Seeing 'Spore' on the Mac for the first time
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At Macworld, it is finally possible to see a rendering of Electronic Arts' much-anticipated evolution game on the Macintosh.
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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The widely anticipated Spore game from Will Wright will go on sale in September 2008.
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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The latest release of Mozilla's lightweight browser for the Mac hints at a major upgrade around the corner. In Monkey Bites.
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Company releases two new products: VMware Fusion for Mac lets Windows applications run on the Mac OS; free VMware Player 2 runs virtual appliances on Windows or Linux.
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Editor's note: This story was reprinted from Computerworld. For more of Computerworld's coverage of the Mac, visit its Mac Knowledge Center.
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"It's a beautiful piece of hardware with a gorgeous high-resolution screen and a carefully designed, beautiful interface inside," says Macworld's Jason Snell.
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Here's an interesting Howto on connecting FlickrFan to the Mac desktop. I love this stuff.  Here's a movie that demonstrates this coolest of hacks.
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Continuing the thread from yesterday. I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I'm a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I'm sure it's an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I'm working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it's an art, we'll see.  As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.  (Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.) Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there's a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.  I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It's daunting, for sure, but let's see what I can get working.
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Parallels Inc. has updated its flagship virtual machine software for running Windows on Intel-based Macs, with the latest version letting users launch Windows apps without having to run the whole operating system.
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Mac users seem quite excited about Microsoft's long-awaited-but-little-anticipated Vista. The new Intel Macs are great machines for running it. In Cult of Mac.
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In an earlier tip, you learned that by pressing the Tab key while holding down the Command key, you get a giant Dock-like window that lets you quickly cycle through your open apps. But there&#146;s much more to this handy Mac OS X feature than that. Read this week&#146;s tip to find out what else you can do with the application switcher. [Jan 05, 2005]
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(InfoWorld) - Codeweavers has released theÂ public beta version of CrossOver Mac, the firm'sÂ virtualization software that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows applications --Â without having Windows installed. Based onÂ the open-source project WINE, CrossOver Mac provides the ability to run Windows applications and some games on the Mac without having to reboot or switch to a virtual machine interface -- applications appear in the same Finder interface that Mac users are accustomed to. Because it's based on WINE, which translates Windows-specific code references to other operating systems' technology, no Windows operating system license is needed in order to get CrossOver to work. By comparison, Boot Camp, Apple's Windows-enabling software for Intel Macs, requires you to install a copy of Windows. Similarly,Â Parallels Desktop for MacÂ needs a Windows operating system (or other PC-compatible operating system) in order to operate. Codeweavers advises that CrossOver Mac's public beta "will give you a taste," but "should be considered an early test release." The developers promise "substantial further improvements" before the production version ships. In other words, unless you're willing to tolerate issues that sometimes pop up with experimental software, "you should skip this and wait for notice of the production release." The CrossOver Mac public beta is a 60-day version. Users interested in placing a pre-order can, for a reduced price of $39.95.
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At San Francisco shindig, Mac community gets first look at book-size budget PC and low-end music player.  Photos: Scenes from Macworld
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A Silicon Valley company claims to have developed a universal emulator that's uncharacteristically fast. For one thing, it could mean the latest games are immediately available for the Mac. By Leander Kahney.
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Mac OS X âLeopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots â and most of them are bright ones,â declares David Pogue (New York Times). He points, for example, to two âroutine-changingâ features. Time Machine, which offers âthe shortest setup of any backup system in history.â And Quick Look, which lets you âview the contents of a documentâs icon at full size, right at the desktop, without having to open the program that created it.â Pogue says âitâs fantastic.â