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forenoon filings

shiny, oh so shiny

new ds now official

Saturday, January 28, 2006

As previously reported, the rumours of a DS redesign turned out to be true.

The last barrier to the DS's wider adoption - at least in the West - (i.e. its ugly exterior) has been removed. And in iPod white too! Nintendo seems to be firing on all cylinders!

Order are being taken over at Lik-Sang.

three more essential apps

I thought it would be time to update one of my earliest posts about essential free or low cost apps that have been specifically designed for the Mac.

All of those featured apps have stood the test of time well, so there isn’t that much to add to them, but I thought it would be good to focus on some other apps, plug-ins and extensions that are currently out there.

One year is a long time in software development terms so here are some apps that I have discovered since then:

1. It goes without saying that Quicksilver must get a special and honourable mention. (I’ve already posted a write-up, so I won't repeat myself).

2. InquisitorX (Freeware): This is not really a standalone application as such, but just a plug-in for the Safari web-browser. This applies Spotlight search technologies to Safari’s integrated search bar – so as you type, Google results are matched and displayed. A great and unobtrusive piece of software that greatly saves the amount of typing you need to do; and what even makes it better, is that within the settings, you can add hotkeys for other search engines or websites (such as Amazon, Technorati with many others also). The makers do guarantee compatibility with Firefox and Opera as well, but I have been using it with Safari.

3. Textpander (Donationware): Again, this is just a preference pane add-on, but don’t let this diminish it’s capabilities from your opinions. In short, Textpander allows you to specify shortcuts (called snippets) for any text strings you define. If you find yourself typing phrases or names regularly, then this will be found to be invaluable. For example if you sign off your emails with “Take care, Bob”, then this can be defined as ‘ttcare’. Anytime this string is typed, it will be automatically substituted with the associated full-length phrase – and what is more this is applied to the whole system – so this will work in any application! The possibilities are endless (simple images, and dates can also be imported as snippets as well). Personally, I have used it to shortcut input of regular phrases, HTML codes snippets, names, URLs, email addresses, and as a way of auto-correcting mistyped words and spelling mistakes. Although this software doesn’t cost anything to download, Paypal donations are encouraged to help fund further donations.

skype & voip with or vs mobile phones?

Thursday, January 19, 2006
Skype and Wi-Fi/VOIP compatible phone featured heavily at the CES at the beginning of this month. The models varied, and some even looked like they could do well at retail (they look like normal phones - Netgear had a well featured design going). All very well and good, but if you will be out and about, it won't be a practical option to be carrying two handsets around (or is it just me who has small pockets?).

But to get this technology to be more widely adopted, surely it should be integrated into future mobile phone handsets - i.e. building a Wi-fi/VOIP enabled mobile?

Similarly, having full compatibility with vCard address book formats would mean that storing multiple data fields against each of your contacts would be easier, and supporting a widely recognised industry standard - this would facilitate the retrieval of email addresses, Skype IDs, maybe even work into it a viable IM client.

Barriers? Mobile networks may not be too keen to encourage people to start dialling and talking on networks that they do not have control over (or at least, have no way of extracting revenue from). As we have seen with IM clients on mobile networks, they are developed solely to lock you into the mobile provider's proprietary network - often at a greatly inflated premium.

However, if a company like Microsoft is starting to take this technology seriously, then you know that someone significant has recognised this technology isn't going to go away in a hurry.

more odds and ends

A little round up of some of the apps that have caught my eye over the last month:

- Google Earth finally got it's offical release on the Mac - and it certainly was worth the wait - now no corner of the Earth will remain unturned! As quick as a sprightly buck, there are already some companies that have begun painting advertisments on their roofs in the hope that they will be photographed next time the satellite passes over.

- Tinkered with Safarilicious, but shyed away from doing a full upload - as my experience of various applications auto-synchronising information has not always been smooth (yes iSync I'm thinking of you); I prefer to know exactly (by way of continuous update dialogue at the the very least) what an application is doing/uploading/changing/deleting. My del.icio.us tagging is now well organised and I don't particularly want it to be steam-rollered to fit in with the wider majority trends (maybe this supra-caution is verging on paranoia?)

- Settings synchronisation seems to be the feature to watch out for. So many solutions for Firefox bookmarks and iTunes playlists - to pick two examples - are seeming to be knocking around, its quite difficult to know which one to plump for. Wait and see for the time being, methinks.

- It looks like the Optimus keyboard concecpt that was featured here last July, may be entering full production shortly.

- After seeing the improvements that have followed in Google's video search engine (the download to PSP/iPod option is especially well received!). In addition to this, I've just noticed that doing a search on a film lists the cinemas near you where its playing (you can even supply a postcode for extra accuracy). Now I'm left wondering - Is there nothing Google cannot index and sort?

- The Time Travel Tube map is a smart innovation. On supplying a station name, the familar tube tube map is distorted around it to show real-time travel times based on estimated travel times and current conditions. This isn't an official TfL project - but it's one to keep an eye on!

- I know Burton have had their winter sport's jacket with integrated iPod controls for some time now, but this offering from Koyono actually looks like a practical proposition - (and one that doesn't require alpine conditions...)

- And finally, digitally stabilised footage of that Bigfoot video, finally proves that he's just a guy in a hairy suit.

early impressions of iweb

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

iLife '06 saw the introduction of a new web publishing package called iWeb - bringing the total number of bundled applications to six.

One of the most important things that Apple have noticed about the web publishing market, is that there are very few middle options - easy to use, powerful packages that allow a high quality site to be published. So what are the early impressions?


Positives
After taking this for a spin, this is really the strongest selling point of iWeb - you don't need to know HTML, or even have knowledge of the hows and whys of tags - yet the sites you can produce are incredibly slick looking. Importing your digital assets into your web page is simple as dragging and dropping. It will be interesting to see if future versions will add support for DHTML or Javascript.

If you have never created a web page before, then it is a near guarantee that after 20 minutes using this application, you will have your first web page online - such an achievement is one that must be commended.


Negatives
However, it must be said that for the more advanced coder, it feels that rather too many decisions have been made on your behalf. There is no way to hand edit your raw HTML code within iWeb - so adding extra stat monitoring tools proves impossible (if you were to rely on iWeb as your sole HTML editor).

If you do decide to amended some of the default page names, then when you come to publish, for some reason iWeb mangles the URLs to long alphanumeric strings "" for example - which defeats the object of having an easy to remember page name!

Image formatting also seems to be rather odd - try as I might, my welcome page photo has been rendered in TIFF format - even though the original iPhoto source is a JPEG! Not a good way to welcome dial-up users...


Looking Forward
Perhaps the aspect which upset most users, is how .Mac fits into this application. It has been noted that Apple are doing their best to leverage people into subscribing to .Mac - as all of their web publishing tools are heavily leveraged to this service. This is fine if you subscribe, but Apple need to be careful of forcing their own technical implementations on the wider web community (typical example is Safari's 'feed://' RSS URL notation).

A daring move would be work compatibility with other web publishing services into their software. As Apple is quite late to the self publishing ball, they have some ground to gain from such services as Flickr (highly unlikely now that it is owned by Yahoo!), Blogger (same reason, but owned by Google) and Six Apart.

macworld's social software playing catch-up?

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Now that the dust has settled a bit from yesterday's MacWorld Keynote, lets take a look at what some of these announcements may mean.

(Take a look at Engadget to see a full rundown of what the new products were).

MacBook Pro: Nice looking enclosure - it surprised a lot of people, by being more of a progression rather than a total redesign of the already successful Powerbook look. This is where Apple's Industrial Design excels over so many other similar companies - that they can take so long perfecting something like the lid closing mechanism - a feature that a vast majority of users would not notice - is a credit to design. Looks like iSight integration will be standard across the line. However Apple really do risk annoying some of their third party accessory manufacturers (especially after the 5G iPod resizing) and people hoping to re-use their power adaptors by reshaping the plug (even though it is a very innovative and well thought out progression!)

iLife: A bit puzzling why Apple seems to catch a year and half later on what the majority of the web community has been championing without them. Although all of the tools were well presented and the templates on offer in iLife are of the highest quality, it does makes you wonder who was asleep for the past year in Cupertino (for photocasting, read Flickr) it seems that Apple can be slow in picking up on lifestyle trends such as podcasting and blogging? No doubt the jury will be out on potential improvements over iPhoto 5's reported performance quirks.

ces digest in preparation

Monday, January 09, 2006
It's been a bit quiet on the Forenoon Filings front lately, but rest assured a summary of last week's CES offerings will be posted.

Also, there some sort of Apple event going on tomorrow, that will no doubt get some attention too...

quicksilver's radial menus

Friday, January 06, 2006

A recent build of Quicksilver has significantly changed the method of navigating your menus with OS X. After installing the latest build and enabling advanced beta features in the preferences, you must first install the User Interface Access plug-in.

Once this all up and running, on invoking Quicksilver (after a restart), you will be able to invoke a circular radial menu which allows faster and more intuitive navigation of available commands based on your selected application or directory. It must be said that this application has been revolutionary in smoothing the human computer interface.

To ensure you make this as effective as can be, it is worth spending a little bit of time setting up a few custom triggers (iTunes and iPhoto integrate pretty well at this moment in time).

Be warned though! This feature is still a development feature - so don't be surprised if Quicksilver crashes a few times. But as this becomes more stablised in the coming months - this will be a feature to watch as it nears maturity.

As an aside, this makes me wonder how long Finder can continue to exist in its current state - not that it is bad, but the combination of Spotlight's search technology and multiple application launchers on OS X have combined to render the Finder less of a central app to more of an optional aside.

flickr shot of the month #3: december 2005

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

This month's choice is obviously one that has not been sourced from this corner of the Northern hemisphere!

This shot was taken by santheo.

shmup studio focus: to be continued

Forenoon Filing's guide to various shmup development studios was never really finished properly - a few pieces remain in half-finished draft form, so over the next months a few more shall be posted.

A collection of previous articles can be found here

shmup studio focus no. 6: cave

Cave is a Japanese development company which came into being as a successor to the now defunct arcade developer Toaplan (they made titles including Snow Bros, Truxton and the now infamous "All your base" originator Zero Wing).

Although Cave has been producing titles since the mid 1990s, it is in recent years that their titles have gained an even wider circulation with PS2 ports of their more recent titles proving to be incredibly successful.

The best known series that Cave has produced - and certainly their longest running - has been the DonPachi series. The title is a play on words as such, loosley translating as "Angry Bee Boss". DonPachi introduced many of the trademark Cave gameplay characteristics: Manic pace and game-speed, coupled with an eye-watering intensity of on screen enemy bullets that have to be dodged – curtain fire (or, 弾幕 danmaku). The DonPachi series originally made its debut in the arcades in 1995, and this was followed-up on the SEGA Saturn a few years later as DoDonPachi. The most recent instalment - DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou – has seen Cave partner with Atlus to deliver this game to both arcades PS2 as well.

Much of Cave’s recent success lies in the home market. It has usually been the norm for home conversions of shmups to be published on incredibly small budgets. For a lot of smaller and independent companies budget restraint often restricts the ambitiousness of game presentation, technical features, as well as accompanying published material and boxart.

But Cave took a very ambitious approach; packing the PS2 port of DoDonPachi with all manners of extras: A full Superplay DVD came packaged as standard – showcasing expert Japanese players completing the game in one credit (even one life!); in-game art galleries, as well as a choice of multiple screen and gameplay modes. This has had the effect of leaving a lot of other shmup offerings looking rather sparsely featured.

In following this success, arcade follow-ups continued with Espgaluda (a follow up to ESP Ra De), and the original Mushihimesama and most recently issued Ibara. All of these games have had similar publishing strategies adopted on PS2.

What strikes, which is surprising in today’s climate of 40 hour plus epics, is that all of these games comprise of only five levels. However, once you begin to play, it is evident that the whole aim of a Cave game is that of engendering mastery. Anyone can complete a Cave game if you throw enough credits at them and max the life counter at the options screem. But can you (the game seems to challenge) complete it in 5 lives? Perhaps even in 1 credit? Without using special shot?

The Cave ethos harks back to the best type of gameplay that the 16-bit eras offered and coupled with the increased processing power of today’s consoles, enables a dizzying array of sprites to be simultaneously animated at once - all of which combine to test your skills to breaking point - and beyond!


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