DISQUS

Your comments link is broken.

Clearly, it's a Gamate:

http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/portables/ga...

BTW: you can use Amazon.com's "search inside the book" feature to search inside books you already own. it's quite a useful companion once you own the book.

A few bits on your letter: Apple can be beat. What do they do wrong?

1.Their laptops are on tables that are too low to actually get a feel of how good/bad they are to type on. Try typing on a Macbook Air next time you're there. You'll notice that it's very difficult to. Why? because it's so low, you need to bend you wrists like crazy to try their keyboard. Will MS be selling hardware? Who knows, but this is a major flaw of Apple's store.

2. Apple TV isn't in its native environment. It may be running on a TV, but it's on a counter and requires you to get way too close to it in order to check it out. In real life, you don't stand that close to your TV. In the apple store you stand so close, it's easier to see mpeg artifacts, and it means you're more likely to have the remote misfire (most users point remotes at their TV instead of the device itself. When you're far away this is not an issue, but up-close it often means the device never gets the IR, and makes the product feel clunky).

3. Apple store employees aren't trained for tech questions. I've gone in to apple stores many, many times and asked for an extension cable for my Apple Cinema Display (the cable cannot be removed like most monitors). Not only do they not carry a solution for this, but I've *never* been told a model number or even what to look for at another store. Basically, if it's not at an Apple store, they can't help you.

4. Apple does not let you try the 3rd party Mac software they sell. if it's iPhoto or any other Apple product it'll be installed on one of the machines in the store. But the 3rd party software they sell can't be demoed, and quite often you can't even find an employee who has used it.

I hope 3 is good. I absolutely adored Superstar Saga -- it restored my hope and faith in the modern RPG-- but I simply could not make it through 2. the level design was uninspired and the gameplay (up to the point I played it) was incredibly linear. Here's hoping 3 returns to its roots!

Thanks Chuck. I will by a 360 based on your recommendation. Even though I can't afford it now.

Worth getting a 360 for? I still don't have a PS3 or a 360, and I'm still on the fence as to WHY.

I loved Oblivion; perhaps my favorite game for the PC in the last 3 years, and I really want another game like it.

>The idea of Windows as the “underdog” is laughable.

I agree. But somehow Apple and its legion of fans have made me feel this way. The smugness is something that comes from Apple's users more from than from the company itself. I actually had an art director for a startup recoil in horror -- no, I'm not making this up -- she actually recoiled in her chair and make a scrunched up face when I told her I used a PC and not a Mac. I get a "WHAT???! You don't use a MAC???" from (young) people on a regular basis. I have never felt like I was too devoted to an os (other than the Amiga!) but I feel like I have to defend my position these days. It's why I think of it as the underdog, because I choose to use a product that makes people recoil in horror.

And yeah, I took a bunch of potshots at the Mac OS in my previous post not to say there wasn't logical answers to them, or that Windows was flawless. Only that there's issues with both.

My final thought: Renaming a file is not very user-visible. The only method that has an affordance is Get Info, which is hidden inside the panel (I needed to expand the Name and Info arrow to see it), which is accessed though File, not Edit. The other methods have been cryptic to me. Thanks for explaining it.

You weren't supposed to like the MS ads, Chuck. The ads weren't made with you in mind. You're a mac user. You've chosen your side.

There's a lot of people who have chosen the side of the PC, too. The ads aren't aimed at them either. They're aimed at the kids whose parents purchased a beige brick PC from Costco. Their aimed at all the people who use their work laptops at home and wish they had a "trendy" computer. Aimed at a huge chunk of their users -- people who haven't actually chosen a side yet but are currently using PCs.

I have a few more random thoughts here, not quite on topic:

I am pretty much a PC user, (although I've been using my Mac more) but I've always kinda detested the "OMG you use a PC? not a Mac?" attitude. I think of Windows as that fat kid who always got picked on last in PE, but was actually kinda cool if you spent time with him. He wasn't popular or hip. But he didn't rub me the wrong way the way the cool kids in school did. He was the underdog.

As for the security dialog on Vista: That is nothing compared to the mac. The mac pops up those dialogs for the same types of operations that Vista does, but the Mac requires your password too. I hadn't used my mac in a new months, and when I fired it up, the Apple Updater downloaded a bunch of updates -- I typed my password about 10 times in the span of 20 minutes.

And I'd also have to say that the Mac is shinier in the first five minutes of use, as well. How do you rename a file? I'm still not quite sure what the voodoo is required to do that. Click and then hold your mouse still for a second? I want to default to edit > rename,(or right click) but it's not there. And apparently you're not supposed to use auto-arrange on your desktop if it's cluttered -- it will overlap icons (on 10.3.9, anyway). And for a company that supposedly can do no wrong with GUI, I give you Apple's shortcut key. It's an unpronounceable, untypeable symbol. It actually has a name, but isnt on the key, which makes it extremely confusing for mac n00bs to follow tutorials, and makes it difficult to explain to "the rest of us" how to do things ("No grandma, hold down the Celtic knot and press C" or "Wait, there's a COMMAND key? I've been assuming you've meant control this whole time")

These are all small things that just take some getting used to, I must admit. But small things that take getting used to are all I've found in Vista so far. I think Apple's "Think different" campaign is accurate, because as someone who uses both PCs and Macs, I'd have to say that the Mac is not better, it's just different.

*I'll probably be buying a top of the line Mac in a few months.

I ran into the exact same problem. Looks like others did too. You can't ever blame the user for "not getting it". This is Apple's fault.

http://blog.hanfordlemoore.com/2008/09/09/itune...

I'm eagerly awaiting your Wall-E review.

"Flash isn’t that heavyweight"?

Are you nuts Robert? Look at the javascript specs that iPhone does ... it's 10,000 times slower than your average PC. Flash does just about everything with the CPU. I've noticed that when I play flash video on my old laptop the cpu fan kicks in.

Seriously, the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run Flash, just like we'd never expect it to play Quake.

I have a different take on this game.

I never thought of this as an adventure game. I thought of it as an advancement out of Brain Age ... polishing it a ton and adding extras, basically. It's kinda like when puzzles first showed up in 3D FPS shooters. Those FPS puzzles didn't hold a match to the classic SCUMM game puzzles out there -- because they weren't trying to be.

I think it will be interesting to see if puzzle games evolve. It may just be that starting with the puzzles and evolving it into story may be a better way to "reinvent adventure games" than starting with the classic SCUMM game and trying to tweak that.

Robert, how does it compare to WikiSky? ( http://www.wikisky.org ) Sounds very similar, but again, I haven't seen it in action.

http://www.captainzoom.com/

Okay, a bit more on that Sony laptop I was talking about: Sony Vaio x505: .38" to .8" thick -- still a little bigger than the MacBook Air, but clearly smaller than the TZ that Steve Jobs was comparing the MBA to in his keynote. And the X505 shipped in 2004(!).

Before the Air was announced, there was still a "world's thinnest laptop" ... and it had been out for quite some time, actually. The Sony one (not the one Jobs mentioned in the keynote, Im pretty sure) was the first time I ever saw a laptop and said "man, this thing looks like it shouldn't work!"

The Sneeze is great. I'm still partial to his artist's rendering of the man that died to become the ghost of Boo Berry:

http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000023.php

Did someone mention my name?

Hey, I am huge Stacey fan .... although I don't like to watch the video unless I'm in a WDW hotel. You know, it's like not wanting to listen to Christmas music unless it's close to Christmas.

Did you see Stacey was the hostess for a movie about a rabid theme-park collector? It's true.

http://www.findingkraftland.com/

Happy 2008.

I went from being someone who had used a DVR more than most anyone else on the planet (Because I was the product designer of the first DVR), to going DVR-less for a whole year. I wrote about my experience here:

http://blog.hanfordlemoore.com/2007/05/14/going...

I found it altered my TV watching habits and now I don't really care about TV the way I used to. But that's just me.

Robert,

I want SO BADLY to watch this demo, but your player UI is killing me. First, you ramble for a few minutes instead of starting at the demo point. I *try* to drag the little handle at the bottom of the player to get into the meat of the demo, but the handle snaps back.

So once the demo actually under way, I tried to enlarge the window ... I clicked the "pop up" button, and it stopped. Dead. When I went to replay it, it started from the very beginning again, and again there was no way for me to jump forward a bit.

Please get a better player experience, especially if you're going to be posting hour-long videos. I feel like I need to not touch my PC while this plays for fear of losing my place in your video, and end up getting stuck at the beginning again

If you purchased an iPhone with a credit card that has price protection you can get the entire $200 back .... unless you purchased it on the first day it was available, because the price drop came one day after the 60 day price protection window that credit cards offer.

I went to the apple store in Palo Alto a week after the iPhone launch to check it out. There were a lot of people there playing with the demos ... and it was a total turn off to me. I didn't want to be part of the Me-too/gotta-see-it vibe that was going on in the store. I ended up looking at everything else is the store except for the iPhone. I like the phone, but some weird part of my brain simply didn't want to be associated with it at that moment.

I'm sure if I ever get one, it will be a different story.

I never got on ICQ because the concept that you had a number to remember and not a name, seemed archaic. I figured if something as basic as names were archaic, the rest of it couldn't be anything spectacular.

After reading a bit more articles on the iphone, I have my own take as to why we've not seen Flash on the iPhone yet:

Outside of hardware graphics acceleration, the iPhone is pretty slow compared to a computer. Really, really slow, actually (see the benchmarks linked below). Some blogs talk about the iPhone having a very specific video codec that is hardware accelerated, and it's the only type of video that the iphone will play. Hence the custom Youtube video app with only a small sliver of videos available.

So, my guess is that a *straight* port of Flash to the iPhone was embarrassingly slow. Video playback sucked; perhaps even semi-complex vector rendering sucked too. So Apple, rather than ship with a Flash experience that made the iPhone look slow, tabled it altogether until Adobe (or Apple, or both) could optimize it for the iPhone's hardware. They then pulled the Flash from their site so that apple.com was fully "iPhone compatible" -- it would be silly if the iPhone couldn't view all of Apple's own site. Apple probably yanked any flavor of Quicktime from the site that was not iPhone compatible too.

Javascript benchmarks here:
http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/07/01/iphone-java...

Note that this is running in Javascript inside of Safari, so it's safe to assume that the javascript engine was as least *somewhat* optimized by Apple for the iPhone. Still, these numbers aren't anywhere even close to comparable to what a PC can handle. Without heavy optimizing, my guess is Flash on iPhone would crawl slower than a baby.

I don't doubt though that at some point, it will be optimized to a reasonable degree.