Chris Till (Tumblr)
The good news is it looks great. The bad news is the above, May 2007. 11 months away for more than a minute of it. I can understand that with all the CG that goes into making the spiderman films but you still wonder how much more they have to do if they have enough to release this trailer.
It starts today and after weeks of great weather it rains on the first monday of the tournament. Pretty typical.
When the weather does get better as it looks like it will it promices to be a great championship this year.
Wimbledon plus The World Cup makes a great sporting summer.
Like many baby boomers, even Xbox chief Peter Moore is getting a little confused by all the buttons and joysticks being crammed onto modern gamepads, and some recent comments he made may indicate that Microsoft is actually working on ways to dumb-down the increasingly complex controller. In an interview with Gamertag radio, Moore seemingly put the “shoulder buttons, triggers, analog sticks, and d-pads” on today’s controllers in a negative light compared to the “old Atari 2600 button-and-stick, which everybody could pick up and have some fun with.” Even Moore’s 14-year-old daughter reportedly finds the 360 controller somewhat confusing, with the man himself mentioning that Microsoft is “doing a lot of stuff there,” but that they won’t release a product that’s not “intuitive and innovative.” We’re all for input devices being as intuitive as possible, but instead of wasting time trying to innovative, maybe Microsoft should just cave in and adopt a certain technology that’s already proving to be pretty popular.
Microsoft planning simpler controller? – Engadget
I thought when Microsoft made the controller s to accomodate smaller hands they had put their control pad woes to rest. However, Nintendo, by doing the predictable and yet again reinventing the controller with the upcoming wii-mote have possibly caused the Xbox team to think about how they can make their controller a bit easier to use and a bit more comfortable to hold.
Nintendo have always in my opinion have always been the great innovator in gaming. Especially in the controller aspect. From the N64 onwards the controllers have been comfortable and easy to use. The PS2 pad is good and easy to use but the Gamecube one just makes it seem ordinary. It feels as if people have put a lot of work into making it comfortable and simple to use. The size of the buttons, the way it fits exactly to your hands. You know where every button is and don’t have to stretch to reach any of them.
Great
Good
Not so good. Bulky looking.
The new Last.fm Beta (currently subscriber only) looks shiny and new. It comes in a choice of…..
Classic red……
…..and sleek black.
Both look great, the new layout and style is impressive even though it probably was overdue.
Theres a new Audioscrobbler beta out too but currently windows only. Hopefully a Mac version is on its way soon. Then again, saying that there isn’t much the current Mac version doesn’t do, and there isn’t really a need to support many other players because the vast majority will use iTunes.
I’m fully switched over to using beta.last.fm and hopefully they make it the default site soon.
The Flock extension Flocktails (provides hCard recognition to Flock) is now available for the beta release of the social browser.
It’s quite a useful extension on pages with loads of info on. Plus having open standards for this sort of information is a useful thing anyway.
Get an hCard here.
Too bad you can’t get the extension on the Flock site yet. They do have a good selection of extensions though if you havn’t looked yet. Or havn’t even downloaded Flock yet.
Rating: 7/10 – It’s not too useful on pages with only one hCard on, except for novelty purposes.
I’ve spent some time today just figuring out all the features of QuickSilver and setting it up just how I want it.
Check out the below screen as well as the other ones in the set for the coolest way to browse your iTunes library and play tracks.
Is that not cool?
Rating: 9/10 – It takes a while to figure out how to get the special advanced features working but once you do its a great app. Oh yeah its also a great app without the iTunes feature above.
The original point of the app was purely an app launcher saving the time spent opening the apps folder in finder and double clicking. It’s so much quicker to do ctrl space and typing the first two letters of the app’s name and hitting enter to open it. Heres a pic of it doing what it was originally intended to do:
Get Quicksilver here. Get a good tutorial on how to set up the advanced features here and here.
A review of UNO, the Mac OSX skinning app
UNO is a very nice skinning app. There are a few plus points to it. Let me highlight them quickly.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the brushed look of finder and the different look of itunes. However, with UNO you can provide the system with more consistancy and give more of a mac feel to apps like firefox which don’t give that feel by default.
Rating: 10/10 – It does the job, simply, with style, without being obtrusive or greedy for your money. Perfect.
Opera 9 has just been released. I have to admit, I have never liked opera up until now. Before it had adverts from google making the whole thing look uncool. Not only that but it had a bad, “classic” interface and colour scheme.
The new version however, has some really nice features. Most of them were in the last one but a few things I like are:
Ok, so the new Opera is good (or at least the Mac version is). It’s good I have to say but I just don’t feel like I can move away from the Mozilla combo, Firefox and Flock because I’m so used to them. Still, a good browser and a huge improvement from the last version.
Rating: 8/10
Where is it?
I have been looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver recently and I found nvu. Yes, its got big shoes to fill if it’s going to compete with Macromedia / Adobe. However, from what I’ve seen of it so far from screenshots it does compete well.
The one problem I have is no one seems to have released a universal binary of the program yet for the new intel macs. I want this now because right now my mac crashes completely every time I try to open it. I will download it on windows later and have a play but I really want to complete my collection of open source programs on my mac.
Photoshop = The Gimp (even though I prefer the photoshop interface).
Dreamweaver = Nvu (even though dreamweaver is one of the best tools around).
And whats the difference in price between them? Obviously it’s mind blowingly huge. From FREE to THOUSANDS of pounds / dollars.
Great album. Tons of tracks and addictiveness. Dani California is my favourite but maybe thats because its at the top and I keep playing it?
My favourite of the new Mac ads. Check them all out and buy a Mac at the Apple store, Apple.com
Yep, you heard me right, there is something about Apple I don’t like. I’ts their dot mac service. I just don’t see how it works.
When it was launched, yes it was good and it was hard to find anything around that offered the same stuff for the price. An email address, storage, bookmarks synching, groups and mac and apple mail integration. Now there’s also iWeb publishing.
Nowdays, why not do these things instead: Get a gmail account, use putfile.com or get cheap webspace, use del.icio.us with the firefox extension or flock, make a group on a social networking site, google etc, use thunderbird with your gmail account. You can also use gmail to store files on if you use a firefox extension. Finally, if you got some web hosting (for less than the cost of .mac for a good one, and way less than that for a basic one) you can set up a site or blog with ease. A lot of hosting providers have easy install options for wordpress and drupal which is useful.
The problem for me is .mac is too expensive for what it is. What Apple need to do to make it appeal more is either make it cheaper, or include a cut down version of .mac bundled with every new mac. They could probably increase the price of every mac by about $20 and they would probably make more money than they are from the current .mac subcription charges. You have to be reasonable and say they can’t offer it for free because the service costs a lot to run, but including it in the price of a mac would have to be a approved by a lot of people.
Another Mac related thought.
The PowerMac G5, what will it become when its replaced with a younger, better looking sibling with an intel brain. The thing is, will it take a new name to replace the power?
I would guess its going to be Mac Pro to match the MacBook line. My choice would be Macintosh Pro. It just sounds more pro than just mac. Also it helps to keep people aware that thats what Mac stands for, otherwise people may forget it.
Thats how the England – Trinidad and Tobago match was for everyone in Englnd I’m guessing, or at least it was for me. When you have a team you know should be able to win like we do, its hard to sit there and watch them struggle to get the ball in the net.
When they did finally get the goals, it was impressive. The second one most notibly. It was a long range shot fro Steven Gerrard who is known for that sort of stuff. It was just a matter of him pulling it off.
So thats England qualified for the next round of the tournament and we can take the next game against Sweeden a little more lightly and just relax because although we want to finish top of the group we can’t go out at this stage so we have nothing to lose.
Trinidad and Tobago did play really well defensively and don’t really deserve to go out of the tournament. It depends now if they can stop sweeden from doing so.
The new Flock site has been launched today coinciding with the release of cardinal (the first flock beta release). Since I’ve been using the continuous testing builds for a long time now its not a big shock to me what its like, what really impressed me today was the new site.
It looks amazing. They’ve continued the stylish minimalist theme but its so much more cool now. The layout and graphics are far improved and its a much more eye catching design that will really attract potential new Flockstars to the download page.
Rating of the beta release 10/10, the new site 10/10.
I know maybe I’m a bit Flock obssessed but if you use it you will find out why. I didn’t even know what Flickr, del.icio.us or wordpress was before I found out about it.
Can Open Source Win?
The two feed readers that I’ve tested are NetNewsWire (full version trial and lite version free beta) and Vienna (free and open source). Not to mention Flock which has a very good feed aggrigation and subcription tool built-in. (open source and free).
Here is a quick review of the apps.
NetNewsWire
NNW is a very good feed reader. However, I feel like there isn’t that much of a difference between the lite (free) and pro versions. For the $29.95 you pay for the full version, I wouldn’t really miss podcast and itunes integration, and a few other extra features that you get with the pro one.
Therefore I much prefer the lite version, obviously because its free and has some good features. The whole things feels very stable. It looks nice too.
Vienna
Vienna is a free open source project. It looks and feels very similar to NetNewsWire, but has a different, brushed metal (safari style) look.
I like the way you can drag feeds from your browser into the left sidebar to subscribe to it with ease. Its really a matter of personal preferance between NNW Lite and Vienna but out of these two I prefer NetNewsWire. It has the more proffessional feel to it which I like.
Flock
Flock browser has the feed reading ability of both of the above apps. However, since it’s a browser, you get the added bonus of having all your feed reading activities, browsing, photo uploading and blogging in one place, rather than being spread over multiple apps.
Overall…
It depends on how you like to work. If you prefer to keep your things seperate then get Firefox, NetNewsWire and use the wordpress web based admin area and Flickr’s site.
If you like to control everything you do online (or pretty much everything) from one app, then use Flock.
I like NetNewsWire and Vienna but I think right now Flock suits my way of doing things the best. Only get a paid feed reading software if you really require the podcast downloading and search features that it offers (among a few other things). I don’t. You can drag podcast feeds straight into iTunes anyway so why add them to a normal feed reader.
Eliot Smith is discussing.
Eliot Smith 8:58 pm on June 29, 2006 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Nvu now works on an Intel mac under 10.4.7. They must have fixed whatever
problem there was in the Rosetta emulation that Nvu was triggering.
Still not a universal binary (so runs slower than it will when recompiled)
but for a basic webpage editor speed isn’t crucial.