Archive for August, 2006

Goodbye Sploid…

Monday, August 21st, 2006

Last week Sploid closed its doors. I’m not upset only because it was an entertaining take on news and managed a great balancing act between tabloid and real news.

I’m also upset because I can no longer enjoy its great design. It’s looks nothing like a typical blog:
lots of images laid out on a grid instead of just a list of articles. Big, SCREAMING headlines. It’s a lesson that there are ways to make a good, useable design while not looking like wordpress template with new colors.

Google Life…

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

Google recently opened up their document editing webapp, Writely, to the general public. It’s in beta (of course) but it looks like they are pretty far along as I’ve already made a nice document with it and didn’t have much trouble. It worked so nicely in fact, that it gave me an idea.

You see, classes are about to start here in Chapel Hill and I wonder if webapps have gotten to the point where I could replace my office software with nothing but these online applications. So starting in a few days I will spend a month using the online tools and see how they effective they are in helping me get my work done — papers, organization, and number-crunching for research. Other work, like web design and development will still be done with my normal text and image editors, but I will attempt to organize that work with the same applications. Speaking of which, here are the apps I’m going to use.

Now you realize why I called this post Google Life.

Of course, there are other issues surrounding all this such as privacy and the sanity of keeping so much data on the web, but I won’t be addressing that. I’m only focusing on functionality. I’m really interested in seeing how this will effect collaboration with other students as my school likes to use a lot of group projects. Hopefully I can convince some of my classmates to use the collaboration features of these applications and I hope that I don’t mess up other people in their work.

Wish me luck!

Snakes on crack…

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

My gawd.

Folks, I had no expectations when I went to see Snakes on a Plane this evening. People were worried that it would not live up to the hype but I wasn’t worried about that. I didn’t even CARE if it did or didn’t. I went to see Snakes on a Plane because it was something special. A film that got to where it was purely on blog hype and mostly unmanufactured hype at that. The world saw the hilarity of such a simply title and just ran with it. This might not be ever reproduced, anything that comes after is just going to sound cheesy and too blatant.

So no, I didn’t care if it was terrible because I would at least be seeing something unique. But the movie did me one better. It was actually a hell of a lot of fun to watch. It’s pure B-movie. It’s silly. You’re going to laugh at things that aren’t meant to be funny. You’ll start guessing who’s going to die and who won’t. It has a few jumps and a few surprises. It’s even a bit more grotesque than I expected. All in all, a pretty good ride.

I imagine it’ll be even better when you can get it on DVD and invite your wise-ass friends over to give it a MST3K treatment. I had a few of those in the audience tonight and while they were trying way to hard at first, they calmed down and timed their riffs nicely towards the end.

Seriously, I’m glad this movie was made. It’s proof that a movie studio doesn’t always have to spend millions upon millions of dollars to make a film we will watch in a theater. Sometimes all you need is to make a movie that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Nice job.

my first print design…

Thursday, August 17th, 2006


You might not know this but I’m a web designer by trade. Though I was trained in (and have a degree in) multimedia design, I basically stayed away from anything print. Too much to know about colors and scales and dpi and etc. But I couldn’t hide forever and today I received my first design in the mail — the ibiblio business card.

And the font is too small.

Oh well, lesson learned.

pay for play…

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

Mentioned in this 1up article on Gamefest 2006 is Microsoft’s wish for microtransactions in XBox Live. One bit intrigues me:

Another thing Microsoft intends to add to the Marketplace is the ability for vendors placed in videogames to allow gamers to buy from the Marketplace. Say, there is a vendor in an RPG selling a rare sword and that sword is available on the Marketplace, players will be able to put the sword in a checkout cart and then return to the Marketplace later to complete the download. For now, the in-game Marketplace will bring the Marketplace experience into the gameplay, but the transactions, for now, will still need to be completed on the Marketplace and not in-game.

Okay, does that disturb anyone else but me? Apparently not, but I remember worrying sometime ago when they originally announced this intent, that this may lead to basically ruining the online game experience. To quote myself:

Imagine you sign up to World of Warcraft and you play and play. For weeks you build up your experience, earn your gold, build up stats (I’ve never played the game so excuse me for my ignorance when describing it). For your hard work, you’ve gained a kick ass sword, unbeatable armor, you can take just about anybody. You alienated friends and family for weeks but dammit, it was worth it.

Then some punk kid with their mommy’s credit card buys all your stuff in thirty seconds.

Fun, huh?

But whatever. I won’t start a hissy fit if people want to be able to just buy their gold to buy stuff in the game other people earned. You just won’t see me playing massive multiplayer online games anytime soon. And I’m guessing you’ll find that many potential players will agree with me.

XNA

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

It’s a rare moment when Microsoft can get me excited about anything they do, but I have to admit that this XNA Game Studio Express looks pretty damn cool. A free platform to build PC games and, for a fee, XBox games. It actually makes me want to get a new Mac Pro and a copy of Parallels (What? You thought I was going to buy a Dell? Yeah, right), and learn C#.

I do have a problem that my games would probably only be playable on a Windows machine and no other game consoles other than XBox, but I’m sure some clever soul on the Internet will figure out some way to convert code. But even if no one does (or if Microsoft prevents it somehow) XNA will still be a step in the right direction for independent games.

And that’s why I’m so excited by this. It’s a great chance for an amateur to make games on the same level as a real game studio. I mean, I doubt I’ll ever make the next Halo by myself. But given some free time and dedication I can at least make the next Geometry Wars and share that game with potentially tons of people. It also gives students a chance to work on a platform they might use in the real world. And I imagine that if people are willing to share all types of open-source code for applications and scripts they will also be willing to contribute codes for XNA produced games.

This really has a lot of potential and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.