One of the things that has bugged me a bit is trying to get my iPod and iTunes to work together as I would expect them to. At work, I've got a macbook that I use a bit, and one day I decided to plug my iPod in and listen to music via the headphones in the macbook. This turned out to be a surprisingly annoying proposition.
First off, you have to enable manual management of music and videos. This is probably the most baffling part of the whole thing, in that I have no intention of managing anything. As a bonus, whenever I resync my iPod at home, for whatever reason, the manual management flag turns itself back off. Next, you have to go into the music interface for the iPod. You can't use the iPod itself and simply stream the music into your computer, and instead you have a menu which is about one step beyond what we had in '95--a list of all your songs. You can't shuffle or repeat or see the album art or limit play to a single album. You must listen to all your songs in order as sorted. At least you can control the sort order.
The comedy of all this is how astonishingly clumsy it is, given every bit of it is Apple hardware and software. Usually the Apple experience is clean and just works exactly how you'd expect it to, yet here they've dropped the ball pretty badly.
As a bonus: I can plug my iPod into my ubuntu 10.04 machine, and it pops up in Rythymbox like magic. I believe the prior version couldn't read the iPod Touch, but the latest works great. All the things I want, it just does, with the minor exception of a lack of album art. How I suffer. Have I mentioned how ubuntu is turning linux into a great OS?
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Future of Flash
I've been developing Flash tools, specifically Flex, for a few months now, and my current opinion is that it's a pain in the ass. I've worked with various javascript toolkits over the last few years, and so far all of them make building a functional, attractive UI far less painful than Flex; the only thing Flex has on the other tools is the ability to integrate Flash elements and animations. HTML5, however, is on the near horizon, officially supported in all of the major browsers' current versions, and with canvas, svg, audio and video tags you can pretty much do anything Flash can do without the pain of Flash. All of Apple's portable devices, iPhone, iPod and iPad, support it (and not Flash).
In fact, Apple's stance on Flash is surprisingly harsh. My experiences with Flash in Linux back Jobs' assertion that Flash is buggy, however; I regularly find the Flash process spinning out of control and taking down my computer until I can kill it. On top of that, the universal binary approach Flash takes means that viruses can be built to infect any platform on which Flash runs, and one researcher even built a special virus as an experiment that would infect Windows, Macs, or Linux machines.
So in the end, I'm inclined to side with Jobs: Flash is doomed. There's nothing notable that it does that HTML5 doesn't, so Flash now has a lot of competition, and Flash just doesn't do much very well. Hopefully I can convince my company of this sooner than later.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
On the Weirdness of Netbook Gaming
As a terrible addict to the dark vice of video games, I've been compelled to try getting games to work on my new netbook, and so far it's been a frustrating experience. The biggest problem: the netbook screen resolution. The device itself may or may not be able to run modern games—I've been unable to get Civilization 4 to run on it, for example, despite appearing to meet the system requirements—so I've focussed on installing older games. The trick there is that, while the netbook is surely powerful enough to play games circa, say, 2005, the display is only capable of a maximum resolution of 1024 x 600. At that point in gaming history, games were pushing around 1600 x 1200, and it was pretty much assumed that a baseline system would be capable of 1024 x 768.
Note that the netbook screen doesn't meet that.
So now I have to dig through games capable of that resolution--or its nearest standard-aspect cousin, 800 x 600--which is throwing me back to around the year 2000. There are good games from that period, but I've gotten rid of very nearly all my games from then, meaning I now have to hunt for some. Then on top of that, I have to find patches and ensure compatibility with my hardware.
One of the funnier finds is Master of Orion 3, a game I bought primarily on the strength of its predecessor and the writings of the lead designer, who had all sorts of really interesting ideas, the vast majority of which were cut from the final product. It's a curious game in that it has all the trappings of a standard 4x game, but over all of it there's an abstracted interface that makes it feel less Space Fleet Commander than Imperial Bureaucracy Wrangler. It wound up rushed out with horrible bugs, and apparently one of the other things cut was any resolution higher than my magic target, 800 x 600. Third-parties have put in impressive efforts to clean up the bugs that remained after the devs quit supporting it, and it's quite playable, though I'm still trying to decide if I want to play it.
At this point I'm almost wondering if I shouldn't try my hand at building games myself, as it might be less hassle.
Note that the netbook screen doesn't meet that.
So now I have to dig through games capable of that resolution--or its nearest standard-aspect cousin, 800 x 600--which is throwing me back to around the year 2000. There are good games from that period, but I've gotten rid of very nearly all my games from then, meaning I now have to hunt for some. Then on top of that, I have to find patches and ensure compatibility with my hardware.
One of the funnier finds is Master of Orion 3, a game I bought primarily on the strength of its predecessor and the writings of the lead designer, who had all sorts of really interesting ideas, the vast majority of which were cut from the final product. It's a curious game in that it has all the trappings of a standard 4x game, but over all of it there's an abstracted interface that makes it feel less Space Fleet Commander than Imperial Bureaucracy Wrangler. It wound up rushed out with horrible bugs, and apparently one of the other things cut was any resolution higher than my magic target, 800 x 600. Third-parties have put in impressive efforts to clean up the bugs that remained after the devs quit supporting it, and it's quite playable, though I'm still trying to decide if I want to play it.
At this point I'm almost wondering if I shouldn't try my hand at building games myself, as it might be less hassle.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Apple's iPod Touch Racket
Way back when Apple first put out the iPod Touch, I thought it was a great idea. The thing is practically a computer! It fits in my pocket! I looked at the iPhone as being a waste out the gate because really, AT&T? Might as well chuck myself off a bridge.
Years later, I've found myself in an annoying conundrum. Every major OS revision that comes out costs a fairly small fee, $10. Certainly not terrible. I paid to upgrade to 2.0, but now we're at 3.0, and looking at the feature set, I think, meh. Nothing I really care about--sure, copy and paste are great for text apps, but I rarely use my iPod for text anything. Music, games, web browsing. So I chose not to pay their fee.
But now my apps demand I upgrade. I foolishly allowed them to update themselves, and they promptly broke because they all require I have OS 3.0, minimum. I'm not sure if it's a contractual requirement of building apps for the platform, but none of the apps I've seen still support OS 2.x. So my device is now shackled to the basic functionality supported, which is nice, but I can't get any apps for it without jailbreaking it. Apple is attempting to extort me to get the functionality advertised. Seems like fraud to me.
In the words of an iPhone dev I know, "anyone not willing to upgrade their OS is also not likely to pay for apps so, fuck you." Thanks, Apple, for letting your representative tell me how you really feel.
Years later, I've found myself in an annoying conundrum. Every major OS revision that comes out costs a fairly small fee, $10. Certainly not terrible. I paid to upgrade to 2.0, but now we're at 3.0, and looking at the feature set, I think, meh. Nothing I really care about--sure, copy and paste are great for text apps, but I rarely use my iPod for text anything. Music, games, web browsing. So I chose not to pay their fee.
But now my apps demand I upgrade. I foolishly allowed them to update themselves, and they promptly broke because they all require I have OS 3.0, minimum. I'm not sure if it's a contractual requirement of building apps for the platform, but none of the apps I've seen still support OS 2.x. So my device is now shackled to the basic functionality supported, which is nice, but I can't get any apps for it without jailbreaking it. Apple is attempting to extort me to get the functionality advertised. Seems like fraud to me.
In the words of an iPhone dev I know, "anyone not willing to upgrade their OS is also not likely to pay for apps so, fuck you." Thanks, Apple, for letting your representative tell me how you really feel.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
EULAs
I've been thinking about the nature of EULAs recently, and I've got questions and concerns.
First off, I like them and I don't. As a software developer, I can definitely appreciate some of the terms of most EULAs; the no-liability clause is probably the most important, because without that, there is a remote chance of any given piece of software I write being potentially responsible for, or connected to, a near infinite amount of damage. At the same time, there are so many more common clauses that I find objectionable: mandatory arbitration, the stripping of a consumer's right to control what happens on their hardware, the claimed right to change the contract without notice.
That said, I wonder exactly what legal standing they have in the first place. At least one article I read (which I should link if I can find it again) suggested that there exists already some legal tension with EULAs, in that they act like contract, but the product they are tied to is sold like a good, which should preclude the attachment of contract terms. Further, it was suggested that a contract in which one of the parties has no control over the terms is not a legally binding contract. I'm not sure I'd want to test these too hard personally, but that's because I'm ignorant.
On top of those complaints, there's the fact that EULAs help to make the entire transaction of purchasing software borderline fraudulent. When you go into a store and pick up a piece of software, it appears that you have gone through the process of purchasing a good. Except, of course, that EULAs often require you to give up the rights you have with a good (though those clauses are usually legally unenforcable). The usual claim here is that you have not purchased a good, but rather a license to a product, but this too is misleading. You can't simply have the disk and use the software, you're required to "agree" to the EULA first. You haven't even purchased a license, you've purchased the right to license the software. That doesn't seem entirely clear from the presentation of the initial transaction at the store.
So as for questions, does the installation of software constitute proof of a legal agreement? If one were brought up in court for violating a EULA, and one simply asserted that no EULA was presented, what recourse would the plaintiff have? An expert could rightly say that it should not be possible to install the software without agreement, but I don't think it's actually impossible. Or, on another more legally questionable track, what if one were to have a piece of software which automatically agreed to any EULA via an installer in such a way that you never even saw it. You then could say you honestly never agreed to the EULA, though it seems plausible this could be some form of fraud.
First off, I like them and I don't. As a software developer, I can definitely appreciate some of the terms of most EULAs; the no-liability clause is probably the most important, because without that, there is a remote chance of any given piece of software I write being potentially responsible for, or connected to, a near infinite amount of damage. At the same time, there are so many more common clauses that I find objectionable: mandatory arbitration, the stripping of a consumer's right to control what happens on their hardware, the claimed right to change the contract without notice.
That said, I wonder exactly what legal standing they have in the first place. At least one article I read (which I should link if I can find it again) suggested that there exists already some legal tension with EULAs, in that they act like contract, but the product they are tied to is sold like a good, which should preclude the attachment of contract terms. Further, it was suggested that a contract in which one of the parties has no control over the terms is not a legally binding contract. I'm not sure I'd want to test these too hard personally, but that's because I'm ignorant.
On top of those complaints, there's the fact that EULAs help to make the entire transaction of purchasing software borderline fraudulent. When you go into a store and pick up a piece of software, it appears that you have gone through the process of purchasing a good. Except, of course, that EULAs often require you to give up the rights you have with a good (though those clauses are usually legally unenforcable). The usual claim here is that you have not purchased a good, but rather a license to a product, but this too is misleading. You can't simply have the disk and use the software, you're required to "agree" to the EULA first. You haven't even purchased a license, you've purchased the right to license the software. That doesn't seem entirely clear from the presentation of the initial transaction at the store.
So as for questions, does the installation of software constitute proof of a legal agreement? If one were brought up in court for violating a EULA, and one simply asserted that no EULA was presented, what recourse would the plaintiff have? An expert could rightly say that it should not be possible to install the software without agreement, but I don't think it's actually impossible. Or, on another more legally questionable track, what if one were to have a piece of software which automatically agreed to any EULA via an installer in such a way that you never even saw it. You then could say you honestly never agreed to the EULA, though it seems plausible this could be some form of fraud.
On Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
I picked up a netbook recently and attempted to run Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri on it and experienced massive failure and fixed it. Hopefully if you're having problems running it, this will help you.
SMAC doesn't like running under funny aspect ratios. If you're running at 1024x600 like I was, the executable will immediately crash, since it tries to use the desktop resolution and it wasn't programmed to allow for that one. So, to fix it, run at 800x600. I suggest turning off the scaling in the driver if you can--there's an option to "center the desktop" or some such on the Intel 945 chipset graphics driver, that will prevent it from looking like ass. You can also use the schemes on that to set up wide aspect and standard aspect schemes to go back and forth more quickly.
SMAC doesn't like running under funny aspect ratios. If you're running at 1024x600 like I was, the executable will immediately crash, since it tries to use the desktop resolution and it wasn't programmed to allow for that one. So, to fix it, run at 800x600. I suggest turning off the scaling in the driver if you can--there's an option to "center the desktop" or some such on the Intel 945 chipset graphics driver, that will prevent it from looking like ass. You can also use the schemes on that to set up wide aspect and standard aspect schemes to go back and forth more quickly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)