Shin
Oct
05

iPhone 4S

Newssites around the world crashed, even Apple's main site couldn't handle the load.

I am amused. Every year Apple releases new products and every year journalists are retarded and fail to see the point, Apple stock drops after an announcement because traders are idiots, and every year Apple sells more, does better and is more loved. It’s so predictable it’s both sad and amusing at the same time.
Who cares they didn’t release an iPhone 5? It’s just a number. Whether it’s called the 4S or 5 is irrelevant. It’s a new iPhone, with a processor that’s twice as fast, a much better camera, better antenna, better battery life, and Siri. And all of that running on iOS5 with a buttload of new features, and sweetly integrated with iCloud, giving you seamless integration of all your media (books, music, movies, photos) along with all of your mail, calendars, documents across all your devices. It IS groundbreaking, but as usual people need some time to actually catch up to how cool that is. The same goes for people who are downplaying Siri. Make no mistake, this really is the ‘one more thing’, but you have to be able to see your real world usage of this to be able to see the awesomeness. And that’s for the nerds of us. For the normal people this is groundbreaking in a way that it’ll make computers usable for people who don’t know how to use computers. All the tasks that Siri was performing in the keynote are tasks a lot of less computer savvy people still struggle with on a day to day basis.
And that’s why Apple keeps rocking and increasing their phone and computer market share; they make shit better and easier to use.

Sep
30

iBooks e-books

What a mess.
The iBooks store in Europe was non-existent thusfar, the only thing we got was free ebooks from Gutenberg, old non-copyrighted works. This week they finally started with commercial ebooks one can buy. And boy what a pile of crap.
The most popular buy right now is a Steve Jobs biography pre-order, the book isn’t even available yet. Fanboy much?
Sadly it’s also the most interesting purchase available as the rest of the offering seems to be limited to popular crap like the Twilight books or Stephen King. Yuck.
What’s even more of a joke is the pricing. I remember publishers saying ebooks would make prices go down. Instead they seem to be going up. And then some. And to make matters worse it’s a big international mess. Why do I see more french than english Twilight books?


And why is the price for a book about Keith Richards nearly 4 times as much for the german edition than the english one? Way too retarded.
I noticed the same pricing problems on Amazon where paper versions are usually considerably cheaper than the digital copy of the exact same thing. I just don’t get why more people aren’t complaining about this. I’ll stick to old fashioned dead tree format, thank you very much.

Sep
21

Tiny Tower

Tiny Tower is one of the most popular games on the iPhone right now, and deservedly so.
It’s sort of an oversimplified version of Sim Tower for anyone old enough to remember that. You manage your building, buy floors, assign residents that move in to jobs and make sure all the stores are stocked so you get more money to buy more floors. That’s it in a nutshell, and it works. It’s the attention to detail in the graphics and mechanics that make it hard to put down, even if you are just a casual gamer. The game is free, but freemium, meaning you can spend money in game to advance more quickly. The thing I appreciate about how it’s been implemented is that the game in no way forces you to buy anything. You can fully enjoy the game and every aspect of it without spending any money, unlike so many freemium games that limit certain items.

Anyway, the game divides floors into Food, Service, Recreation, Retail, Creative & Residential. You need the last one so you can get more residents to move in, and you need 3 residents to fully man a store. You can upgrade your elevator, rename stores, customize how your lobby and your residents look, get bonuses for assigning residents to their dream job, the list goes on. And every app update adds new bits and features.
Give it a try, I’m sure you’ll like it. This is my tower by the way, a work in progress.

Sep
16

Bring back Front Row in Lion!

Front Row is missing in Lion, and that sucks seeing as there’s no good alternative.

Don’t even get me started on Plex, tried it, hated it.
Plex, and other alternatives, might be good if you’re Joe Average, listening to popular music, watching CSI and the newest big hit movie. But the media manager in Plex sucks DONKEY ASS if you like to watch anime, obscure movies and listen to electro and anything not in the mainstream. It’ll mess up your collection, label your anime as some weird 50′s american tv show, show incorrect info on all your albums seeing as last.fm is a mess with 1 page for 6 artists. One… big… mess… So please gimme back a fully working Front Row please!

Until this gets sorted or there’s a better alternative I’ll postpone upgrading to Lion. Snow Leopard’s working just fine, thank you very much.

Jun
08

WWDC 2011

or more specifically, the World Wide Developers Conference opening keynote speech by Steve Jobs and colleagues. Meaning it’s for developers, not end users.
In a nutshell: iOS5 will be awesome, this fall. Lion is going to be awesome, next month for only $29.99. MobileMe turns into iCloud and will be free, costs $25 a year if you want to use the music syncing option.

You can watch the whole keynote here, or download it here.

Or instead of watching the whole 2 hour keynote, which I do recommend, you could opt to check out the 4 minute ‘musical’:

Jun
05

Trolling the Apple Store

Now this is just funny, IRL trolling.


(via OSnews)

Dec
19

Game of Life for iPhone

Electronic Arts games are currently on a big sale, with most of them currently available for only €0.79, so I decided to pick several up, including the Game of Life.
If you’re totally clueless about the game, it’s basically a board game where you have to roll and land on spaces, some offer you money, progress your career, or life points because of certain events like getting kids or visiting places. Other spaces cost you money and set you back, like getting fired from your job, paying taxes or getting sued by other players. The winner of the game is the one who has the most money at the end. Capitalism at its finest.

I always loved playing this as a kid, so it seemed fun to be able to play it again, especially the multiplayer version. And it is fun, except for a few little quirks here and there that seem to haunt most EA games. When you play against the computer it keeps using long term investments, which means whenever someone rolls that number the player gets money. Nice, except as a human player you can’t seem to place any yourself.
Next there’s the cards you can use in-game to either make someone cough up half your fee or to make them give you half their profit, along with a third card to block the first two. In single player they work just fine, but in multiplayer if the active player uses a card, the computer automatically uses the non-active players cards for them instead of giving them the choice. That’s just sloppy.
Still, overall it’s a fun little game, but if I’d bought it full price I’d be annoyed. Of course an update could fix these bugs, but given how long this game has been out… don’t hold your breath.

Dec
11

iAmiga, an Amiga emulator for the iPhone

It was bound to happen sooner or later, an Amiga emulator based on UAE is heading to the iPhone, with licensed games included.
Check out the demo which features Defender of the Crown, Battle Squadron, International Karate +, R-Type, Speedball, Stunt Car Racer, Beast, Virus and Xenon 2 Megablast. Made by the same guy who’s made the C64 emulator for the iPhone, let’s hope this takes off and he gets lots of licensed games to add. I’ll have Speedball 2, Supercars 1 & 2 and Turrican 2 please!
And let’s hope the games will be somewhat reasonably priced.

Dec
11

Time Machine saves the day

Again. In case you were wondering why the site was down last week, the hard drive of my Mac Mini that runs the site died. Completely and irreparably. So I had to wait until the next day before I could go out, buy a new drive, install it in the Mini, pop in the Snow Leopard DVD and do a full restore from Time Machine (the Mac’s standard backup program). It’s a godsend.

Work in progress... not home!
Trying to get all/most of the new code working before I start on the eyecandy.