Here’s an encyclopedic, bitter and hilarious summary of all that E3 had to show this year. I am looking forward to Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and Bastion. Yeah, I suppose the latest Jenova Chen game and probably Dark Souls (although I haven’t finished its predecessor, even though I liked it).

As for the hardware? I want very much to like the PS Vita, but after what I wrote here, you’ll understand if I’m not too optimistic about its chances. And the new Nintendo Wii U? Looks pretty great, I guess. I mean, it could be. I don’t know. They are so vague with the details that it’s hard to really know, doncha think? At least it’s a reasonably new idea. I know there are no new ideas, but that’s especially true of the video game industry.

The shit going down in Apple land seems a lot more interesting, and a lot of that wasn’t super-new (Lion’s features had already been promoted, and a lot of the iOS improvements are “inspired by” competing mobile OSes). iCloud seems to have an awful lot of small print, so I am waiting for it to get closer so we can resolve its details. But still. Cord-free syncing? I’d punch a Wii U in the face to get that TODAY.

I was looking through the ol’ archives and realized I had never written about this thing. I have a draft called “what the world needs now is a four-month-late post about the iPad.” So clearly I wasn’t in love with the result. But I also quite like this one that I did about the iPhone a year into owning it, when I was able to look at how it had changed my… life seems a little hyperbolic, so let’s say… personal computing cocktail.

I’ve had the iPad for eight months. Things have changed for sure because of it.

The comparison you want to make is to a laptop. I’ve been a laptop user for a good ten years, so I understand why. You want to know if the iPad can replace your laptop. It’s very hard to answer this, but if I had to, I’d say no. It’s totally not the same thing.

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Like you didn’t know, it’s iPad day in the US, and here I am posting about my new iMac. But it ties in, I swear!

Anyway. After 10 years of buying laptops I bought a 27” iMac a couple weeks ago. I’m still deciding whether this was the right decision, but I’m pretty sure it is.

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Development of my media center app of choice, Plex, has seemed stagnant of late, with their blog only updated with new plugins for Danish sports channels and the like. But all was not as it seemed. Deep in the dark, there were rumblings. And lo!

At the end, we decided, just like with our plug-in framework, to throw out the existing code and rewrite it from scratch… The ground up rewrite not only results in an extremely powerful library for personal content, but also sets the stage for providing many benefits beyond just the library itself.

Plex’s new Library, Alexandria, is thus teased. Hopefully it won’t be burned down by the Christians and blamed on the Romans, like the real one.

Andy Ihnatko on the iPad – what that guy said. I had a post drafted about the iPad from a few weeks ago but it didn’t seem to add much to the talk at the time. Despite initially feeling underwhelmed, the product quickly made sense. Traditional computer interfaces don’t work on small screens (they barely work on 12” screens let alone 10”), and rather than start from scratch Apple is building upon the touch OS that when you think about it is already quite an achievement in usability, much more so than the Mac OS. There are a lot of super-non-nerds I know who recently got iPhones and they understand it in minutes. In a couple days they are showing off their new apps. This never happened with the Mac or Windows.

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Here’s an article by Shawn Blanc about iPhone feed readers. I find him pretty forgiving. I’ve tried NetNewsWire, Byline, and Fever, and am now using GReader’s mobile interface because none of the others did it for me. All of them are slow, Byline has interface problems, NNW is (was?) buggy, Fever… Just not a good iPhone solution is how I’d put it. I quite like GReader mobile. It’s fast, and as you’re probably going to be bouncing things to the browser I don’t mind the web-app-ness as much as I often do. Also, it’s fast.

I would like to try Reeder, though. Maybe when I haven’t blown my iPhone app budget on plants, zombies and waaaay too many to-do apps.

What did you think? I’m moderately impressed. During the keynote I felt underwhelmed, but once we learned the price was $500, I changed my tune. Apple was clever to leak the $1000 price point ahead of time.

Perhaps the disappointment is that this is a glorified iPhone with some extra eye candy and none of the revolutionary new interface hype we had been inhaling over the past little while.

The price reinforces my feeling that this is primarily Apple’s response to the growth of the netbook market. However, the netbook and the iPad both menace laptops in general. Since I got the netbook, my 15” MBP remains on my desk, and for the first time I am considering buying a desktop to replace it. Netbooks make two-computer life possible to those of us who aren’t among the richest princes in Europe. My dream portable remains something like the MacBook Air, but that thing seems dead in the water now, especially at three times the price of the iPad. I expect they may eliminate the Air altogether and perhaps introduce a new model that is essentially the iPad with a keyboard, with a laptop form factor. Or maybe that’s just me dreaming.

The clunky peripherals are a surprise, especially the keyboard dock. It seems very un-Apple. I also hear from Gizmodo that it can be used with Bluetooth keyboards. That’s awesome, and makes me think I could stand to have it instead of a netbook.

As an ebook reader? I imagine hardcore readers will stick with proper e-ink readers and/or actual books, but casual readers may well like the eye candy of Apple’s presentation and not worry too much about eye strain and the higher prices of books. But the Kindle and friends are going to have to come down in price, stat.

My biggest problems with it: the encroachment of the closed iPhone app ecosystem into general computing. Also, still no multitasking? Granted, if the apps launch super-fast and save their states, perhaps we don’t need it as much. But still.

Anyway, that was a fun day. I have a million little questions about specific implementations that I guess are going to have to wait a couple months. I think I can deal with that.

This is one of the facets of the ongoing Apple tablet megarumour that really intrigues me – an Apple 3D interface patent.

In “Systems and Methods for Adjusting a Display Based on the User’s Position,” Apple proposes a display that can automatically adjust the point of view and angle of 3D objects, or even 2D objects arranged in 3D space, based on the changing position of the viewer in relation to the display. Example: imagine you are viewing some 3D object on your monitor. A sensor could let the computer know when you move your head to the left, and the object would subtly change position and/or rotation so you could see the left side of the object. Alternatively, you could move your head up so you could see the top better.

Head tracking. Fuck yeah. There was another 3D-related patent filed in January, and while it didn’t have any head tracking, it does lend credence to the notion that, come Jan 27, shit be poppin’ – in 3D. (Well, hopefully without the glasses.)

For interest’s sake, here are a couple of old posts of mine in which I drool over 3D interfaces: one two.

Some questions about this tablet thing, that have made me doubt its existence. Questions that the excellent Daring Fireball article also addresses, but does not answer – no one has answers right now.

What is the screen like? If it’s LCD, is Apple really expecting to succeed in the ebook market? The single defining feature in a suddenly-cluttered, apparently reasonably successful market is the e-ink screen, notable for the absence of backlight and close resemblance to print, but also for many side effects that make them bad for other uses (low refresh rate, monochrome, poor contrast). Apple may well view readers with some condescension – “no one reads any more” – and if so, they may settle for an LCD, which is good for everything except reading. But if they have actually tried to solve the problem, they may have something cool up their sleeves. Perhaps two layered displays? Does the backlight turn off when a book is opened? I’m very curious.

How are you supposed to type on its presumed on-screen keyboard? Do you hold it in one hand and type with the other? Do you hold it with both hands and type with your thumbs? The latter is actually more than doable on a 7” screen, and would probably work on 10” as well. But that leads to the next thing-

Is it really going to be a grand? That’s laptop money even for Apple (and at the netbook price range, three laptop money). While that makes my heart sink because it means I wouldn’t buy it, it also makes me a little excited because it means that Apple may be trying to replace the laptop, not slide in alongside it in a rather crowded gadget matrix – phone / “smartbook” / netbook / laptop / desktop. That’s ballsy stuff, although I remain skeptical of the value of a keyboardless computer. I sure as hell head to a computer when I have to type anything more ambitious than “LOL” on my iPhone, despite being comparatively good at thumb-bashing.

I think Apple may well have arrived at the tablet form after experimenting with netbooks – one can imagine they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’m just concerned that throwing out the keyboard throws out more good than bad. Then again, the Nexus One’s lack of a hardware keyboard may indicate that smartphones are evolving away from such dangly bits, like the arms of a tyrannosaur. So will we learn to stop typing and love the screen?

Whatever, it’s exciting stuff for the gadget nerd. I’m almost as hyped as I am for the final season of Lost, and that’s saying something.

Because I have to get back in the blog posting habit.

First, about 10.6.2 breaking Atom-based Hackintoshes – lots of FUD like this article. Really, everyone? “Puts an end to the hackintosh”? Was 10.6.1 that bad? In my experience, your apps aren’t going to go incompatible with a x.x.x release. Nevermind that the mydellmini.com champs are surely on this shit right now and it will be sorted within weeks.

Second, because of this, and ‘cause ranking shit is fun:

1. The Wire
2. The Sopranos
3. Deadwood
4. Lost
5. Breaking Bad
6. Mad Men
7. Arrested Development
8. Tim & Eric
9. Battlestar Galactica
10. Firefly

With props to Dollhouse (sorry to hear you’re cancelled). It had massive problems, but on the strength of “Epitaph One” alone, deserves to enter the TV pantheon.

Recently I read this guide to Hackintoshing a Dell Netbook on Gizmodo, and after seeing mention of the larger keyboard, the still-miniscule size and of course the dirt cheap price of $300, I impulse ordered a Dell Mini 10v.

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Man. I had a post ready about how I deal with feed overload.That all changed on the weekend as on Ram’s recommendation I switched to the new self-hosted feed reader, Fever.

I’ve been rocking NetNewsWire since way back in the day. I paid money for it when it first came out of beta. It’s great, it’s now free, and totally packed with features. Problem is, it hasn’t seen any new development in quite some time. I think the free Google reader took the wind out of the feed reader market. At the height of it all NNW seemed about to sprout a bunch of feed management features. Ranchero was bought by Newsgator and they had a ton of ‘other people are reading x’ capabilities and everything seemed promising and then… nothing.

To step back: the problem with feedreaders is you wind up adding too many damn feeds. You realize a feed reader allows you to check more news than you could by manually hitting all those websites. So you add more feeds. Gradually, those unread counts pile up. We’re conditioned from email to imagine missing an item as THE END OF THE WORLD, and so those unread items translate into stress.

So, inevitably, the net was awash in articles a couple years back about how to cull your feeds, sort them into priority lists, etc. etc. And at the same time, feed reader development ground to a halt.

It seemed the best way to use a feed reader was to not use it at all.

It could have gone a different way. I mean we’re sitting here using computers; perhaps the computers could step in and lend a hand and do something a little more taxing than displaying lists. The computer could determine what news is being talked about across all your feeds. Like Google News, except without the Kansas City Star and Voice of America and all the sources you don’t give a shit about.

Fever represents a step in this direction. You dump in your existing feeds, which are in typically gimmicky fashion referred to as ‘kindling.’ You are encouraged to add ‘sparks’, which is to say, link-heavy, high noise-to-signal feeds you might otherwise ignore. Fever then scans the feed data to determine which links are being referenced the most. It presents this to you in the ‘hot’ list, which is sorted by most inbound links:

The idea – and it is a noble one – is that you can at a glance get a sense of the biggest news items being talked about, sorted by priority. The other associated ideas are a) this diminishes the need for unread counts (although they can be toggled on globally or individually), and b) this works better the more feeds you throw at it. Get it? you “feed a fever”. This calculus of optimal sources to perfectly tailored hot list is actually really fun to set up. Presented with a list that was too tech video game heavy, I went looking for film and news sites. Fever isn’t a feed reader, it’s a feed management game.

Ready for the downsides? Fever, an idiosyncratic app if ever there was one, has many. It costs $30. It’s a web app that must be installed on your own server. The only portable option is a less-than stellar iPhone web view. And for best results, and for the iPhone version to be at all useful, you have to set up a cron job. I had never had reason to do that before.

I can live with all of those issues. (I’m confident the iPhone view will see improvements – hopefully its own app.) The biggest drawback though, as mentioned here, is that Fever only sorts according to links. Sure, this is the web and links are the currency. I duly note the idealism. However, actual real life feeds often fall short of our ideals. For one, find me a newspaper feed with a goddamn hyperlink in it. For two, many feeds (like the link-rich Greencine Daily) only give excerpts, and Fever sees only that and not the full post. Fever works well on tech news and the like, and falls short with real life news where there may be no definitive hyperlink.

This could be fixed. Can small developer Shaun Inman add headline-parsing algorithms that rival the goliath Google News? It would be awesome, and I hope so, but I have no idea. Frankly, I feel we need legitimate personal data sorting tools that don’t involve huge friend lists and massive privacy violations. News is not the only area of our lives in which we grapple with data overload, and Fever is an excellent new weapon that just needs a few tweaks.

Now does anyone know any good news blogs with lots of links?

I took my computer apart this weekend.

Having filled my 160gig internal, and with a new camera on the way, and realizing that 500gig 2.5” drives were now here and quite affordable, I had ordered a replacement hard drive, with the intention of paying a technician to install it. I had read the guide and it involved many steps, specialist screwdrivers, and a great number of differently-shaped screws. However, as Computer Systems Centre never called me back, and routinely put me on hold for 5 minute intervals, I decided to go it alone.

A trip to Canadian Tire later, I had all the nerd screwdrivers I needed, and was ready to start. This Macworld article had invaluable advice: print the instructions and then tape the screws to the pictures that indicate their provenance. Without this, I would have a frankenstinian monster on my lap right now, but with it, the procedure was long and repetitive, but not hellish at all. Although it gets scary when you crack open the top case (it actually goes ‘crack’), and see your computer’s guts just lying there.

So it worked, and my free space is now a cavernous 300+ gigs, plus I feel like I really upgraded my nerd cred a whole lot. Fucking A.

This is a simple but effective time-saver if you use your Mini for the downloadin’ and find yourself checking in frequently to see if your downloads are complete yet.

The notifier preference pane Growl can be set up to send an email instead of showing a little notifier box on your screen. Amongst other things, BitTorrent client Transmission and also Hazel work with Growl, so you can get email updates letting you know when files have finished downloading, and confirming they have been processed by Hazel.

Hazel is a preference pane that watches folders and carries out actions on files based on rules you set. It’s presumably stuff that you could do with folder actions and applescript, but for non-scripters, it’s handy as heck. It can take a while to get your head around, and figure out the right rules you want, but once you have it set up, you can automate a lot of the fiddly file management that comes with digital media. I have mine set up to watch my downloads folder and do the following:

• add any mp3s to the iTunes playlist I sync with my iPhone, and then move the files to the trash
• unpack any rars that might, say, have been spat out by Transmission
• shunt any movie files into the “Movies” folder, where they’ll show up in all their metadata-enriched glory within Plex (or Boxee, or any XBMC version)

It doesn’t work perfectly – Plex etc. can be fussy about filenames. However, it cuts down on the fiddling drastically. The auto-iPhone-updating alone is worth the $22.

I’ve been falling behind with the series of posts about getting the most out of your Mini as a media center. I’ve made some tweaks, and figured I should share the joy. So expect a few updates in this vein over the next week or so.

Plex is my media center app of choice, and the recent versions introduce Harmony Universal Remote support, now with less fiddling. There’s a profile within the harmony setup app for Plex now, and it works well. Now I can put the Apple Remote aside and actually use only one remote. Sweet. Instructions here.

On the 18th, TUAW reviewed the just-released SimCity for iPhone and found it to be good, saying

This is one of those games that will help make the iPhone be viable as a portable gaming unit alongside the Nintendo DS and PSP. For those hesitant to try out games on your iPhone, give SimCity a try. You won’t be disappointed.

One week later, they re-review it, and find it to be bad. It crashes every five minutes, it takes two minutes to load, the controls are bad, and it “keeps draining the battery even after connecting the iPhone to a power source”.

Not that game journalism in general has very high standards, but iPhone game journalism in particular is setting some new lows. Yet another reason to avoid TUAW like the plague. (via funkaoshi’s iphone blog)

I just rented a film off iTunes for the first time. The service only became available in Canada in June, and when it first started the selection was far from compelling, so it’s taken me until now to give it a shot. I chose the middling spy thriller Spy Game.

The iTunes movie experience has some good points. I liked that my download was watchable fairly quickly, which compares favourably to either bittorrenting or actually getting off my ass and going and renting a flick. The quality is decent (let’s say slightly below DVD quality). The price was good, too – $4. And at 48 hours, the rental period is more reasonable than Rogers on Demand’s 24. The ease of getting the flick onto the iPhone is a plus, too.

But other than that it’s all bad.

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So I was going through the referrer logs for once and discovered that people are still reading my post about Front Row replacements and the one about alternate Apple Remote software, both of which are fairly out of date. Thus a couple notes to reflect the current state of the Mac media centre world.

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As I’m sure we’re all aware, the iPhone (and its shy cousin the iPod Touch, pictured above) represents the newest, most promising games platform. The hardware is at least as powerful as the Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP, and the unique input controls present the possibility for new gameplay forms. So inevitably the App Store is swimming in games, some great, most horrible. The bulk of the games are casual, which is probably as it should be, but traditional gaming genres (racing, sports) are filling out gradually.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is price. The most money you will pay for an iPhone game is $10, generally reserved for “A-list” titles from the large publishers like EA and Sega: Super Monkey Ball, Spore Origins, Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, Star Wars the Force Unleashed. In the broader context of video game pricing, these are absolute steals – top shelf DS and PSP titles go for $30 to $50 CDN, and games for the 360 and PS3 can go above $60. However, the iTunes store has a hell of a lot of free apps, and many games in the $1 to $5 range which often rival the more expensive games in quality. Also, the cheaper games tend to show up in the “Top Paid Apps” list, which appears at the top level of the iTunes Store, and must generate great traffic and thus sales. As a consequence, games seem to be getting cheaper, and gimmicky sales are now the norm.

Anyway, it’s impossible to be exhaustive about this on account of the hundreds of games now in the store, so I’ll just make mention of the games I’ve tried enough to be able to comment on. Prices are moving targets, I can vouch only that these were the prices at the time of writing.

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