I had been wondering for a while if, impatient as I am, there was any possibility I might ever enjoy a stealth game. Well, I can — when the controls are flawless, the environments exciting, and I have a quick-save button (I can’t imagine why they don’t put quick-save on the power wheel for gamepad users, but my keyboard was never far and I suspect not having this ability would have made a sizable difference to my enjoyment).

Dishonored is gorgeous, well written, and impeccably acted. If it feels a little short and too linear at times, I’d still rather buy a game like this, perfectly mastered from beginning to end, than another Assassin’s Creed 3.

See, it isn’t so hard to make a decent sandbox game. You need to have writing that doesn’t insult the player’s intelligence (this story is nothing original, but it’s written earnestly and makes sure to embrace all the cool clichés from the genre), and you need one major mechanic that works great. In Sleeping Dogs’ case, it’s the fighting: well balanced, allowing you to choose whether you want to mash a single button or learn complicated combos, with fights that can always be won, yet can always be lost as soon as you get careless. Gunplay is below average (as in, noticeably worse than even GTA 4), but it’s only available in a small fraction of encounters anyway. Driving is also the worst of any recent sandbox game — and there’s a lot of it — but you know what? That’s okay, because I’m gonna get into a fight when I reach my destination, and I’m gonna have fun, and I’m gonna hear more cool dialogue from cool characters (even if most of the acting is pretty dull, starting with the lead). Oh, and the environment looks pretty nice, and appropriately alive, but I can’t say as much as I’d like about it because I had to turn every setting to the minimum on my machine.

So I’m not asking for a lot — I know that making a sandbox game is a huge endeavor, and this genre more than any other will always require the player to make an effort of imagination in order to appreciate the fun parts. The game just has to have those fun parts.

I’ve been filled with unfathomable rage for the past two days, and it just occurred to me that I happen to have this website where I can publish opinions and vent the rage, so maybe I should trying writing a post.

It’ll be more of a list than a post, because I’m too pissed off to write a proper review. And it won’t be a real review either, because I hate that game so much there’s no way I’ll ever finish it. (I’m about halfway through.)

Listing the game’s flaws, though, isn’t enough to justify my rage — there have been bad games before, and there have been bad games with the same budget and marketing before. But Assassin’s Creed 3 does two vile things: it ruins a promising franchise (which already overextended itself with filler, but the game still had a shot — and explicitly promised — to recapture the awesomeness of Assassin’s Creed 2), and it borrows extensively from one of the best games ever, Red Dead Redemption, sullying its memory every step of the way.

• Hunting sucks. I don’t understand how some people reviewing it can say this is the best aspect of the game when there’s no gameplay to it — you just wait for the QTE. Unless you perform an air assassination (only possible when the area has been explicitly designed for that, which isn’t often), if you want to kill a big animal you’re gonna have to attract its attention, wait for its attack and follow the button prompts. That’s not fun, ever. What’s worse, it shouldn’t have been that hard to just adapt the game’s existing counter mechanic to the new enemies.

• Actually, the fighting also sucks… for the first five or ten hours, until you get the assassin’s robes and weapons. Until then, there is one and only one way you’ll survive any encounter, and that’s to do nothing until you get the signal to counter an attack (which you’ll regularly miss because the camera decided to move around and hide the threat). There are story reasons for limiting your capabilities, but when most players come from a string of two to four games of the same series, it’s just unreasonable to inflict such a prologue on them before they’re allowed to enjoy the killing.

• Oh, yeah, the prologue. I can see how the writers thought the twist was super cool, because it is, but if your story idea involves opening your game with three hours of the most boring gameplay ever? Sorry, you have to scrap it.

• Not that the gameplay is much better beyond that point. Most of the story missions play like this: go to the marker; press the "interact" button to play a couple line of dialogues; go to another marker; and so on, five or six times. And then once in a while you’ve got a mission where you must kill a hundred guards at once without raising the alarm while holding an egg with a spoon.

• The writing is atrocious, or missing. The main missions’ dialogue is boring as hell; the town errands don’t bother with any story, dialogue, or explanation; the side missions are like ironic satires of sandbox games. Compare with Red Dead Redemption and cry. Or just compare with Assassin’s Creed 2’s awesome characterization (I’m still sad about missing the Leonardo hug). This may well be the laziest, most uninspired writing of any game I’ve ever played.

• The synchronization trees are unplayable. Okay, they’re all the same so you’re good once you’ve memorized how the first couple worked, but until then it’s a mess: the camera’s too close to the character and it won’t tilt all the way up, so you’ve got no idea where you’re going. Oh, and once you’ve synchronized? Jump off and die.

• Side missions and sandbox activities are enabled and marked on the map before they’re introduced and explained. That was already an issue with some of the previous games (and I admit it’s not a trivial problem to solve) but here it’s a million times worse than it ever was. Oh, and I was killing bears with my hidden blades hours before actually receiving the weapons.

Many of these could have been solved with a few more months of QA. No sympathy from me there, as it’s entirely self-inflicted by delaying the franchise with two entirely pointless entries while giving the series a hard deadline for concluding the story by late 2012. Yet even if it weren’t appallingly rushed (there are missions where the voice acting contradicts the on-screen prompts), it would still be boring and uninspired.

In short, a monumental waste.

hyperbate.fr

Je me souviens d’une expérience vécue dans un hypermarché : à la suite d’une panne générale d’électricité, simplement éclairés par un peu de lumière naturelle, les lieux me sont apparus tels qu’ils sont vraiment, sans néons, sans panneaux luminescents, sans affiches criardes qui étourdissent le regard. L’endroit m’a subitement semblé étranger, je me suis vu dans un sinistre et immense entrepôt,  où curieusement la démesure des rayons était bien plus évidente que sous la lumière artificielle, et où j’avais le sentiment d’être entouré de centaines de tonnes de nourriture. J’aurais voulu photographier ça.

Many shows have tried guest-starring the Angel of Death for an episode of melancholy, but very few had the tonal flexibility required to pull it off. American Horror Story is not just flexible, it has no spine at all — in the very best way.

And their casting choice was particularly perfect, too.

wired.com

The only convincing case the author makes, actually, is: kill the motherfucking password reset systems. And yes, I realize you can’t have passwords without some kind of password reset, but the problem here lies with the implementation more than anything else:

Apple: Can you answer a question from the account? Name of your best friend?

Hacker: I think that is “Kevin” or “Austin” or “Max.”

Apple: None of those answers are correct. Do you think you may have entered last names with the answer?

Hacker: I might have, but I don’t think so. I’ve provided the last 4, is that not enough?

Apple: The last four of the card are incorrect. Do you have another card?

Hacker: Can you check again? I’m looking at my Visa here, the last 4 is “5555.”

Apple: Yes, I have checked again. 5555 is not what is on the account. Did you try to reset online and choose email authentication?

Hacker: Yes, but my email has been hacked. I think the hacker added a credit card to the account, as many of my accounts had the same thing happen to them.

Apple: You want to try the first and last name for the best friend question?

Hacker: Be right back. The chicken is burning, sorry. One second.

Apple: OK.

Hacker: Here, I’m back. I think the answer might be Chris?

He’s a good friend.

Apple: I am sorry, Brian, but that answer is incorrect.

Hacker: Christopher Aylsworth is the full name.

Another possibility is Raymond McAlister.

Apple: Both of those are incorrect as well.

Hacker: I’m just gonna list off some friends that might be haha. Brian Coca. Bryan Yount. Steven May.

Apple: How about this. Give me the name of one of your custom mail folders.

Hacker: “Google” “Gmail” “Apple” I think. I’m a programmer at Google.

Apple: OK, “Apple” is correct. Can I have an alternate email address for you?

Hacker: The alternate email I used when I made the account?

Apple: I will need an email address to send you the password reset.

Hacker: Can you send it to “toe@aol.com”?

Apple: The email has been sent.

“Why, yes, this Apple e-mail account does have a folder named ‘Apple’. Nobody could have guessed that, and our conversation has given me every reason to think you are who you say you are.” Jesus.

arstechnica.com

The most immediately noticeable change to the free games in Windows 8 is that they’re all designed to run primarily in full-screen mode as “Windows 8 style” apps. On the plus side, this helps create some very streamlined interfaces without distracting window borders or menu bars getting in the way. Multitaskers can play some of the available games in "snap mode" by dragging the game to a small sliver on the left or right side of the screen, but the results are mixed—Minesweeper and Wordament work fine in this compressed space, but the card layout in the Solitaire Collection gets so cramped that it’s nearly unplayable. If you want to play Mahjong or Taptiles while you’re on a teleconference, you’re going to need a dual-screen setup.

It is so sad — no, it is revolting, really — that we are abandoning the huge benefits of overlapping windows, proven over thirty years of computing history.

‘Look – there are only two of us in here, aren’t there? So, if you give it some thought, there is no reason whatsoever why you should repeatedly tell me what my name is. I know why you’re doing it. Dominance.’

— The Long Earth by Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett

Which is it, then? Do I never use people’s names when addressing them because I don’t care about people, or because I completely abhor any kind of dominance and intentional manipulation? Or is it both?

eurogamer.net

Oh, it gets better and better, doesn’t it. Here’s what the few lines of dialogue quoted here (and, seriously, hasn’t Bioware learnt by now to better hide the stuff in their DLC packages?) seem to say:

If Bioware was wickedly clever, you could imagine that the Leviathan ending would actually reveal to the player that their previous choices had all been a scam — that the AI was evil, that the first-last race had been manipulated (or altogether indoctrinated) — and you’d get new choices reflecting that new information. But I expect that, if it were the case, they would have rushed the Leviathan DLC to resolve fan outrage instead of wasting months on that free Extended Cut that didn’t change anything significant.

Damnit. Karpyshyn wasn’t a good writer (his Mass Effect books were a chore to read), but at least he understood sci-fi.

marco.org

And ideally, before resetting a password by phone, they’d send a forced “Find My”-style push alert to all registered devices on the account saying something like, “Apple Customer Service has received a request to reset your iCloud password. Please call 1-800-WHATEVER within 24 hours if this is unauthorized.”

Then make the person call back the next day. If you forget your password and the answers to your security questions, it’s not unreasonable to expect a bit of inconvenience.

I’d even go as far as sending the password reset via snail mail. Your iCloud account is fucking important and, as Arment says, you’ve got no right to expect access to your account within the hour after you’ve lost your password.

wired.com

I never answer security questions because they’re by definition the exact opposite of secure but, hey, turns out that doesn’t matter one bit.

Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.

Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. I was very clear about this. During my second tech support call to AppleCare, the representative confirmed this to me. “That’s really all you have to have to verify something with us,” he said.

First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you’ve lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account.

Let’s launch an online service like everybody did, and we’ll figure out the kinks later. What’s the worst that can happen, people’s entire digital lives obliterated? Bah.

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but the release of the Extended Cut revived online discussions a bit, so I only just thought of this analogy and I want to write it down somewhere. (Vague spoilers if you haven’t seen Return of the Jedi and played Mass Effect 3.)

The scene takes place on Endor. The scooby gang has just been captured by Ewoks, C3P0 is their god and is playing the role of his life: translator, and also god.

C3PO

They say they’ve been waiting for us. They’ve been watching us all along and waiting for us to get here. They say they control the midichlorians.

LUKE

The… what?

C3PO

They say the Force is the power of midichlorians. They are inside you. The more you use the Force, the more the midichlorians control you. And the Ewoks control the midichlorians because they’re the spirits of their ancestors.

LUKE

Uh… okay.

C3PO

And they say they’ve been waiting for the last jedi to come here so they could ask him what he wants to do with that power. They can keep doing what they were doing, or they can relinquish control to you and you’ll have to stay here forever, or they can send all the midichlorians in the universe to Ewok Heaven, and all jedi will die. It’s up to you.

(beat)

You need to choose NOW.

LUKE

I… I don’t know… I guess… I don’t want to have control over them, I don’t want to have control over the Emperor and the empire and my father and… really, nobody should have this control. Yeah, nobody should have such a power, so release the miniclaws or whatever.

LUKE, LEIA and HAN SOLO all look at each other with TEARS in their eyes, or the closest approximation in HAN SOLO’s case. R2D2 WHISTLES MOURNFULLY.

C3PO

It is done.

C3PO’s eyes FADE OUT and he SLUMPS ON HIS THRONE because he had MIDICHLORIANS in his system ever since ANAKIN made him. LUKE, LEIA and HAN SOLO are OFF-SCREEN; we HEAR LEIA CRY OUT.

DISSOLVE TO: DEATH STAR, EMPEROR’S OFFICE

The EMPEROR DISAPPEARS, his CLOAK FALLS TO THE GROUND. Behind him, DARTH VADOR straightens up, then suddenly FALLS TO THE GROUND.

DISSOLVE TO: SPACE

The DEATH STAR EXPLODES.

TITLE CARD: THE END.

arstechnica.com

As of Friday, the company seems to have quietly given or replaced the display e-mail addresses of all of its users [on their profiles] with an @facebook.com address.

I thought, who cares? until I read this comment on Reddit:

Where I see this hurting most users is from automatic phone syncs of contacts. Running through my phone, I see all these @facebook email addresses now.

Remember what’s coming this summer? iOS 6, and automatic Facebook contact sync for everyone (I’m under the impression that it’s an option — haven’t installed the beta myself, but I read something to that effect on Twitter — but you can be sure that most people will enable it, because why wouldn’t they? it beats manually entering the info). It’s not like people use e-mail much these days, but it’s still definitely going to make a noticeable difference in usage, and it is a hijacking of people’s email accounts.

So, yeah, I’m moving this from “benign” to “evil.”

And, as a bonus:

Isn’t it funny how this privacy control doesn’t exist anywhere else in the profile settings, and its title (“Shown on Timeline” / “Hidden from Timeline”) doesn’t make any sense for what it actually does, and it can end up completely contradicting the regular privacy control that’s on its left (oddly enough, at Facebook’s benefit)? Even for Facebook, that’s oddly inefficient and obtuse UI, isn’t it?

david-smith.org

I’ve heard from many people who think that this isn’t possible. That once you pull an app from the store you must essentially abandon it. That is simply not true.

So long as you don’t actually delete the old version of the app within iTunes Connect you can continue submitting updates to apps even while they are in the Developer Removed from Sale state. Whether this is intentional functionality is unclear but I have verified that it does in fact work and the resulting approved updates are available for customers.

Interesting. I assume that "available for customers" means the update won’t be pushed to their devices and they have to use the purchases list to download it “again,” but that’s still better than nothing.

reddit.com

iOS 6 makes it pretty obvious, I think, that Apple has wanted to have turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for a while, but couldn’t as long as they were using Google. And I would be surprised if Google hadn’t been asking for more and more money — or more and more ad impressions — with each iOS release. (Remember that Reddit post about Maps giving sponsored directions to another fast-food place than what the user asked for, even though it was twice as far? That’s definitely not Apple’s idea.)

I don’t think iOS 6 is Apple getting rid of Google out of pettiness; I’m certain they switched to a new data source in order to offer more functionality, and at the cost of removing less important functionality that TomTom can’t provide. (Turn-by-turn is much more important to the iPhone than transit maps — transit info will be available in free or cheap third-party apps, but turn-by-turn was an expensive App Store purchase and as a third-party app it couldn’t be integrated with Siri. Voice-operated turn-by-turn, included with the phone, is going to be a huge factor for many people hesitating between iPhone and Android.)

Conception graphique, réalisation en HTML et PHP.

highlyscalable.wordpress.com

First, we should note that SQL and relational model in general were designed long time ago to interact with the end user. This user-oriented nature had vast implications: […] No one can expect human users to explicitly control concurrency, integrity, consistency, or data types validity. That’s why SQL pays a lot of attention to transactional guaranties, schemas, and referential integrity.

I had always wondered about that, and it never occurred to me that SQL could have been designed primarily for end users. So it does make sense that, when accessing my database from PHP, I feel no need to use stuff like foreign keys constraints in the schema itself, for instance.

(Can’t vouch for the rest of the article, still haven’t read it. It’s long, and I have to be in a more open and productive state of mind to appreciate what it’s offering.)

ignorethecode.net

I’m always surprised when someone mentions that they use Safari a lot on their iPad — I kinda avoid it like the plague. Not that it’s bad; it’s just that the tab management UI is absolutely not optimized for touch. I always refrain from opening a web link from an iOS app because I know it will result in Safari remembering to keep this tab open for months, even though I only wanted a glance at it once.

On the other hand, managing your open tabs — and managing your open apps, and a lot of other system-level stuff — is a pleasure on webOS. How does it work anyway, now that the system is open source? Does it make it possible for anyone to copy any aspect of the UX, or do the patents still apply to you if you aren’t actually using the code (and contributing your own code in return, by the law of open source)?

pandodaily.com

Under the “theft” conception of copyright law, what, exactly, is the deprivation when someone makes illegal copies?  It really boils down to just one thing:  money.  Copyright infringement – renamed copyright theft — deprives the copyright holder of some of his or her expected profit from exploiting the copyright. […]

Failure to pay expected money under a contract doesn’t trigger a penalty: contract law usually says that a party can recover the money she expected but not punitive damages or attorneys fees (unless parties have specifically bargained to pay attorneys fees for a breach).  Failure to pay rent usually requires payment of rent to cure the default.  Failure to put money in the parking meter prompts a ticket for $60.  In New York City, failure to pay the $2.50 subway fare results in a maximum fine of $100.

That’s an immensely seductive analogy, and I’m sure it’ll be widely linked and tweeted, but it’s also completely incorrect (and I’m rather disappointed that it’s written by a lawyer). People aren’t sentenced to pay astronomical damages because they downloaded a song, but because they uploaded it. The author mentions in passing that Jammie Thomas was found guilty even though it was never proven that anyone had downloaded a file from her, but I’m pretty sure I remember the argument being that she had offered them for download and that was enough — it still wasn’t about her downloading them.

To get back to the author’s analogy: people aren’t found guilty of jumping the turnstile, but distributing fake subway tokens… by the thousands. I don’t expect you’d get away with a $100 fine for that.

On the other hand, the author’s point about how copyright infringement came to be known as “copyright theft” is entirely right, and quite depressing.

Hornet’s “request access to this user’s hidden photos” mechanism leads to an interesting take on hitting on a guy: if he accepts, you know he likes you; if he refuses, there’s not much rejection pain — you can just tell yourself he thought your request was too forward.
And if you don’t like what you see, you don’t even really have to say anything polite, since you never exchanged any actual words with the guy in the first place.
It’s like someone invented the best possible online version of groping someone in a backroom.

I definitely need to steal this.

macsparky.com

Then I got home and my wife was really upset about it. My wife is a bit of a nerd too but she travels in circles of electronically connected paper-crafters and they are absolutely up in arms about this. To them, Google Reader is RSS. They don’t know of alternative services and as far as they know, new services will never again exist. They think RSS is going to die on July 1 and that’s that. Now some of them will figure out they can go elsewhere but some won’t. Those people will stop reading blogs via RSS and those blogs will lose readers.

That got me thinking. I’ve spent years building up MacSparky.com. There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a new RSS system and subscribe again? The closing of Google Reader is going to result in the great RSS purge of 2013.

forbes.com

I don’t like to quote analysts (and I don’t like to link to Forbes blogs), but this is an excellent point:

More importantly, we believe AAPL needs to reclaim high-end leadership as that is what its brand is about.

It was okay for Apple not to have a 7-inch tablet because that segment was mostly defined by cheapness until they entered it. It’s okay for Apple’s laptop line to start at $999 because the only advantage competitors have is price — and unprofitable margins.

But there are people out there not buying iPhones (either holding off on their purchase, or moving to Android altogether) because they want a higher-end device, a potentially more expensive device, than anything Apple is willing to offer. That’s just wrong.

(Okay, the Mac Pro hasn’t been a worthy purchase in years, but I don’t think its potential market compares to that of 5-inch smartphones.)

macworld.com

REACT officers found McFarlin with help from Apple security, which tracked where the stolen devices were being used by matching their serial numbers with connections to Apple iTunes servers.

I want to see a regular joe use this precedent to demand in court that Apple help track their stolen MacBook.

coolhunting.com

If using folders or the "snooze" function isn’t for you, the ability to simply move messages up or down in the mailbox timeline allows for creating to-do lists of sorts. And all movements made in Mailbox also effect your accounts in their native formats so you won’t be confused when switching between web clients and Mailbox.

How on earth does that work? How do they manage to reorder messages in your Gmail inbox without changing the timestamps? Or do they actually change the timestamps, making your e-mail archive completely unreliable? I’m guessing the way they implement "snooze" is they move the message to their own servers, then move it back on a timer. (They have to have servers of their own with access to your inbox, since they’re offering push notifications.) Would you trust them with that?

This app looks extremely interesting, but e-mail is too vital for me to risk a third-party app screwing it up, or for that matter to let a completely unknown entity access and mess with my accounts — I’d much rather Google implemented those functionalities on their side.

bbc.com

Many interesting, scary things in this article (and when you think about it, it makes sense: we’ve been hard-wired to trust what we see, because sight was the most tamper-proof of our senses until a few decades ago) but I didn’t expect this bit:

In fact, people trust photographs so much that they actually place more weight on information that is accompanied with an image, regardless of how related or useful that image is. If you show participants a statement, and an image that provides no proof of that statement, they are far more likely to find that statement true than if it had no image alongside it.

gametrailers.com

gametrailers.com

It took me a while to decide what I really thought of this DLC for Red Dead, but now I’m certain I’m offended. I realize that many people (including me, for that matter) miss playing as John Marston, and I would have accepted the premise if it only involved him, but bringing his family and other supporting characters (most especially B., seen in an earlier trailer) into this is tasteless, cruel, incoherent, disrespectful and a lot of other adjectives.

I’d have been quite curious to play a zombie game in the Red Dead engine and environment, but absolutely not under those conditions. Do not mess, even “ironically,” with the tragic story and characters you had so well established. (GTA IV introduced entirely new characters for its DLCs, and that worked perfectly fine.)

appadvice.com

Changing hardware button functions has been argued as of recent, and denied to developers like TapTapTap, due to the fact that it’s not “what users expect” and could be confusing. TapTapTap and other camera app creators tried to use the volume buttons as options to activate the camera shutter to improve convenience but were ultimately deflected by Apple’s review team.

daringfireball.net

A world where Kindle hardware sales pale in comparison to the iPad but where there’s a very popular Kindle app for iPad that competes against iBooks is not a bad situation for Amazon. Apple is only selling e-books for use on their own devices; Amazon is willing to sell e-books anywhere they can.

That ought to be updated with “should be” — yes, it would be the smartest strategy for Amazon to focus on selling their e-books on whatever platform can read them, but I don’t think that strategy should include a comparative TV ad that goes head-on against the iPad. This move just makes no sense to me.

I’m guessing they’re afraid that iPad users might stick with iBooks and not bother to download the Kindle app… but the correct answer to that is definitely not to antagonize the iOS fanboys.

(Disclaimer: I’ve only watched the ad with the sound off, so for all I know they say the iPad is awesome and the Kindle is just complementary. But somehow I doubt it. Even though that’s exactly what they should say.)

kara.allthingsd.com

Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission. That is, unless some entity wants to access it a lot. In that case, Facebook requires an agreement for reasons primarily centered on protection of Facebook user data and, of course, infrastructure impact.

It’s hard to blame Facebook here. When Apple brags about having 160 million users, with credit card number on file, and decides to sic all of them (and simultaneously) on a Facebook app that will harvest the social network which Facebook took pains to cultivate for years (and for no other purpose than the harvesting itself — unlike, say, Zynga games which bring a lot of page views back to Facebook), you can’t quite fault Facebook for wanting to get some kind of compensation. Apple isn’t building something on top of the Facebook platform here, they’re trying to piggyback and supplant it.

It’s also easy to imagine Steve Jobs deciding — at the last moment, after long, failed negotiations — that Apple is big enough not to need Facebook at all, that it can just as well construct its social graph from scratch. Because that’s how much Steve Jobs and Apple know about social networking: not very.

If Apple is serious about Ping — and they should be, since music recommendations with inline preview have the potential to push a good deal of product — I wager that they’re the ones who will have to give in. Sure, people are signing up for Ping, but if my “entourage”’s experience is any indication, they’re not making a lot of friendship connections and, on Ping more than anywhere, the social graph is where the money’s at.

(I’m assuming that the provision regarding a compensation for extensive use of the API does exist in Facebook’s terms of use, but I see no reason to doubt it — and I’m too lazy to check — because it just makes sense.)

ilounge.com

According to Apple’s pages, the three-button remotes that were previously integrated into the headphones packaged with the iPod shuffle and iPod touch are now gone; all of the iPods are shown as coming with the same plain old earbuds, which would mean that the iPod touch now needs to rely on its rear-mounted microphone for audio input unless there’s something else hidden inside, or attached as an accessory. Apple’s base model Earphones with Remote + Mic sells for $29 as an upgrade.

Wow, that sucks. It isn’t absurd to make you buy a new set of earphones if you want to use your iPod touch for Skype (although, well, it’s a little absurd in that Apple wants you to use FaceTime), but it’s particularly annoying for the Nano.

In my writeup of the keynote, I was going to say that the new Shuffle had become the only iPod you can conveniently use without looking — whether in your pocket, or while doing something else. Then I edited the words out when I figured that the Nano would have a remote on the earphone cord. Without it, the touch-screen iPods offer terrible UI for real-world usage.

(And I can’t check right now because apple.com is hammered by people who desperately want to play with the new iTunes.)

engadget.com

I like card stacks — navigating both the list of running applications, and the list of open Safari tabs, is pretty much a chore on iOS, and Palm has a big advantage there by treating each web page as a separate open app (um, I think that’s how it works?). Just Type, or Quicksilver for mobile, is very promising if the API is well structured. And Exhibition, which lets apps display ambient information when the phone is docked, is something iPhone users have been dreaming of for years.

Nothing huge so far, but very nice refinements; I can’t wait to see what devices HP proposes to run this OS on. (Is there any chance at all we could be spared the inevitable iPad clone?)

majornelson.com

The problem with the existing D-pad is that it tries to do too much (four directions plus push down), ending up not doing any of it right. I seriously doubt that adding a pinch of Decepticon functionality on top of that will make it perform better.

At least the new pad (which will apparently be only available separately, at least for a while — huh?) looks pretty. Mostly. I’m not sure about the black accents.

slashgear.com

As for those small square things above the bigger cases, those are supposedly for the sixth-generation iPod Nano. The case seems to be created specifically for a touchscreen device, as the entire back of the gadget would be covered, but the whole front would not be. And considering we’ve heard rumors that the new Nano will lose that trackwheel, we’re beginning to think those earlier leaked images of the iWatch (or whatever) were indeed showing off the iPod Nano.

Oh man, it totally is time for an Apple watch, isn’t it? Just have the iPod nano display the time of day (with an OLED screen — where only the active pixels are lit — it may be possible to make the battery last, like, a whole day!), put interchangeable straps of leather on each side and, boom:  Watch.

And, yes, I’d buy it even though I haven’t worn a wristwatch in a year.

theappleblog.com

I’m reluctant to give my Google account credentials to a third-party app, but having bought an iPhone 4 and iMovie for iPhone in order to make pretty 720p videos [of my cat], I just can’t avoid it.

sfgate.com

"How could this possibly work?" said IDC Financial Insights analyst Aaron McPherson, adding that eliminating a merchant account is akin to dangling fresh meat for criminals. "They are just so overhyped and it seems to be entirely based on Dorsey’s celebrity."

First time I see anyone actually make sense in a Square writeup. (But the rest of the profile on Jack Dorsey is interesting.)

slashgear.com

Truth be told, it can all be summed up in just a few sentences: “I’m the last person on Earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that ‘Flash has had its day.’ I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.”

Laughing Out Loud.

economist.com

They wondered in particular if the mere presence of a canine in the office might make people collaborate more effectively. And, as they told a meeting of the International Society for Human Ethology in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 2nd, they found that it could.

Filed for future reference.

valleywag.gawker.com

"Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple." But in fact, as Chen shows, three of Shoemaker’s seven apps went onto the app store weeks after his employment began, according to dates gleaned from Shoemaker’s Twitter accounts and from the iTunes profiles of his apps. In one case, a Shoemaker app was published over a month after Shoemaker started work at Apple; in two other cases, they were published nearly three weeks after his work began.[…]

Shoemaker himself is in the fart-app game with his pre-Apple offering Animal Farts

I don’t give a damn that the guy in charge of the App Store follows escorts on Twitter — it is a bit weird, but none of our business. But, really, Apple hired to direct the App Store a guy who made a fart app, a pee simulator, and poetry magnet apps?

Just… why?

next-gen.biz

Rare updates Xbox 360 Avatars as unrealistic proportions affect hand-eye coordination when using Kinect.

That sounds a little stupid, but (a) the whole point of Kinect is to target morons with no sense of abstraction, and (b) I’m not gonna mourn the bobbleheads. I don’t like PlayStation Home, but at least my avatar there is somewhat sexy.

jquerymobile.com

Great news! jQuery is updating for mobile platforms, I’ll finally be able to use it everywhere again! Oh, wait…

Note that we’re not releasing a separate “mobile only” build of jQuery. The bug fixes and workarounds that we develop will be included directly in mainline jQuery. You will be able to continue using the single script file containing jQuery and get all the benefits of working across all the new mobile browsers. Thus far these changes are only yielding a minimal increase in file size (no more than a couple hundred bytes) and no appreciable change in performance.

Well, that’s great, isn’t it — because jQuery is already too big to fit in most iPhones’ web cache* (meaning it has to be reloaded with every page, meaning page loads are slow, meaning you just can’t use it on an iPhone site**), so bigger is… better than… a mobile-only version… that would have been smaller… and would have worked.

I used to think that jQuery was the work of geniuses. But it seems that no open-source project can ever escape entropy. (It would be so simple to selectively load a different javascript file depending on the platform you’re running on — you know, if you intended to actually optimize for mobile browsers and mobile networks.)

* In case you want to tell me that jQuery is 24KB when gzipped: The object size limitation in Safari is based on the decompressed file. I just downloaded the latest minified jQuery, and it’s 70KB, so it would be cached on no iOS device except the iPhone 4.

** Unless you make it one single page that loads everything in Ajax, which is… well, I think it’s more acceptable on the mobile web than on the desktop, but it’s still poor form. And if you’re doing a full-on web-app, people want App Store apps instead anyway.

"Xbox One runs 3 OSes" is like "a Windows 3.1 PC runs 2 OSes: DOS and Windows." Arguably not quite false, but at least pretty meaningless. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

S’il fait ce temps toute la semaine, va pas y avoir le choix, la seule défense possible sera la tournée des saunas parisiens. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

STOP TRYING TO GUESS WHAT KEY I WANT TO PRESS YOU’RE A FUCKING MORON STOP HELPING. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

D’un côté peut-être que je danse comme une merde. De l’autre, j’ai vu des mecs mignons danser très bien et ne pas se faire draguer du tout. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

Avoir la crève, flemmarder toute la nuit sous la couette pour se soigner, avoir une poussée d’énergie à 21h, sortir, rechoper la crève. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.