10.30.07
Posted in Home at 12:08 pm by JohnB
I visited the Apple store. I STOOD IN LINE! I smiled when the shutters raised at 6 PM and everyone cheered. I high-fived the staff member who handed me my free t-shirt. I wandered around the store wondering what else I could buy (iPod Classic, 80GB in silver, but don’t tell anyone!), and then I picked up my shiny Leopard box and handed my switch card to the friendly girl with the mobile card-machine. The deal was done.
On my return I gazed with reverence at the box (actually all joking aside it is one of the nicest bit of packaging I’ve seen in a long time!) removed the DVD and slid it into the side of my Mac.
The installation is about as simple as I was led to believe by the nice chap on the Apple site. Click the button, restart the machine, select the drive and wait. A couple of hours later the job was done and I reveled in the delight of the new feaures and functionality.
Now then.. what did I actually get for my money (129GBP… I bought the family pack so I can so my MacBook Pro G4 too)? Lets review:
Email:- now has integration with the address book and has functionality for Notes and Tasks. The details sensing functionality is cool too, the application can sense phone numbers and addresses in the body of an email and hovering the mouse over produces a drop-dow allowing you to save to either an existing or a new contact.. this is nice!
Stacks:- I like this feature. Any folder can be dragged from the Finder window to the Dock and when clicked it shows the content in either a fan or a grid, click again and it goes away.. very neat!
Spaces:- I love having a lot of desktop acreage. To put this into perspective I ‘work’ using a Vaio laptop.. its a nice piece of kit and it has a nice wide screen, however it spends the majority of its life hooked up to a hi-res DELL monitor, acting in dual screen mode. Even then I sometimes don’t feel I have enough workspace. The ability to have multiple desktops, easily accessible with a key combination to separate my various activities and with no apparent overhead on the system itself is simply phenomenal!
Time Machine:- This is the BEST piece of Backup/Restore technology I have ever seen.. bar none. I actually invoke it on a regular basis just to look at the thing.. is that too sad? It does require an extra drive on your systems, either internal or external. I’m using a Firewire 800 connected 500GB Lacie unit and after the initial build of the image, Time Machine snapshots my system every hour. I know this because the drive spins up and chatters for a few minutes.. thats it, no impact on working, no glitches, delays, hang-ups, nothing. I love it!
I know that there are a raft of other little touches such as the Finder updates, Network accessibility improvements etc, etc, all of which I will discover over time (or actually may not, they’ll just be there making my life easier) but my impression right now is that it was worth EVERY PENNY.
J.
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10.26.07
Posted in Home at 3:20 pm by JohnB
So tonight I will be at the Apple store from 6PM for the launch of Leopard. I’ve never.. NEVER attended any sort of launch outing before so I think this gives some indication (to me too!) as to the sort of impact this new flavour of personal computing has opened up for me. I’m not buying into the brand either.. this is based very much on the genuine benefits I believe I will get from the upgrade. In the same way that the initial purchase of my shiny iMac was based around the way it made my creative efforts actually work for me, instead of being a fight to find the right bits (yes plural) of software on my Windows PC.
Will I get freebies! Will I be sucked into buying even more Apple-shaped loveliness.. who knows. But before I sleep I will have Time-Machine, Coverflow in Finder and all of the other new and cool stuff! I think I may be becoming a H.O.M.O.!
J.
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10.25.07
Posted in Gaming at 9:47 am by Silesti
When I saw the case, sitting innocently on the rack I have to admit to a frisson of excitement! PGR3 was my favourite driving game on the 360, the benchmark against which all others have been measured since. Could this new one be as good.. better.. different..? It has bike in! Hmm well if you are a biker like me this is a mixed blessing, and let me explain why.
The dynamics and experience of riding a motorcycle are a unique, physically immersive, experience. One which it is VERY difficult to reproduce on screen. when you are actually riding a bike your attention and focus is well ahead of where you actually are. On track you are looking at the next corner as you are running through the current one, on the road you are scanning ahead, running a constant risk assessment for potholes, overbanding, manhole covers, branches, idiot car drivers on mobiles phones etc, etc, etc.
The most realistic on-board view of any motorbike sim is the one where you remain fairly level and the bike moves underneath you, however in real life you are only peripherally aware of the screen, dash etc as your focus is well ahead as I’ve already described. The crisply focussed and detailed rendering of the bike in PGR4 and the others (MotoGP etc), while very pretty, actually detracts from the gameplay and takes you’re eye away from where it should be. My solution would be that as the speed increases the dash becomes more transparent allowing you to focus only on the where the main action is.
The other unique element of riding a motorbike is the point and speed at which when you turn the bars left, you turn right. It’s a slow speed thing, at the lower speeds turning the bars in the direction you want to go it the right thing to do, but once you are rolling you use the rolling radius of the tyres to change direction, a gentle movement of the bars to the left causes the bike to roll onto the right hand side of the tyre and the curvature of the tyre means the bike goes right too. Try it with a disposable cup it’s the same thing, the wider rim travels further than the narrower base so it changes direction.. neat huh?!
Now I realise that translating these physics into something which is reproducable in a game engine may be a stretch, and certainly we are not going to see anything like the immersive physical experience of actually riding a bike for a good while yet so this is a largely academic discussion, BUT it is surely not beyond the realms of possibility to have the slow speed manoeuvering sorted out?! At standstill and walking pace, bikes do not pivot round some magical central point, when pulling away or moving at a slow rate they don’t get steered by flopping from knee to knee… gravity has an issue with that kind of thing! 
ANYWAY! PGR4… I’m very impressed. The technical elements have been improved immensely, in particular exercises like the cone gates. In PGR3 these were the simply 2 cones and I found them a little hard to judge. In PGR4 they are well defined, and offer more of a guide to where you should be.
The graphics are superb, in particular I was running around the Nurburgring F1 track in the rain and when looking down the straight you can see the rain sweeping across the track in bands.. you’ve seen it happen in real life, there’s a gentle wind blowing, the rain is coming down and as it bounces on the road you can see the waves and curtains moving ahead of you. It’s actually quite lovely!
BBRRAAGH! Sorry got a bit poetic there… It’s fast, loud, tense, challenging and the new format for progression – running through a calendar and choosing which championships to run in – provides a much more dynamic element to the career progression. The cars are fantastic (I’m a Mercedes fan all over again) and even the bike bits are OK, if you separate yourself from real-life biking experience.
If you haven’t got it, buy it! If you have, find me on Live!
- Silesti
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