Well we had the big (and overly long) strategy cast from Adam Curry and Ron Bloom last night. On one hand I agree with Dave Winer that this Ron Bloom character has appeared on the podcasting scene out of nowhere and therefore can only be in it for one thing. Also Adam already was the ‘go to guy’ in the mainstream media for podcasting and by establishing this commercial business he will become the only tunnel through which other podcasts can thrive.
On the other hand we have the people like Dawn and Drew who will be benefiting the most from this deal apart from Adam and Ron. Long term, if their plans come to fruition, they should be able to become full time podcasters and not have to worry about being able to find the time or money to produce their show.
Boku as they are called want to give podcasting a kick up the backside and boot it into the mainstream possibly before it’s ready. I can’t help feeling if they had left it alone and given it time to mature and gestate we could have avoided this and had a fully decentralised network not reliant on one source of income or traffic. You only have to go back and look at Dawn and Drew to see they have been independently attracting sponsors to their show. I’m sure, given time, they would have snowballed and increased their listeners without having to resort to the over commercialisation of this medium.
Previously I commented on the screen shots taken of the WinHEC build of Windows Longhorn. The interface left little to the imagination but after watching the WinHEC keynote I am a little more upbeat about the situation.
Obviously a large amount of the graphically rich features that were demoed in the keynote were withheld from the distributed beta. Transparent menu bars, smooth distortion effects and clean minimising animations were all shown during the presentation fully utilising the powerful graphics cards we all have in our systems.
The search tool was also impressive if not a bit too similar to spotlight from Apple. There are now search bars all over the interface and on the start menu so programs and more importantly files can be quickly filtered and found. Microsoft are employing heavy use of meta data or tagging and will be encouraging users to fill out property fields on documents so they can be found more easily when it comes to search. The whole approach seems to be to get the emphasis of strict directory structures and onto dynamic organising and sorting of data no matter where it exists on your pc or elsewhere in the network or over the Internet.
Lists can be generated, creating a kind of pool of shortcuts and links to different data that can be distributed using a variety of means. Amazingly in nod to recent trends they are making all these lists RSS capable, allowing you to subscribe to the feed of these files. Whether or not Microsoft release their own aggregator remains to be seen.
In a move that I’m sure Adobe won’t be too happy about they were heavily pushing their new portable file format called Metro. This is clearly an attempt to take the fight to the Acrobat format as not only will this become the standard for printing (a la Postscript) but is actually a new open standard based on XML. Excuse me while I faint.
So things aren’t as bad as I made out before, but the release is still along way off and Tiger has many of these features already available today whereas Longhorn still has a good 20 months of development left.
The new live action Star Wars TV show has been confirmed by George Lucas at last. It will be set between episodes 3 and 4 as expected and will not feature any of the main cast.
I am hugely looking forward to this. The fact that we will have a weekly Star Wars TV show is just incredible, I can’t believe I am typing it. The scope and the depth of this thing could be massive and I just hope we get something more along the lines of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica than a bad Star Trek (Voyager 1 Season 1 - Enterprise Season 2). Writing will be the key here, they need to hire the guys who do these great scifi shows and not rely on Lucas and his buddies to write it.
One of the cool ideas I heard a few months back for the show was a story that follows Bobba Fett arround the galaxy. That would make for an action packed show but his acting range is very limited with a helmet on ;-).
A Chinook helicopter just seemed to be randomly flying all over London today. It kept doing large circles from Greenwich to Westminster. It was funny because at one point I heard it go over head then a few seconds later Andrew Marr came up on the news and you could barely hear him talking due to the roar of this thing.
A few days ago Kevin Rose pointed out the some what disappointing screen shots of the new Longhorn beta. Well here are some more courtesy of this man and his virtual pc.
This one clearly shows the sorting of the My Music folder is now going to be heavily based on ID3 tags as opposed it just reading the raw contents of the folder. Fair enough. Oh no, I can also see that dreaded red icon in the tray “Yes I do have a god dam virus checker!! And no I don’t want automatic updates!”
The wireless wizard has been separated from the main networking settings. Notice on all these shots how the the menu bar has now been moved below the tool bar, now MS are really messing with us.
This is the best example of everything you don’t do in interface design. In main window we have a white bar with headers (Name, Type, Total Size, etc.) but there are no columns with that information on this screen. Also notice the pixelated icon in the bottom left. Now rather than using a sidebar for additional info or links to related apps there’s a new labelled tool bar running below the menu bar, very inconsistent.
Alpha transparency on the start menu, there also seems to be a search bar just beneath the all programs button, handy.
In all honesty this looks like Windows XP after someone has tried out a few different icons, installed some random themes, decided they didn’t like what they saw, so went through the registry trying to remove them, only getting rid of half of it and mangling the rest. I know this isn’t the final version and it’s completely unfair to judge the OS at this stage but this is horrible. Have they learned nothing from Apple? Nothing from the open source community? My Gnome 2.10 desktop at work looks a thousand times better than this and that’s a freely available desktop environment that’s a mishmash of hundreds of independently developed packages. Consistency is the main thing done wrong here along with an overall lack of innovation.
I can feel Steve Jobs breathing down the back of my neck harder than ever now. If this is where the Windows platform is headed, this is where I get off.
Today I started shopping for a Mac.
After a very productive weekend of getting a large chunk of C++ reading and research done it’s clear that I am so much more productive at home than in the office. Right now I have a throbbing headache from the phones all around me that won’t stop ringing and the constant background chatter that I am starting to notice more and more. At first it would seem there are more distractions at home, whether it’s the fast net connection, TV, games, guitars or making an elaborate lunch but these things actually add up to less than the office. When I do let go and do one of these activities, afterwards I feel more relaxed and more motivated to work as a result
It’s debatable if I could do my current job from home, but being the general student dogsbody I am here that could never happen. Of course if I were doing the job I should be this year, programming, that would be more of a possibility as it’s the kind of thing that you need to lock yourself away to do. Instead I have to fill my weekends with that activity if I am to stand a chance of getting off to a good start at uni in October.
UPDATE: I also sit next to a big fat printer that won’t stop printing. Maybe I should have an aspirin dispenser on my desk.
All those former TechTV guys seem to be making it on there own these days creating shows that are better than anything G4 is showing right now. Another new show popped up this week called From the Shadows and in the first episode they push the limits of the PSP and DS’s wireless capabilities. It starts off innocently on street corners but then turns into a full blown game of Mario while skydiving.
Due to popular demand and to prove I do read comments Trackmania Sunrise is cheap at MX2 for £17.95 (turns out they are in Guernsey not Jersey 
same place really).
This game is gonna be a very fun racer, the online mode was great on the last one.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory has been my game of choice for the last week or so, my lack of progress in Swat 4 pretty much forced me into finally installing it. Overall very impressed so far and this game is vast improvement on it’s predecessor.
I can imagine first time players to series picking this game up and not having a clue what’s going on. There are no training missions or tutorials aside from the video clips hidden in the menu structure. The first game did this very well and why it couldn’t be replicated here, albiet with new moves added, is beyond me. The controls are excellent once you are used to them, but getting used to them maybe a problem for newbies.
When you do start playing the graphics are stunning, littered with awesome effects and little touches that make it great. One graphical touch that does spoil it though is the warping on the night vision goggles. Considering how much you must use them it’s supprising that they warp your view in a fishbowl lens style so much. Pretty minor but it can be distracting looking at wobbly walls.
Sam can do some great new moves like pulling people over ledges, breaking their necks from above and giving enemies a good stabbing when needed. The knife is a new adition that can totally change the style of play, if your good it’s possible to just run up to guards and stab them before they hit the alarm. This can make the game very easy at times, especially on the darker levels.
The cut scenes, normally the worst part of most games, are of excellent quality if littered with a bit too much product placement (Airwaves and Nokia take a bow). They tell the story very well and you always feel like the missions you are doing are of great importance to the countries involved. The decision to go with dynamic objectives adds a new level of replayability to SC that it didn’t have before (can you complete the second level without killing anyone?).
I have heard bad things about the PS2 version so if you are thinking of getting this, and I suggest you do, then pickup the PC or Xbox versions which are the same build. And I haven’t even touched on the multiplayer yet! A major part of it that I haven’t got round to yet. Just one more level…
Now this is what I call a real front panel connector. 20 in 1, including highlights such as SATA (wtf?) and an RCA connection along with the obligitory USB and firewire ports. This is what I don’t get though. Lets say I decide to hook up a SATA hard drive using this thing, where is the power coming from? I still have to run a power lead from my PSU to the drive, thus defeating the point of the front panel.
Very tempting none the less as I have been looking for away to plug in my guitar and headphones without having to reach around the back of my system constantly. Not a bad price either.
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