This news is as hot-off-the-press as it comes; well, it hasn’t actually come off the old school press yet so listen up. Do not, I repeat DO NOT turn your PlayStation 3 on today, March 1st. Your PS3 thinks it’s either February 29th or, more likely, December 31st 1999 and as a result it won’t work.
RIP PS3
Basically, the internal clock in almost all PS3s - except the Slim models - is staring blankly at its calendar and has freaked out, bringing most PS3s to their knees. The affected consoles are throwing up an error message when trying to connect to the PlayStation network, then resetting the date, loosing trophies, not playing games and generally being complete arses.
So what can you do? Well, you can keep that console turned off (and maybe unplugged, too), hope the internal clock won’t play hell when turned off and wait until Sony say something. Or, you can boot up tomorrow and hope your console is more familiar with March 2nd than the 1st. Or you can ignore me and most of the Internet and go play Hard Rain, then watch your pride and joy fall to its knees and die, reducing you to a sobbing wreck with nothing to do but stare longingly at that lovely shiny dead box under the TV.
It's probably his fault
Sony have said nothing, apart from to keep an eye on their Twitter feed, so are presumably working on a fix; or sitting in a dark, powered-down office, Jurassic Park style, hoping a quick reboot will change the date and indeed time itself.
On the plus side, it’s sunny. Go for a walk.
Tags: 9001050f, end of time, playstation, ps3, ps3 error, psn, sony
Posted by Alistair on Feb 22, 2010 in
Other Tech,
iPhone Apps,
mobile phones,
thoughts Beating France, Italy, the UK and Spain, Farmville sits just behind Germany in the population league table, and it’s growing by ten million per month, according to research carried out byAll Facebook’s Application Statistics study.
The application, which works within the Facebook social networking site, lets players run their own farm by managing livestock and planting crops, has 31 million daily active users. This doesn’t include those who made an account, then never played again; these are active.
Over Valentines Day users exchanged more than 220 million virtual gifts with their farming lovers; these gifts were, presumably, heart-shaped potatoes or Cupid riding a pig.
Facebook now has 400 million active users so, using maths, I’ve worked out that some 20% of these are doing some pretend farming in their spare time.
All this begs the question; what the hell should these 80 million people be doing while they are planting carrots and buying sheep? I’ve never played Farmville but know many friends who are utterly addicted to it and I can’t for the life of me see why. Yes, I played Sims a lot when I was 10 but soon realised I had better things to do than make a fantastically ugly couple have their children taken away by social services.
Can someone please explain to me why Farmville is so addictive. If I don’t get any replies then I’ll assume you’re all too busy collecting eggs and tutting at your poor wheat produce.
Alistair
Tags: facebook, farmville, germany, internet, social networking
optional extra: kitchen sink
No, the Nintendo BS isn’t real, but it did get me thinking…
With the introduction of smartphones a few years ago able to make calls, send texts, browse the Internet, take photos and a whole host of other things, do we ever need more than one device in our pockets?
When I got my 1st iPhone it immediately replaced my iPod for carrying music and video content - in fact I flogged my iPod to a friend to fund the imported iPhone. It also replaced my laptop for some tasks too; at least until the novelty value had worn off I’d use my phone to chat on MSN, manage my email and browse the ‘net. Sure, the laptop would be far more comfortable to use, but this was the honeymoon period, I soon learnt that my mobile phone was indeed for mobile use.
Anyway, iPhone aside, does anyone feel comfortable to have just the one device with them, or are you all still carrying an iPod when the music would probably fit on your phone? How’s the music - or video - experience on a Blackberry, or a Nokia?
smartphones: can they do everything?
I’m asking because I think while being able to do everything is nice, we tend to ignore that and stick to what we know, or already have. Try this one; how’s the camera on your phone? Is it your only camera? On a night out or holiday day-trip do you rely on your phone or take a digital camera? I certainly take my SLR with me for proper photos and can always fall back on my iPhone’s shoddy shooter if I need to snap something unexpectedly.
And yet…when buying a new phone what do you look for? Probably stuff like the camera, the memory, the ability to play mp3’s, how quickly it boils an egg etc. Then we don’t use half of these features that convinced us to buy it in the first place.
Of course I could be completely wrong and find we’re all carrying an all-singing, all-dancing phone and nothing else; but I doubt it. Will the mobile phone ever be able to do everything? It’ll need to be more powerful, with a bigger battery, so the size will increase; remember the Nokia 8310 or similar mobiles of the early 2000’s? It was tiny, half the size of current phones.
the 8310 was tiny compared to newer phones
So if they do get bigger with the need to do everything the gap between laptops - or netbooks - and phones will all but disappear. This might be a good thing, but we’re all going to need bigger pockets.
Alistair
Tags: apple, Blackberry, iphone, ipod, MP3, music, Nokia, smartphones, Video
Posted by Alistair on Feb 12, 2010 in
Mac Hardware,
Mac Software,
Other Tech When the original iPhone was announced back in 2007 I was contacted by a member of the medical industry who believed that the phone, with it’s large touchscreen, Wi-Fi connectivity and simplicity, would be the future for a paperless medical system. He believed that hospital staff would no longer require paper and patients’ notes would never be lost, as all data would be entered on the phones and synced to a server. I agreed with him and, once the AppStore went live, we saw quite a few interesting and clever medical uses for the iPhone and iPod Touch; from reminding patients when to take medication, to keeping track of personal fitness and, most recently, the case where a victim of the Haiti earthquake used an application to assess his wounds and treat himself before rescuers arrived.
While these applications proved useful, no one introduced the iPhone to hospital wards as a replacement for paper. But the iPad, with it’s much larger 9.7” screen has the chance to change this.
As the hype surrounding the iPads announcement subsided I was contacted by Software Advice.com who have conducted a survey asking 178 physicians, nurses, medical students and healthcare IT professionals about what the healthcare industry’s ideal tablet would look like,
When asked if they would buy an iPad or similar for healthcare use - so to actually be used at work, not just at home by someone who happens to be a doctor - 54% said they would be very likely or somewhat likely to purchase a tablet.
With regard to how these medical workers would use their tablet, over 80% said they’d use it for lab orders and results, prescriptions references and notes and memos. That last one, note-taking, is where I think a tablet such as the iPad could be big business in hospital wards. Imagine if each doctor and nurse had a tablet synced up to the hospital server over Wi-Fi and could access notes for every patient on the ward. They could add to and edit these notes as and when required and every tablet would update instantly, allowing all staff to be up-to-date on the status of every patient, all of the time. Staff could also email updates of a patient’s condition to family members who are unable to be at the hospital.
Over half of the 178 medical staff surveyed said that ease of use was their most important feature of a tablet. This is great news forth iPad as I;d imagine many staff already have an iPhone or iPod Touch, so are already very familiar with the software and how the operating system works. Many staff would presumably be put off using a tablet with an unfamiliar user interface.
Despite having a finger touchscreen - favoured to using a stylus by 63% of those surveyed - the iPad will have virtually no medical software when it goes on sale in March, as the vast majority of medical software found in hospitals uses Windows operating systems, not Mac. And with 70% naming a wide selection of medical software as a must-have for the tablet, the iPad starts to fall short of the mark. In fact, of the 10 must-have features suggested by Software Advice the iPad has just two; Wi-Fi access, a light weight and an ergonomic design.
If you’d have asked me 2 weeks ago if the iPad would be a great appliance for a paperless system in hospital wards, I would have said yes; but the lack of crucial hardware like a barcode scanner, fingerprint scanner, integrated camera and Oyster card-style RFID reader makes the iPad unsuitable for most medical situations. Add this to the software issues mentioned above and the iPad seems completely unsuitable for a role in hospital. As Chris Thorman of Software Advice concluded; healthcare wants a tablet, healthcare likes the iPhone, but this does not translate to healthcare liking the iPad. So any Apple fanboy like me reading this; do please remember that your high horse isn’t really that tall and when it’s bolting as fast as Apple’s is, then it’s easy to fall off.
You can find the full survey results at www.softwareadvice.com
Alistair
Tags: apple, Healthcare, iPad, iphone, medical industry, microsoft, tablet, windows
I’ve always liked decent-sounding headphones and after trying items from Apple, Shure, Bose and Apple again I settled for the in-ear headphones by Cupertino’s finest. They retail for about £70 and work great with my iPod and iPhone, while delivering a good sound through comfortable earphones. However, recently I’d considered buying some proper over-ear headphones, particularly the noise-canceling QuietComfort range from Bose. I loved the idea of the noise canceling but couldn’t quite stomach the £270 price. I like my music, but not that much!
This need for proper headphones was rekindled again last week when I read of the Dr Dre Beats Studio on Kevin Rose’s blog; he said they were the perfect traveling headphones and better than Bose’s QuietComforts. I did a quick Google and sure enough they look the business and have noise-canceling. But also cost around £270, so are far too expensive. While grazing the Apple Store - as I often do - I found the smaller, just as good-looking and much hyped-about Dr Dre Beats Solo. These are similar to the Studio model but are a more practical size, don’t feature noise canceling and, best of all, cost £138 from Play.com.
So what are they like? Well, when I first opened the box I thought I’d ordered some rather fancy shoes by accident; the packaging is as large as it is pointless with the Beats not displayed nicely, but wrapped up in their soft travel case. Why go to the effort of making an awesome box, then hide the damn things? Anyway, I digress.
I’ve never bought, or even worn a pair of proper cans before so I can’t offer much in the way of a comparison, but I will say they are very comfy on my rather small head, pretty much covering my ears and blocking out nearly all background noise even at low volumes. But why listen to music quietly? I’d head of the Beats incredible bass so I stuck some hip hop tracks on and cracked up the volume. And oh my, did they impress.
Yes, they are a bit bass-heavy in the same way I found the Bose in-ear headphones to be, but you get used to that or fiddle with the EQ if you have to. When the heavy bass is needed I have heard nothing better than the Beats. At a loud-but-comfortable level I can feel the bass pounding against my ears; this may sound awful but the sound is reproduced so cleanly there is no distortion, with clear highs and lows even at full volume. Next I switched to some classical and found that the bass wasn’t intrusive at all, with a crisp and clean violin clearly distinguishable from the lower strings.
After several hours use - as in most of the day - my right ear began to hurt a bit, maybe from listening too loud or from not being used to wearing over-ear phones, I’m not sure.
The Beats have a thick red audio cable an I was pleased to hear no annoying noise when playing with it, anyone who uses the Apple in-ear headphones will know what I’m on about, when you can hear your own footsteps crashing through the cable.
One negative point that I should mention is there is a considerable amount of noise leaking out of the Beats while listening to them. People in the same - admittedly quiet - room could hear quite clearly what I was listening to on my MacBook at anything above half volume. So do bare that in mind if you travel by plane or train a lot, the guy next to you might not be too impressed.
Where the Beats shine is in the design. I’m a sucker for this and was thrilled to see that the Beats are available in look-at-me-I’m-different white, as well as these-are-just-headphones black. Of course I got the white ones which look great against the contrasting red ‘b’ logo and red cable. They fold up like most cans do and there is a small degree of flex to get them over your head but I get the feeling that care will be needed if I want them to last as they are just plastic after all.
At £138 from Play.com they are twice the price of any headphones I’ve bought before, but there is a noticeable difference. They are so much more comfortable than the Apple in-ears, which I could never get to sit right in my ear and the Shures which made my ears feel like they were giving birth after more than an hours use. And I’ll just say this once more, they look awesome. I’m writing this in a train and I can see three other people with cans and yes, they are all those boring black headphones you used at school in music class.
As with any product like this, please don’t take my word as fact; do go and try a pair out first before buying, or at least read a load more reviews. I took the plunge and ordered without trying but this might not work out for everyone.
Available from Play.com
Tags: beasts solo, bose, dt dre, ipod, itunes, Macbook, music, play.com
Yesterday Apple’s boss Steve Jobs announced the company’s newest touchscreen mobile device; the iPad. The 9.7” tablet computer takes the same form factor as the iPod touch or iPhone with a huge, crisp LED-backlit touchscreen and just a small, black Home button. It’s made out of aluminium and glass and packs the same unibody construction as the MacBook Pros.
The iPad - still trying to get used to that name - operates using a modified iPod Touch system, which the same home screen and interaction, but each application has been subtly redesigned to take advantage of the larger screen. Safari is now a much more pleasant experience, but the all-too-familiar lack of Flash is an annoyance. Mail, Photos and iPod now take on a similar appearance to their equivalent from Mac OS X - Mail, iPhoto and iTunes respectively - with Photos taking on an ‘events’ theme and the iPod app looking very similar to iTunes with a great UI. However, I doubt the iPad will ever get used much as a music player; while using it I’d probably have an iPod or my iPhone stuffed in my pocket for music.
While we’re on the topic of media, I’ll mention films and TV show. Yes, the iPad does sync to iTunes, so yes you can put all your films and TV shows on it and yes it is bigger than an iPhone. But hold on one moment. The resolution of the tablet is 1024×768; that makes the aspect ration 4:3 and I believe I’m right in saying that the Battle of Hastings was filmed in 4:3, but it died out soon after. Even watching most modern films on a 16:9 screen like on a MacBook Pro will give you some lovely black boxes so films will look awful on the iPad, using just over half of the screen. Unless you zoom in, then you chop off a quarter from each side left and right. Don’t know about you, but that’s not an ideal content-watching experience.
As a side note, it should be mentioned that Apple say the iPad has a battery life of 10 hours when watching films. This would be incredible if true but Apple hours are often quite a bit shorter than real hours, so your milage may vary on this one.
So what is the - rather well price, more on that later - iPad for? Well, it’s got an application called iBooks. No, not a gallery of some old Apple laptops, but a book reading app. And this being Apple, it’s a gorgeous book-reading app with a wooden bookshelf to display your collection - how many users will buy 10 books just to make their first book look less lonely? - and rich, colourful book covers. You tap a book and it swoops towards the screen, opening at the last page you read and fills the screen with a slightly off-white mock page. In portrait mode you get one page of text at a time, with the option to change font and point size; switching to landscape displays two pages at a time like a real, open book. It looks great and is very well implemented, but the proof will be in the reading. This is an LED-backlit LCD remember, so will I be able to read on it for as long and as effortlessly as I can with my E-Ink Kindle? If reading on the iPad gives me no headache for 2 hours then I will happily sell my Kindle and admit that I bought the wrong product.
Of course, there will be a books magazines and newspapers section to the iTunes store, available by double-tapping the bookcase. The iPad uses the popular ePub format just like the Kindle, so I hope I can transfer my purchased books from Amazon onto the iPad.
The iPad also boasts a maps application, notes and gorgeous contacts and calendar applications. Apple really have done a great job of redesigning the iPod touch apps for the larger screen of the iPad.
At the keynote Apple also announced that versions of it’s popular iWork suite - including Pages, Keynote and Numbers, would be available in a slightly slimmed-down, multitouch format for the iPad, and would retail from the AppStore for $9.99 each. They were each demoed and look great; I’d certainly use Pages a lot and, for me, this is where the iPad starts to make sense. Add the inclusion of Pages to the iPad’s ability to connect to an Apple bluetooth keyboard and you have a brilliant, dare I say it, netbook. I can certainly see myself using this at university; tapping away on the on-screen keyboard during lectures, then docking the iPad and typing up my notes with a proper keyboard in the library. Even writing essays would be a breeze, and I can listen to music or take a break and surf the web or chat on MSN or Facebook with the university’s Wi-Fi.
With regard to applications, we were told that almost all of the 140,000 applications already in the AppStore will work on the iPad and you can use them in iPhone size or tap a button to fill the iPad’s screen. I fear this ‘stretching’ feature may not work as well in some apps as it did in the ones demonstrated. But, of course, the SDK has been updated and developers will no doubt be coding new apps for the ‘pad.
Now, to the pricing! Steve made a point that we were all expected a $999 price-point but, with an audible gasp from the audience, he announced that the base price would be $499. This is a great price and will probably translate into the UK at £379. For this you get a 16GB iPad with Wi-FI; the 32GB and 64GB are available for $599 and $699 respectively and the 3G model (with Wi-Fi) will be sold for $130 more for each model. This, I admit is a bit cheeky, charging so much for a 3G chip and some plastic on the back case, but whatever.
The data plans are very impressive. It’s with AT&T, which isn’t so great, but they are offering 250mb per month for $14.99 and an ‘unlimited’ plan for $29.99 per month. These are good prices and there is no contract, meaning you pay each month but can stop paying whenever you want; a real breakthrough compared to other data plans.
The Wi-Fi only models will be available world-wide in 60 days time, so late March; and the 3G models will be sold in America in 90 days time, with a target European release date of June/July once the network deals have been made.
Personally, I’d buy the Wi-Fi model and get a Mi-Fi card from 3 which offers 1GB per month for £7.50.
So there we have it, the iPad; at first it’s just a big iPod Touch but, with more reading content like newspapers and magazines, it could be the start of a new market. I already have a 13” MacBook pro, iPhone 3G and Kindle 2 so will I get an iPad? I’m not sure. As mentioned above, it if reads as well as the Kindle then yes, the Kindle will be sold; but otherwise, I’ll wait for version 2.
Alistair
Tags: apple, ebooks, iBooks, iPad, iphone, itunes, kindle, steve jobs, tablet
Posted by Alistair on Jan 19, 2010 in
Mac Hardware,
Mac Software,
Other Tech IT’S HERE!! OMG IS THIS IT??
aherm…sorry about that readers, just needed to get it out my system. So today Apple sent out invitations to a media event to be held on the 27th of this month and, judging by the tag line, we can safely assume that this is the much-hyper tablet computer/ebook reader/thing.
It seems almost as if we have willed this product into existence with rumour after rumour clogging up the interwebs for what must be almost a year now. But what the hell is it?
It can’t just be a tablet computer, like we’ve had for the last 5 or 6 years; you know, they run Windows XP and while the touch thing is nice, they are kinda useless, lacking in power and well, what’s the point? I’ve never understood why tablets are any better than laptops or smartphones; they just aren’t that different enough to have their own market segment.
So surely Apple won’t release a conventional tablet, or it would be dead in the water, we’d all hate Apple and Steve Jobs would retire to his Californian mansion a broken man.
This things needs to be the ‘iPod Moment’ for something, just like the iMac, iPod and iPhone have revolutionised their markets, the new iThing has to do the same. But which market?
How about reading? Ok we do have ebook readers - I own a Kindle and love it - and e-ink screens aren’t capable of colour or video yet, so there’s no way in hell Apple would use one as it couldn’t be used with iTunes, and in Cupertino that’s just not allowed. It can’t be e-ink, but that doesn’t stop it being a reading machine, just means you won’t be reading long novels on it.
But magazines? They involve much less text, bright colours, images, varying font sizes…all the kinda stuff that you can view on a computer screen without getting a migraine, as it’s all taken in moderation. One minute you look at a few images, the next you read 3-400 words. Easily done on an LED or OLED screen.
How about we add some rich video content, the ability to subscribe to magazines, save and email content, click links to adverts that opens your browser, play games against other readers even. Then this might be getting somewhere. Sure, some pretty big hard-to-keep-quiet deals would need to be made with the publishers but it’s possible, right?
Now as the iThing will probably be 7-11″ it’s a great size to view your iTunes content on, so that’s a given, as well as the ability to browse the Internet fully and use the iSight for some iChat or Skype goodness. Maybe even use the touchscreen to spice up iLife and iWork? The event invitation does have some paint dropped on it, and as we know Apple do tend to slip hints into their invites, so maybe the iThing has a creative, arty side too? Maybe revolutionise basic sub-Photoshop image editing too.
That was all - as you can probably tell - off the top of my head, so sorry in advance if it’s a) a bit daft or, come the 27th b) completely wrong; either way, I love the magazine idea.
The keynote is at 10am Pacific - 6pm in the UK - on January 27th.
New shiny Apple-Goodness? Yes please.
Alistair
Tags: apple, ilife, iMac, iphone, ipod, iSlate, iwork, media event, os x, steve jobs, tablet
Posted by Alistair on Jan 5, 2010 in
Everyday Life,
Other Tech As you may have noticed, Christmas has just happened and geeks all over the world have been unwrapping some new shiny, techie goodness from under the tree. And, being a proper geek, I was just the same. I got an Amazon Kindle as my main present and let me tell you something…it’s the future.
What it has started in the book, newspaper, magazine and journalism industries is mind-blowing and without doubt it is certainly the ‘iPod moment’ for the print medium.
But first, the device itself. Unlike the first generation Kindle - which looked a bit like a milk carton after being run over by a truck - this second generation looks really nice. Like, Apple-nice, really it’s a handsome thing and feels great to hold too. White plastic on the front and brushed metal on the back, it feels sturdy and weighs just the right amount too. It’s also surprisingly thin, about 2/3 the width of an iPhone 3G, so very portable and incredibly easy to hold and carry around.
The e-ink screen, while not dominating the device, is a good size and very clear and crisp. I’d never read from an e-ink screen before opening up my Kindle and I was amazed at how good and how readable it is. In fact it was displaying a low battery warning, which I thought, before reading, was just a sticker of some kind telling me to charge before use or whatever. Coming from laptops and iPhones, this screen is quite a shock. It’s matte so can be read in almost direct sunlight and of course there’s no backlight or flicker so you can read for hours in comfort with no eyestrain or headache at all.
Ergonomically speaking, the device is easy to hold and the buttons are situated sensibly - again, unlike the squashed milk carton 1st generation - with Next Page buttons on both sides to accommodate lefties and righties. The buttons are all dead simple, Home takes you to the list of contents, Menu opens a small side menu for wireless on/off etc and Back, well, that takes you back. The only bit that takes some getting used to is the tiny 5-way joystick-type thing. It’s very small and you really have to dig your fingertip or nail against it to move around without accidentally clicking it to select something. The keyboard is very minimal and keys are spaced well, so no complaints, and to be fair it’s not going to get used that much anyway.
So what else is there, apart from being able to read stuff? Well, there’s the ability to read stuff to you; clever but rather pants, I spend more time trying to hear and understand each computer-spoken word rather than digest what is being said. Something more useful is that you can make notes on anything you read and go back to these notes at a later date; you can also search for keywords within a text and be given a dictionary definition at the foot of the screen when highlighting any word. Under the menu there’s a submenu called Experimental; this includes MP3 playback, a basic web browser and the crappy text to speech I mentioned earlier. MP3 playback works well enough, so if you copy over some tunes on your computer, you can play them using keyboard shortcuts while you read; but it’s the web browser that interests me. Sure it works, but on a grey-scale screen that does no flash, pretty much no images, no video and has to physically refresh every time you do something, a browser seems a bit daft. It does work though, and when connected to 3G it’s quick enough, but for anything more than email and very basic searching I don’t see the point. I’d rather use my iPhone. Same goes for music playback.
Far and away, the best feature unique to the Kindle is the Whispernet. The Kindle has basically a mobile phone chip, so it can access the net using GPRS or 3G to browse the Kindle store and download books and newspapers wirelessly. This is a truly great feature and works best when you set up a newspaper subscription. I have one for The Times - costs about 45p per day - and very early every morning that days newspaper is delivered to my Kindle wirelessly, ready to read right when I want it. This is awesome and it may seem simple but I love it.
While I’m on the topic of newspapers, they obviously aren’t as easy to navigate through as a proper paper is, you are given a list of sections such as Front Page, News, Business, Sport, Editorial, World and Features. After clicking on, say, News you are given a list of the headlines to chose from. This works ok and means you get just news without loads of adverts and stuff you don’t need, but a more comprehensive contents list would be nice, like a news website would offer.
Compared to a phone or laptop the battery life is awesome, mainly because power is only used when the screen refreshes, so while you’re reading one page no power is being used. I seem to be getting about 4-5 days of standby time with the wireless mainly off and I guess you could read for about 10-12 hours of page-turning every minute or so. I don’t really know but I’m used to charging my iPhone daily so any more than that is a bonus. It does take some time to charge, however, and they currently ship from America with a US plug to Micro USB cable. So without a plug adaptor or different cable it cannot be charged out of the box, which is certainly annoying. A USB to Micro USB cable was £8 from a mobile phone shop; it’s the same as what BlackBerry use.
So there we have it, the Amazon Kindle, I love it and I believe that this is only the start of something very big indeed. More on that in a few days…
What? Amazon Kindle 2
Where? Amazon
How much? $259, approx. £160 plus delivery
Rating 9/10
Tags: 2010, amazon, apple, ebook, future of news, kindle, the future, whispernet
Posted by Alistair on Dec 5, 2009 in
Mac Software,
Other Tech,
iPhone Apps I’ve played Tetris, you’ve played Tetris, we’ve all played Tetris at least one in our lives and we’ve all loved it – dammit even the spellchecker in Word knows what it is. So I was excited to see that some iPhone developers have taken the original recipe of falling coloured bricks and spiced it up a bit. Legendo is one such company who have taken the 1984 original and given it a 21st Century facelift.
Legendo’s Spooky Spirits: Puzzle Drop!! does just that by adding a simple yet effective storyline to the game we’ve all played and loved. When playing Puzzle Drop you’re task is simple, to help spirit wardens Becky and Tim stop the Spookies – or naughty ghosts – from escape and haunting humans. The ghosts hide in the dropping coloured blocks so it’s the player’s job to match the blocks by colour to capture the ghosts.
The blocks – which are all the same shape but different colours – appear at the top while those at the bottom rise upwards. To control the top blocks you navigate by flicking left and right, a flick up swaps the position of the two highlighted blocks and a flick down drops those two blocks into position. Once several blocks of the same colour have been joined together, they disappear just like Tetris.
There are three different game modes in Puzzle Drop; Panic Mode is a race against time and frankly rather difficult. Until I got used to the controls I stuck with the Puzzle mode, which gives you as much time as you need. But the aim of Puzzle mode is to remove all the blocks with a very limited number of drops; so for example you might get just two drops – so a total of 4 blocks – to remove everything. The third game mode is Eternity, which lets you play forever, or at least until you fail the game, up to a score of 9,999,999 but if anyone reaches that I’ll happily give them everything I own. The gameplay may sound complicated but trust me, it isn’t. Take a look at my screenshots to see what I’m rambling on about.
Puzzle Drop has been put together very well and has all of the features and details expected from serious games by the likes of EA. The menus are very easy to navigate, the music is very clear and professionally composed, the graphics are awesome and the game loads very quickly, never once crashing on me during testing. These are the basics that so many games in this price sector – just £1.19 – fall down on; if developers get the basics right then the game works and feels so much better. Small developers have a lot to learn from Legendo.
For me personally, the addition of a story line and characters is neither here nor there, but the adaption of the original Tetris formula is impressive and makes for a game that I will continue to play until I’ve mastered it.
What? Spooky Spirits: Puzzle Drop
How much? £1.19
Where? AppStore
Score 4/5
Alistair
Tags: apple, application, appstore, iphone, legendo, puzzle drop, spooky spirits
Posted by Alistair on Nov 22, 2009 in
Other Tech,
google So when you sit down at your computer, what is the first thing that you do after logging in? Open the browser. And, unless you are working, which application do you use the most? The browser. Where can you access your email, your social life, your documents and even your files? The browser. And where do you find your news, weather reports, video clips, stock prices, sports results and almost all the information that one could possibly consume? Yep, the browser.
If you agree with even half of that first paragraph then you may well understand why Google is currently developing an operating system that is purely a browser, with no other applications at all. The OS, announced by Google earlier this week and available to download now - albeit in a *very* early form - is, annoyingly, called Chrome and it is nothing more than their Chrome browser with a few tweaks.
These tweaks include the ability to pin web apps to the tab bar. These appear as small icons, similar to those found in the Windows 7 taskbar. These ‘applications’ range from Google Apps, to Google Maps, but also include Facebook and any online games that you might play. So in a way this bar acts as a bookmark bar, just Chrome OS encourages you to bookmark webapps rather than just random webpages. While I could describe the layout and design in more detail, there’s not much point because Google have said that the design and UI may completely change, so check out my pictures and draw your own conclusions.
While we may spend the majority of our time in a browser, a lot of us will want to attach hardware such as USB thumbdrives or digital cameras. Chrome OS deals with this and pops up the contents of your USB stick or camera in a Panel. Panels are small windows that are pinned to the bottom of the browser window and are the size of a typical IM chat window. They can be used for IM or contacts lists, but they also show the contents of removable hardware.
If you plug your camera in you can view photos - they appear in a new browser window - but you cannot save them, or indeed anything, to the local drive. Instead, these photos could be uploaded to Flickr or wherever you personally post photos online.
Another feature highlighted in Google’s demo of Chrome OS was the integration with Windows Office online webapp. So if you have an Excel document emailed to you, Chrome OS will open the document with Office online in a new browser tap. This looks and feels very natural and I can certainly see other applications such as Skype and MSN offering web-based versions of their software.
Google is always obsessed with simplicity and their recent update to the Google.com homepage shows this. If you haven’t yet seen, they have removed almost everything from the page, leaving just the logo and search bar. Only when a mouse is moved does everything else appears. They have taken the same approach to Chrome OS and are aiming to simplify wherever possible. An example would be the emphasis on short boot times. Google say that a computer doesn’t need to run all the tasks that a full operating system runs when first turned on, so Chrome OS doesn’t. When using an SSD drive they boast that the OS boots in 7 seconds and a user will be logged in 3 seconds after entering their password.
Using essentially one browser windows with tabs and panels tacked on all over the place might get messy, so Google have incorporated a system similar to Apple’s Spaces. The user can have one window with tabs related to - for example - shopping, with Amazon, eBay and Paypal open, then another window with work-related tabs and other windows for whatever else. These windows only appear on screen one at a time and the user can flick between them or view an overview of them all, just like Spaces. I use Spaces all the time so this is a great way for Google to manage multiple tabs and windows.
So will Chrome OS be successful? Well, with an estimated release date of ‘late 2010’ and the promise of many changes it’s impossible to say just yet. One thing we do know is that Google want this entire operating system to work in the cloud, so I hope either netbooks come with SIM card slots or we have nation-wide WiFi by the time they are ready to launch. Otherwise I can see this system struggling. Sure, they will probably implement a way of working on documents offline, but that will no doubt damage Google’s vision of cloud computing only, with no local files.
One feature I do love is the claim that you’ll never get infected, because the OS can re-download a new and clean copy every time the computer boots up. And because all of your data and applications are online, this method seems entirely possible. I guess system updates would be pushed out this way too, with an entirely new OS being installed when you boot up.
So there we are, Chrome OS. You can try it now as a virtual machine, I’m using VMware Fusion on my Mac, and I hope that updates will be released to the public over the following year. I am excited to see how Chrome will look when it’s completed and I can’t wait to see where the currently booming netbook market will be in a years time. If Apple never gets into the netbook market then we may have our two system contenders already, Windows 7 and Chrome OS.
To find out more about Google Chrome OS, and have a go for yourself, visit the lovely folks at GDGT and have a look at this really neat video by Google.
Alistair
Tags: apple, chrome, chrome os, cloud computer, google, netbooks, the cloud, windows 7
