pearls

Pearls

The Energy Saver icon used to be an incandescent light bulb; Apple has replaced it with a compact fluorescent as a part of its quest to reduce the energy consumption of its icons.

The Energy Saver icon used to be an incandescent light bulb; Apple has replaced it with a compact fluorescent as a part of its quest to reduce the energy consumption of its icons.

—Jason Snell

Blizzard says: You'll pay three times for StarCraft II, and you'll like it

Blizzard says: You’ll pay three times for StarCraft II, and you’ll like it

In StarCraft II, we’re going to have a campaign that focuses strictly on the Terran. It’ll be 26-30 missions long, and you’ll play as Jim Rainer. When we release first expansion set, that’s going to focus on Zerg. So that’s going to be another 26-30 missions strictly focusing on Zerg. When we go to the final expansion pack, it will be the Protoss experience, probably another 26-30 missions.

That’s nice, but the main point of single-player mode in a real-time strategy game is to learn how to play each race, offline, before you compete with other people. The story, although important, has to be secondary to that.

This is a company that has done literally everything right–not just right, but outstandingly above and beyond the competition–for as long as I can remember. Now, look how far they have fallen in their greed.

This is not a hard problem to solve: you put a short campaign for each race in the first box. Then you can expand upon them later in–wait for it–the expansions. That’s what ‘expansion’ means. It doesn’t mean ‘the rest of the game you should have got in the first place’.

I think the readers aren’t understanding that there’s a full, gi-normous single-player campaign experience in each of these three products.

Yes, that’s it. It couldn’t be that we hate what you’re doing, it must be that we don’t understand. Go ahead, insult the intelligence of your customers. Great strategy.

iPhoto Feed with Picasa Web Albums

Here’s a how to get a feed that works with iPhoto from someone’s Picasa Web Album.

Go to the person’s Picasa Web Albums home page. This is the page that shows all of their albums at once. Click the ‘RSS’ link at the bottom of the page. This will give you a URL like:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/dmdeller?alt=rss&kind=album&hl=en_US&access=public

But don’t do anything with it just yet. This feed only has one tiny thumbnail for each album, which is not what you want.

Where it says ‘album’ in the URL, change that to ‘photo’.

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/dmdeller?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=en_US

(I also removed the ’&access=public’ part. This doesn’t currently have any effect, because it will only show you public albums anyway; but I figured, asking for more is better.)

Copy the modified URL. In iPhoto, go to File > Subscribe to Photo Feed… and paste the URL.

Now, you can get automatic updates of a friend’s photos, right from the comfort of iPhoto.

Addendum : if you want to link to this on a web site somewhere so that it will automatically open in iPhoto (without requring your visitors to copy/paste), just change the ‘http://’ part to ‘photo://’. This will probably only work for people who have iPhoto installed (namely, Mac users), so you should also provide the normal HTTP link.

Comparison (with audio clips) between real and fake-leaked versions of Ben Folds's 'Way To Normal'

Comparison (with audio clips) between real and fake-leaked versions of Ben Folds’s ‘Way To Normal’

What’s sad is that, if you don’t read the text, it’s sometimes difficult to tell which is supposed to be the ‘good’ and which is supposed to be the ‘bad’ version. And I say this as a long time Ben Folds/BF5 fan.

… to my knowledge, not a single published iPhone developer has spoken out in favor of the App Store’s current rejection policies. Those developers who have spoken are against it. Those who see no problem are not themselves iPhone developers.

… to my knowledge, not a single published iPhone developer has spoken out in favor of the App Store’s current rejection policies. Those developers who have spoken are against it. Those who see no problem are not themselves iPhone developers.

—John Gruber

David Pogue: Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User

David Pogue: Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User

Unlike most such lists of ‘tips’, this is a surprisingly good article.

If you can’t find some obvious command, like Delete in a photo program, try clicking using the right-side mouse button. (On the Mac, you can Control-click instead.)

This is actually why Apple refused to ship a two-button mouse for so many years: hiding functions in contextual menus is poor design because it is not discoverable by users. Shipping computers with a one-button mouse forced developers to make applications that work with only one button (even though the computer and OS fully supported as many buttons as you want).

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First, a Saturday Night Live skit about Sarah Palin.

Then, the actual interview with Sarah Palin that the skit was based on.

I’m not going to say anything more; it speaks for itself.

Penny Arcade: Guest column about DRM by Chris Remo

Penny Arcade: Guest column about DRM by Chris Remo

On the other hand, I can’t help but feel a lot of the vocal protestors are simply getting caught up in the righteous fury of the moment. It looks like we’re at five activations per game now, up from three; that’s unlimited installs on each of five PCs, as I understand it, and a deauthorization tool is coming. Realistically, how much more do you need? Obviously, it’s not as good as “infinity installs (plus one)” but can’t we just come to terms with the fact that no amount of internet petitioning or Amazon guerrilla warfare is going to take the activation limit out of the realms of the finite?

I’ve seen this argument a few times now, but it misses the point that he came so close to just one paragraph earlier:

… adding yet another complicated, irritating thing that PC gamers have to deal with …

It doesn’t matter what number of installs you’re allowed. What matters is that there is a limit. When you buy such a game, you have two options:

• Closely keep track of your installs, uninstalls, system hardware changes, etc. to make sure you don’t go over the limit
• Decide ‘oh it probably won’t affect me’ and live with the nagging doubt that one day you could wake up and your game doesn’t work any more

Either one of these is extra mental baggage that is forced on you when you buy the game, and that you can never get rid of as long as you still care about owning the game. For many people, computers are already sources of frustration. They buy games to have fun. And DRM can ruin that good feeling they would have, because of the fear, uncertainty and doubt that it introduces into the experience.

That’s right: these video game companies are using FUD against themselves.

Remo goes on to rant about the media blowing things out of proportion, but the more important story is of the would-be customer who takes a look at the words ‘activation limit’ on the box, thinks about it for a moment, and slowly puts their credit card back in their wallet. Because it just isn’t fun any more.

Screen Sharing between OS X 10.5 and earlier versions

Here’s something that took me by surprise when I found out: the new ’screen sharing’ feature in Mac OS X 10.5 works not only with other computers running 10.5, but also versions going back to 10.2 (though I’ve only tried with 10.4 and 10.3).

Only 10.5 has the ‘screen sharing’ service in System Preferences > Sharing, but it turns out that if you enable Apple Remote Desktop in the same location on earlier versions, you can then connect to the older computer from one running 10.5. (Note that this will not work vice versa.)

Computers running 10.3 or 10.2 will need to install this update first.

There are several ways to start the session:

• In Finder, if you use the browser view (default), select the computer from the sidebar and click Share Screen.
• In Finder, choose Network from the Go menu. Open the computer’s icon and click Share Screen.
• Browse to System : Library : CoreServices, open the Screen Sharing application, and enter an IP address or hostname. (I made an alias to this application - just don’t move the original.)

This is very handy in the case of my company because we have many machines still running 10.4 and a few running 10.3, but can’t justify $500 for the Apple Remote Desktop administration software. Of course, Screen Sharing has fewer features than ARD, but it basically does the job.