The internet has changed the course of history forever, it’s changed the planet in 10 years more than it had changed in the 100 years before it, and in the next 100, it could change us more than we’ve changed since the beginning of civilization. Seriously, read on and I’ll explain more. I know many people think of the internet as a cesspool of people who can’t be bothered to spell out actual words and instead save themselves a couple hundredths of a second by butchering language so much so that it makes them seem like the mental equivalents of 7 year olds, but really the internet is an amazing tool for connecting billions of people in a way that has never been done before. And yeah, some people are gonna be idiots, trolls, bullies, and just bad people in general, but you know what, I know a lot of really great people who are online too (you’re welcome, by the way). The point is, even the biggest luddite has to take note of this as something REALLY REALLY big. I think it’s bigger than anybody ever imagined though. The internet has already caused many industries to be re-designed and re-thought, such as the music industry and the gaming industry, but in the end, almost every industry will be affected in some way or another.

The global economy will have to change entirely to be, well, I hate to say it, but more communist, in a way. You see, on the internet, many many things are free, there is no physical material cost, no shipping costs, and no having to go through retail stores. The only cost left is paying the developer, which, because free things get a lot more users than commercial things, can be paid for with ads. As we are seeing with piracy, people don’t want to pay for things anymore. In communism, people don’t have to pay for things. You see where I’m going here? Take, for example, JamLegend, a free, online version of Guitar Hero. I actually like it better than Guitar Hero because of it’s ever-expanding set-list and it’s web 2.0 style community. Yeah, that’s right, the free online version is better than the commercial console version. Let me say that again for impact: THE FREE THING IS BETTER THAN THE NOT FREE THING. Or for you math nerds out there: 0$ > 1$! Yeah, you know what that means? People are gonna stop buying stuff. The entire economy of the world is gonna have to be turned upside-down, and somehow the world is gonna have to adapt. It’s so astounding and unlikely, it’s mathematically impossible, unless $ = 0, which, in the future, it might be.

Now, what about the governments of the world, what will become of them? Well, on the internet, the concept of a hierarchy of power does not really exist. Sure, there are people who have more influence than others, but there is no king of the internet, technically, everybody has equal power, to a point anyway. That’s called anarchy, which is usually a bad term used as a synonym for chaos, but it is an actual form of government where all of the citizens are relied on to police themselves, and on the internet, for the first time ever, it’s actually working. Wikipedia is total anarchy, it works great! Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all pretty much governed by users (not entirely of course, there are people who work at those companies who are payed to police, but they really can’t do everything themselves, and so in a lot of cases the community really does most of the work, ‘burrying’ on digg for example). Could the future see that form of government spreading into the real world until there is no more government? Maybe, although the real world is a much different place from the internet in that there is much more as stake if something goes wrong, so maybe not. Still, a complete change of how the people communicate, learn, play, work, and buy things has got to change something in the government, well, unless people like, dare I say this, alright, here goes: McCain, take over, in which case, nothing will change. SORRY. I couldn’t resist, although the thought of a president who can’t operate a computer has got to scare every geek just a little bit.

So yes, the internet seems like a fad, a silly little thing the kids do, but if you take a step back and look at what it is, and what it’s doing, it’s so much more. I think these next few years are crucial, and the adaptation to a completely new way of doing things will be rocky at best, but I really think that this could be a huge turning point in human civilization. This is where we ditch thousands of years of systems, structures, and traditions in favor of new ones. This is where we all come together to accomplish greater things than we’ve ever done before. And now that you think about it that way, those people who write poorly seem insignificant, don’t they?

There is a never-ending battle between Mac enthusiasts and Windows enthusiasts on the Internet (Which, for some strange reason, occupies about 99.748% of comments on digg*). This battle will never end, there will never be a definite winner, and nobody will ever switch platforms because of it. Honestly, Windows is great for a certain type of person, and Mac is great for a different type of person. People who game a lot, or who only use their computers to surf the internet, will be just fine with Windows. People who want to be more creative, or want an elegant, pretty (let’s not forget shiny) computer, will want a Mac. Oh, and let’s not leave Linux out of this, Linux is for people who believe technology should be completely open, or who just want to show off their geekiness (Again, to prevent an onslaught of angry comments, I would like to take this time to point out that these days linux is actually no more geeky than Windows or Mac, distros like Ubuntu and Suse are very polished and starting to become mainstream). So, why do I bring all of this up? To show that Apple fanboyism is, in fact, deeper than just a love of all things shiny. It’s about who you are and what you want to do with your computer. So why does mac have such a community of fanboys while windows really doesn’t? It’s because, for the most part, the people who use Windows use it because, well, that’s what everybody uses. Most people who use Macs had to make a decision to switch from Windows to Mac, so Mac users chose to use a Mac while most Windows users just sort of have to use Windows.

So why do I bring this up? Really I’ve just been thinking about it a lot. All of the bad press that Apple has received about Microsoft-esque screw ups, DRM, and closed environments have forced me to step back and consider why I like them so much while loathing Microsoft. Maybe the answer is best summed up in Apples motto: “Think Different”. They “Think Different” and create innovations, the key to their success, they tend to be the leader, while others follow. They “Think Different” about how a computer should look and work, and what it should do, and so their users are the ones who “Think Different” from normal users. Maybe this is all over-analyzing, but I figured on the second anniversary of my fanboy-ship, I’d share some of my thoughts.

Now to be kind of hypocritical. I’d like to share some of the great things I’ve noticed about mac, aside from the general look and feel of it (which could be seen as trying to convert Windows users to Mac, which would pretty much go against what I just got through saying, also it goes against my theory that I just like it because it does the stuff I want it to do, I would like to point out that A: I am not trying to convert a Windows fanboy into a mac fanboy, I’m trying to convert people who are thinking of switching to a mac but aren’t quite sure and B: These are not the reasons I switched to mac, or why I love it, just some nice things I noticed. In other news, this has been this biggest statement I’ve ever put in parenthesis on my blog. Yay for me. Now for the reasons:).

1. In this entire 2 year period, there has only been one occasion where I had to use a Windows computer, and that was to program my old Lego Mindstorms set. That problem has since been fixed with Lego Mindstorms NXT, who’s software supports Mac.
2. This sounds obvious, but in this entire 2 year period I have never gotten a virus of any sort.
3. I have never had to contact Apple support about anything, the transition was incredibly easy and I picked up the basics of the OS in minutes.
4. I have never had to have my machine repaired in any way, it’s been running perfectly smoothly for 2 years.
5. I have only re-installed my Operating system twice, and one was to upgrade to Leopard, I re-installed Windows about once every 3-6 months.
6. My mac has run smoothly for almost a month without re-starting, not all that impressive until you consider that I pretty much never actually close programs once their open, by the end of a month I might have as many as 60 apps running.
7. This is more an observation than a fact, but I’ve noticed far more free Mac apps than free Windows apps.

*Statistics are completely made up.

But wait, there’s more! I’ve actually been working on Code Art for 3 days now, after it had been tied with Power Twitter for about a week I decided there was a good chance that it would win, so I started work on it. I’m creating my own interpreter from scratch, probably a bad idea, but I can’t easily integrate any pre-made ones, so I’m sort of stuck. The above picture (which you can click to enlarge) shows what I have so far. Not much, I know, but you have to understand I have a whole code parsing, variable tracking/storing/using, exception throwing, object oriented, well organized interpreter in there. Sure, it’s not very powerful at all yet, but I’ve got a lot of the hardest parts done, or in the works. So, how long is it going to take? Well, it depends, a lot, on how motivated I am. I’ll try my hardest to finish it by the end of this summer, but it is a very big project, maybe bigger than TiMo, and I’ve never finished anything of this magnitude before, so It’s a bit of an uphill battle.

Just like with TiMo, I’ll give you updates on my progress every week or so, right here, on keatoncasts.grotonma.net … yes, that was a plug for a website that you’re already on, so sue me :p

Part one is about weighing the pros and cons of modelers that I’ve been able to try out and get a feel for, so, Mac compatible modelers that will run on my mac and have a free trial. Here are 5 of them:

Modelor 1: Blender

Price: Free as in Freedom (and beer, or in my case, soda, although who gives away free soda? I digress)

Overview: Blender is the cheapest 3D modeler around, at a fair price of $0.00. Of course, that’s not to say it’s not worth anything more than $0, it’s a decent 3D modeler. It has it’s strengths and it’s weaknesses, and after a lot of getting use to it you can come out with some pretty good looking stuff. 

Pros: Free! Big, helpful user base, can answer all of your questions. Easy to navigate (once you get use to it) interface. REALLY cross platform, as in, every platform I’ve ever heard of, including a couple I haven’t, like IRIS. Built in game engine. Built in compositor. Built in (very basic) Non-Linear Video editor. Very good fluid simulator. Good physics system (hard body and soft body). Good modeling tools. Lots of key combinations. Python Scriptable. Very Expandable.

Cons: Very Steep learning curve (aka. hard to learn). Missing basic features like keyframing of all values (it can only keyframe an objects position, rotation, and scale, many other editors can change all values, so you can have objects do things like change color over time). Many features ‘hidden’ in the interface. The particle engine leaves much to be desired. The ‘addon’ features like the game engine and the NLE aren’t very powerful and are very poorly documented. The material/texturing system is hard to get the hang of and often involves a lot of random tweaking of poorly labeled controls. Lack of a landscape system/editor. Renders aren’t exactly stunning in speed or quality (although they’re not bad)

Who’s it for: Blender is good for modeling and for simple animations such as theme songs. If you’re willing to take the time to learn it, it makes a pretty good ‘first 3D modeler’ because of it’s good support and, of course, price. Mostly, it’s good for quick little 3D renders (like theme songs), and for just playing around in 3D and seeing what you can do. Basically: you really can’t complain too much about it, seeing as it’s free :p

Modelor 2: Cheetah 3D

Price: $149 (Upgrade for $69)

Overview: The first thing I should mention is that Cheetah 3D is Mac only, and there’s good reason for that. It has the nicest looking interface of any modeler I’ve tried, the only one to really look like a mac app. It uses all of the apple windowing styles, a unified toolbar, a mac-style property editor, and overall it uses the mac color scheme. All of it’s features are just a click or two away at any time, and you can figure out how to use it in no time. But, the interface is only half of a modeler, the other half is the power. Ok, Cheetah 3D is no Maya or Modo, but it still makes a pretty good render. The gallery has some great looking pictures, mostly single objects, not full scenes, but still, it’s pretty good.

Pros: Excellent interface. Very easy to use and learn. Has all of the basic features you’d expect in a 3D modeler. Makes decent renders. Good OpenGL modeling interface. Good animation tools. Mac OS X integration. Good import/export. Customizable UI. Javascript Scriptable. Very good price.

Cons: Render is kind of slow, not THAT impressive. Modeling can get kind of slow, especially when you have a lot of objects in a scene. Lacks a good landscape editor. Lacks a lot of more advanced features. Mac-only (It’s both a pro and a con).

Who’s it for: Cheetah 3D isn’t exactly ILM’s modeler of choice, it’s not as advanced or powerful as many of the other modelers out there. You’re not going to make Star Wars with Cheetah 3D. That said, it’s powerful enough to make some pretty good looking pictures and simple animations. It’s the perfect ‘my first modeler’ because of it’s ease of use, interface, well rounded feature set, and reasonable price.

Modeler 3: E-on Vue 6

Price: Numerous versions offered, can cost anywhere from $99 to $1035

Overview: Vue isn’t about individual models, like most modelers are, it’s about whole big 3D environments. It’s got a great terrain editor, and amazing tools to populate that terrain objects such as rocks, animals, or plants. And we aren’t just talking about static models of trees, Vue makes every plant different, although derived from the same ’species’ (model). You can literally paint forests and valleys filled with grass and trees onto your terrain model, and then texture it using your own system, or using one of the many pre-made textures. Unfortunately the interface isn’t very good, and it lacks good modeling or animation. 

Pros: Great terrain editor. Amazing ‘environment’ tools, to quickly and easily create large, natural looking scenes. Great plant system, makes every plant in an environment unique. Great sky tools, make realistic, volumetric clouds complete with god-rays and as many suns as you want. Really good looking water. Great material presets, good material editor to edit them or create your own. Really good looking renders. Multiple versions, starting as a pretty good price.

Cons: The interface is hard to get the hang of, not that well laid out, and really quite ugly. I find it hard to use. The more ‘conventional’ 3D modeler tools like modeling and animating kinda suck. It can be a bit slow.

Who’s it for: The way I see it, for most people Vue will be more of an addon tool than their main modeler. It makes beautiful environments quickly and easily, but lacks many of the most basic modeling and animating features. By itself, Vue is perfect for artists who only want to make a still picture of a scene, much the same way as painters do.

 

 

Modeler 4: Luxology Modo 302

Price: $895 for Personal License (to use on any computer you own, $395 Upgrade)

Overview: Modo can render things that you literally cannot tell from a photograph. It’s modeling, texturing, and rendering systems are nothing short of amazing. Now, they’ve added some pretty decent animation tools to it. What’s it missing. *See Cons*

Pros: AMAZING looking results. Very snappy render speed. Very easy, powerful modeling tools. Great 3D painting tools (so you can paint textures and materials onto an object). Just about every modeling feature known to man. Pretty good animation tools. Good import/export.

Cons: The interface isn’t all that great, and I found it really hard to figure out basic things like making materials. It lacks particle and physics systems. Not all that many free tutorials, often you have to buy training material. Very Expensive.

Who’s it for: Modo was clearly not designed with animation in mind, until recently it had no animation engine at all. Modo is perfect for people who want to model amazing looking things, like product mockups, people, even whole alternate worlds. If what you want is really good looking stills, I doubt you’ll find a better modeler anywhere.

Modeler 5: Maxon Cinema 4D

Price: $895 for the ‘Core Version’, up to $3495 with plugins ($235 upgrade, student discounts offered)

Overview: While most 3D modelers have a focus on modeling, with animation sort of thrown in there, Cinema 4D has it the other way around. It has great tools for complex scene layout, and easy animation, even on a large scale. And yeah, it can make it all look good. Of course, it has modeling tools too, and they aren’t bad either. It’s interface is well laid out, labeled, and documented, so it’s easy to tweak everything to be exactly what you want it to be.

Pros: Excellent keyframe animation tools. Excellent behavioral animation tools (automated ways of animating objects, like physics systems, premade paths, and other things like using an audio track to control values). Easy to use interface. Good material/texturing editor and manager. Nodal editors for movement, behaviors, texturing, etc. Good particle system Good object modifiers (things like clone tools that make setting up large environments easy). Good object/asset management. 

Cons: The modeling part of it isn’t all that great, can get confusing. I’ve seen better renders. Good tutorials can be hard to come by. Really expensive.

Who’s it for: Cinema 4D can do a lot of things, but at it’s heart, it’s designed for animation. It’s been used in a variety of professional 3D movies, and I can see why. The great animation systems allow you to add realistic looking, highly detailed animations, and while you probably don’t want to use it to make photorealistic, highly detailed renders, you certainly could use it. This might be my favorite of the ones I’ve tried, although that might just be because I focus on animation.

Err, sorry for that childish breakdown of purposeful misspellings, lolcat-esque grammar and misuse of capital letters, I just got a bit excited. This thing is 10000% better than Wordpress 2, and I mean it. I loved Wordpress 2 from the minute I started using it, but, sort of in the same way I love VectorDesigner, it bugged me in a lot of small-ish ways. The Wysiwyg editor messed with my posts, plugins had to be manually updated, the dashboard was almost entirely useless, and the interface would quickly become cluttered with the multitude of space-hogging plugins. Wordpress 2.5 fixes EVERYTHING that I hated about Wordpress 2, and then ads on top of it with some amazing features that I never knew I needed until now.

The new feature that I really like is the easy picture uploader, and inserter. You can use it for individual pictures or you can easily make really cool gallery pages and stuff (which I will demo later on). I think wordpress 2 had something like this, but it wasn’t anywhere near as smooth. This uses a lightbox style effect to put all of the dialogs and stuff into a neat and clean window. There are similar dialogs for video, audio, and other media (like embedded flash I presume). Lemme tell ya, these dialogs will save me SOOO much time I now don’t know what I would ever do without them, and this is the first post I’ve written in 2.5! So maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but they’re great, I can do more with my blog now that inserting stuff is seamless. I do have a few disappointments, for example you can’t grab a youtube link and have wordpress auto-insert the player for you (which would be really nice), but other than that it’s just really neat.

There are also a lot of little things that add to the overall experience of wordpress. The interface is much brighter, neater, and cleaner. Lists are better laid out and easier to read (like the Page Manager, pictured left), Tags auto-complete, categories sort by most used, little things like that. There are also some little new features that can add some more customizability to your blog, like the ability to edit the permalink of the post (notice the permalink for this post doesn’t have the FULL name of the post in it, to keep the URL short). Everything is much better laid out, and in general just looks better. I must say though, I was a bit shocked when I first logged into my new Wordpress, it is REALLY different from 2.0 in visual style, and things are laid out a bit differently, so there might be a tiny bit of a learning curve.

It’s not absolutely perfect though, it still has some (major) bugs, like, oh, not being able to add images when using Safari, but I’m sure they’ll get those sorted out. Overall: TOTALLY FRICKEN AMAZING! 463.58 Million thumbs up. Now, to demo the spiffy gallery feature:

First of all, I don’t think this program was really intended for the kind of stuff I do with it. In a way it’s sort of a vector image editor (like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape) that thinks it’s a desktop publisher (like Swift Publisher or Printshop, or even Word). You can make icons and stuff with it, but most of it’s features are geared towards making things like posters. But yes, it’s still a vector editor, you can make shapes (either ‘regular’ ones like squares and circles, or custom ones), you can fill them with colors, pictures, and gradients. You can give them shadows and borders, and overlay text. You can make text wrap around shapes and follow lines. You can even give shapes different blend modes (like Add, Subtract, Difference, Soft Light, etc). Plus, as with most any vector editor, you can zoom in as far as you like and create small save files.

VectorDesigner seems to be heavily oriented towards photos, maybe for making scrapbooks, or posters, or invites. You can get pictures directly from your disk, your webcam, or through a really slick (yet pointlessly crippled, i’ll get to that later) Flickr image getter. You can then adjust the Exposure, Gamma, Saturation, Contrast, Bightness, Sharpness, and Sepia-ness of any image in a very iPhoto-esque way. While it’s image support is probably very useful to some people, I found it crippled and annoying. First of all, it INSISTS on always taking complete control of your webcam, even if you never open the picture taking window. As long as VectorDesigner is open, you can’t use your webcam. When I first saw the flickr feature I thought it would be really cool, I assumed you’d search for any flickr photo, then just drag it in. Not so. It has a pre-made database of a couple thousand photos organized into 10 categories, most of them pretty useless, like ‘Numbers’ and ‘Doors and Windows’ (No, I’m not kidding). What?!? Ok, seriously, if you’re going to cripple it that much don’t even call it a fricken flickr browser! It’s like clip art but less useful! Who’s idea was that and where they drunk when they came up with it? I’ve gotta be missing something here. There’s a color wheel button thing that appears to do nothing but clear the list so you can’t select anything. There’s a search box, but it only searches through the pictures in that category! The image adjust HUD is fine, but way to sensitive, move the exposure slider just a touch and your image will be completely washed out. All in all, the image features are an annoyance at best.

Overall, it isn’t bad, but it isn’t exactly good either. There are a lot of little annoyances with it, like you can’t change the size of the canvas to anything other than 8.5/11in (paper size), the printing ads borders to all of the objects, and you can’t specify an exact size in pixels for the export (unless you wanna do some math and figure out the dpi). But it works fine, can be quite powerful, and has a nice interface, so I live with it. As for my reccomendation: If you didn’t get it with MacHeist, it’s not worth it, I mean, $70, come on! I wouldn’t pay $70 if it were the most perfect vector editor around, and it’s far from that. If you did get it with MacHeist, go in there and play around, as I’ve found it can be quite fun and addicting, and you can end up making some great mockups.

It would have a multi-track timeline, just like Final Cut, so you could have multiple video/text/image tracks going on at once. You could drag and drop objects around, and animate them. You would organize clips by segment and take, instead of just by time taken (there could be an option to turn this off if you were working on a ‘freeform’ video). The interface would be polished and easy for anybody use.I’m busy with TiMo, which, while admittedly similar, would at this point be very difficult to turn into this. So, please, if any developers are reading this, have free time, and are up for a challenge, please make this. Thanks  

The Microsoft/Yahoo merger craziness

This week was filled with some crazy, hard to follow negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft. So first, taking a page from facebooks’ book, Yahoo was all like “Pfft, 40 something billion, we are so worth more than that”. Microsoft then responded with the equivalent of rolling their eyes and telling Yahoo to just shut up and be happy that they’re getting any money at all. So then Yahoo was desperately looking for somebody who could outbid Microsoft for Yahoo, ’cause, let’s face it, the second they get bought by Microsoft, all of the kinda-sorta-cool-ish innovations they’ve been doing will instantly end, replaced by blatant copying of everything google does. So then Yahoo seemed to be on a mission to destroy themselves before Microsoft could get them, first threatening to buy AOL, then laying off a whole bunch of people. Wow, this is dramatic, somebody should really make a movie about this, they could call it “Transferers” and have Michael Bay direct it and put it on Blu-ray (Or however it’s spelled today), which leads me nicely into my next topic

HD-DVD died even more

From Wall-Mart and Best Buy to Michael Bay to Netflix, nobody wants to be on the HDDVD bandwagon anymore. Just one ‘nail in the coffin’ for HDDVD after another. Frankly I dunno how many more nails you can fit in it before the whole thing will just go away. I was on the Blu-ray side all along, not only does apple support it, but it has more storage space and, umm, let’s see, oh, it has a cooler name, although impossible to spell…

Microsoft buys Danger

Y’know, the guys that make the sidekick? Yeah, I didn’t either. Anyway, the story goes that one day Microsoft realized that Apple had done something that they hadn’t copied yet, they’d made a phone, and been successful with it. Knowing they didn’t have time to TOTALLY copy the iPhone, Steve Balmer monkey walked over to the phone and called danger and was all like “Umm, hey, you guys make like, phones, right?” and the danger guy was all like “Yeah…” and Balmer was all like “I. LOVE. YOUR. COMPANY! And then dug a billion dollar bill out of his pocket and somehow faxed it to them or something, and hence the deal was done. Well, one less iPhone competitor now, the sidekick is officially out, not cool, lame, crappy. Thanks Microsoft!

AT&T expanding their 3G network

Well, we know a 3G iPhone is coming this year, for awhile I was really disappointed by that for the simple reason that we don’t QUITE get 3G in my area. At least EDGE works pretty much everywhere, albeit not very well, but it’s way better than nothing. Anyway, if anybody from AT&T is reading this, I can haz 3G? kthanxbie

1. Improved hardware support: In my mind, the most frustrating thing about linux is its poor hardware support. Sure, it’ll boot on almost any machine, heck, it’ll boot on way more machines than Vista, or even XP, will. Displays, drives, processors, memory, keyboards, mice; these are all well supported in Linux. Unfortunately, network cards, (some) graphics cards, webcams, iPods; not so much. The biggest problem is WiFi network cards. Only cards based on some chipsets (Mainly atheros .. I think) work out of the box. Chips such at the Airport chip inside every mac, and about 90% of other chips, require this special thing called Ndiswrapper, which, at least in my experience, sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. After hours of trying I was not able to get my Ubuntu-running iMac to see the network. Please guys, get right on that, that’s been a problem since I first ran Linux 4 years ago, and really hasn’t gotten any better. I know you’re dealing with proprietary drivers and all here, but that didn’t stop Wine (which, by the way, works great).

2. Unified API/App file format: Another thing that really annoyed me about linux is that there is no .exe or .app . There’s RPM, but they only work on some distros, and some RPM’s are distro specific (like some only work on SuSe and others only work on Red Hat), which is totally confusing and anoying. Then there’s .deb , which is better, but, again, only works on some distros (Ubuntu for example). As if all that weren’t enough, there are a jillion and seven different window managers (KDE and GNOME being the most popular) and, who’d a thunk it, KDE programs don’t work on GNOME, GNOME programs don’t work on KDE. If linux is to beat windows, there needs to be 1 format that will work on any distro with any window manager.

3. Wine built in, seamless: As I mentioned earlier, Wine (Windows emulator … oh, I mean Wine Is Not an Emulator, Confusing, is it not? The point is, it’ll run certain Windows apps on linux, not all, but a lot) is great. It runs a bunch of apps and it runs them at pretty much the same speed as they’d run if they were native linux apps. The problem is I haven’t yet run into any distro which has it built in There are a few distros with wine built in, but no major ones (yet). The non-techy crowd isn’t gonna look for a way to run Windows apps on Linux, they’re either going to assume that it does run windows apps and be confused when it doesn’t, or assume that it doesn’t and never find out that it can. If Wine is built in, but hidden from the user (so they don’t have to think about it), then new users could totally simulate the experience of using windows, without the, umm, blue screens of proprietary death.

4. Money: Just sayin’, it wouldn’t hurt their cause if they could advertise, and pay people to work on it and all.

Linux is SOO close to being a perfect alternative to windows even for non-geeks. Once these things are fixed up a bit I will tell everybody I know to install it and cure themselves of Windows.

At first glace is looks pretty, well, pretty. The windows have a sort of smoked glass look to them, the task bar is a glossy black, and the start menu is no longer as useless as MSN search. Unfortunately, first impressions do not stick; the Aero blur behind windows is poorley done, it looks like all it’s doing is taking a screenshot, shrinking it to a tenth it’s size, and stretching it out again, an effect photoshop junkies will know all too well. It’s blocky, grainy, and seems to turn white things grey. There are also these weird diagonal lines that go across the ‘glass’ that seem to have no real ‘meaning’, they’re just kinda there to confuse you when you move windows. As if windows weren’t normally bad enough, when you make them full screen, the semi-transparency seems to go away, the titlebar just goes blackish. Why? I have no friggin idea.

I also have a problem with the new Start Menu, it’s better than XP’s no doubt, but really not by much. It’s got that same ‘poor mans blur’ behind it, which I can honestly say I just find anoying. The “All Programs” list goes in the same  box that the default apps go in, and you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to get back to the default list thing. Even after 2 days the Recent Programs list was filled with, umm, bad links from spyware, yes, spyware, after 2 days! There is one icon at the top of the start menu that changes to reflect the icon of the item that you are hovering over, but it lags, so it really doesn’t help. You still can’t ever find what you’re looking for in the control panel, and even if you could, there are very few useful options anyway, like, no ‘Turn off this cruddy Aero” button. Blech.

And of course, even with a shiny new face, it’s still Windows. Internet Explorer still sucks, Viruses are still counted in the millions and bugs in the ten thousands, anti-virus programs still suck (grandads prevents me from getting on hulu), it’s still slow, it still bluescreens, and, through it all, people still love it. So y’know what, The best version of Windows ever made (which, of course, is saying very little), is STILL Windows 95, hence why I use a mac.

Ok, ok, I’ll admit it, i’m not writing this on a Wii, but only because, well, the keyboard is kinda like the iPhone keyboard; it’s fine for typing a little bit (like a URL or a tweet) but not ‘War and Peace’. The wii’s opera browser also reminds me of the iPhone and it’s browser, It can load pretty much anything, with some exceptions. The Wii DOES have Flash, but only Flash 7 due to licencing issues with adobe. YouTube still works though, even though they claim to use Flash 8. The one thing that the Wii’s browser lacks that the Mobile Safari browser has is Quicktime, so, unfortunatly, no listening to TWiT, or watching *ahem* everybodys favorite video podcast on the Wii. The coolest new thing is a special javascript SDK for the wii that let’s you write AJAX apps that get the tilt/position of the wiimote(s), take advantage of the Wii’s built in 3D graphics, and draw good lookin’ menus and such. Overall it works really well and looks good.

So, what about the built in email client that I mentioned? I’m not just talking about online stuff like Gmail. I’m talking about a special feature of the Wii message board thing, where it tells you about Wii updates, your daily play time, and messages from games. Here’s where it gets cool, every wii has it’s own automatically-generated email address, emails sent there from ‘approved’ addresses will show up in the Wii message board. So, alls ya got ta do is approve your gmail address, and then set it to forward incoming emails to the Wii. So now, whenever a new message comes in, the Wii blinks, I turn it on, go to the message board, and the new message is ‘pinned’ cork board style with an orange pin (signifying that it’s new), you click it and it elegantly pops up. Composing messages is a little harder, but, like, why would you want to on that keyboard?

There are also a lot of smaller, yet still cool ‘channels’. Mom loves the photo channel because it makes it SUPER SUPER easy to show slideshows of all the family photos to us (and any guests), and even tweak the colors, and, if she where so inclined, draw a mustache on everybody. The weather channel (no, not that one) is really neat because not only will it give you the current conditions and forecast for your area, it’ll give you the current conditions from everywhere in the world on a really cool 3D globe that you can spin with the Wiimote. The news chanel is simmilar, with stacks of news appearing on top of the city they came from on a cool 3D globe. And then there are the Mii related channels and stuff, which are just fun.

And finally, what the Wii was made for, the games. The selection at this point, even more than a year in, is, to say the least, weak. I think there are maybe 5 or 6 games that I’d actually pay $50 for, and I already own 4 of them. What I like is that most of them are pretty new, creative, not just another shoot-em-up (more than can be said for any other console except for the DS, gotta love nintendo). My newest game is Super Mario Galaxy, which is, well, really fun. Something that really suprised me about it is it’s graphics, a huge improvement over the cartoony Wii Sports, they’re not like PS3 good, but they’re detailed, and, well, ok, pretty. A whole bunch of good games are going to be released in the next few months (Super Smash Bros Brawl, Mario Kart, etc…), which will really make it a great gaming machine.

Overall, best $250 my, umm, parents ever spent. If you see one in Wall Mart or something, grab it ’cause it won’t be there much longer, these things are selling BETTER than hotcakes.

TiMo is a simple motion graphics editor, like a mini version of Apple Motion. No amazing 3D explosions and video effects (not any time soon anyway), but an easy way to edit together Images, Video, Text, Shapes, etc into rich videos. It could be used to make titles, theme songs/intros, custom made slide shows, short animated clips and backgrounds, or something like those weird cut-scenes from 24 with 4 videos playing at once. It will be easy to use, but come out with original, professional results

I spent a lot of this week setting up the foundations on which the app will rest, but I do have the beginnings of the user interface and features set up. No actual animation this week, just a very VERY simple still vector editor. I also spent some time on the logo, and UI graphics and such.

Screencast of the current features (WARNING: 90mb file)

Logo/Teaser Image

Screenshot (With example image)


Text window

Closeup of toolbar

Example Image

Another Example Image (by Milo)

Ok, so it probably won’t filter Microsoft Fanboys, Apple Bashers, RIAA takedown notices, or Dvorak (unfortunately, but ok, he’s getting better), but it’s a step in the right direction. Of course, the idiot complain that this violating their right to free speech and whatnot, but hey, take an extra second to spell things right, and you’re all set.

Ok, now to help the internet-ville town idiots with their real life problems. 1: Get a house, 2: Get a life, 3: Get a mac, 4: Get a wife. There, that even rhymed!

Digg Link: http://digg.com/software/StupidFilter_Time_to_Fight_Back_the_Imbeciles/

PS. I’m snotty now. Good? Bad? Comments please!