Ranting Kenya

As reported on the Gamerscore blog, Worms is coming to Xbox Live Arcade!

To say I’m excited about this would be an understatement. One of my favorite PC games to play with my friends has been worms. Many a game I played on my laptop in college, on road trips with the team, even at home on the network. And now it’s coming to bigscreen TV, care of your Xbox 360.

My only wish and desire is that they stick to one of the 2-dimensional versions. I never cared for the 3D version, they never caught on. My personal favorite was Armageddon.

!!Update!!

Screenshots of the Xbox 360 version of Worms show that it is in fact the 2D style of worms! It looks like it’s a little different (tweaked, like many Xbox Live Arcade games) from previous versions that I have played, but still looks great.

This product, shown at right, will never be popular. Never. It was one of the “top products” from CES 2007 according to Scientific American. Seriously, how dumb is that. As long as you have to wear something that looks like that, forget it. And what is up with Scientific American? I get that it might be new and revolutionary, but one of the best from CES? Look harder.

The state of the HD war in Canada is is being dominated by one provider, long before most households have even gone digital.

When I initially went for HD about a year and a half ago (July 2005), the HD offerings were overpriced, and channel-wise it was slim pickings. I researched both providers available to me, Shaw Cable, and Bell Expressvu satellite. I called both companies multiple times to ask specific questions to help me decide on who to go with.

Shaw’s customer service people gave me three different answers to the same question. Bell was consistent. Shaw was “continually adding more HD channels”. Bell had every available channel in Canada. Shaw had one plain HD box to choose from. Bell was about to introduce a dual-tuner HD PVR.

The choice was an easy one to make. Bell did not disappoint. Picture quality was excellent, programming was good, service was consistent, the non-PVR box was stable, etc.

I have since moved from that house into a townhouse. This seriously limits your HD offerings. So now I’m a Shaw customer, and have been for nearly six months now. My experience has been different to say the least.

The picture quality is inferior to Bell’s and the dual tuner HD PVR (the best Shaw box available) isn’t worth its weight in gold (it ain’t light either). In fact, if you want to read some reviews on the box I have, search on the internet for the same box that Comcast uses in the United States (it’s a Motorola 6212 I believe).

Despite the boxes horrible interface, buggy operation, inferior quality, and higher price tag, what really gets me is the channel lineup. Shaw’s full HD offering includes 14 channels. That’s with the two new ones (National Geographic and Showcase). There’s basically no time-shifted channels (less important because of the dual tuner box), video on demand is not in HD (and arguably lower than SD too), even their Pay-Per-View is not in HD.

As I discovered when I called my friend with Bell Expressvu that I had received two new channels, he informed me that 14 channels is a joke. Bell, in the last few months (6-8) has added more for a total of 27! Nearly double what Shaw offers (not including their Pay-Per-View stations)! That included Mark Cuban’s HD-Net which I didn’t know was available in Canada at all.

So in review Bell has more HD channels, better looking HD and SD signals, better hardware (in every way), better customer service, no analog channels, and time-shifting channels. Need I say more?

I hate to give a product such as the iPhone more time than it has already gotten, but whatever.

It seems Apple’s new killer product will be coming to Rogers wireless in Canada (I know, old news). Personally, I can only think of one person still using Rogers as their wireless carrier, and that’s mostly because of his work and he’s addicted to the crackberry. On a side note, I am writing this from my moto Q.

Bell Canada and Telus dominate the wireless market by my count. But with Rogers offering the iPhone to gadget loving Canadians, will it be enough to grab more market share? It’s likely that to expand the iPhone’s market share, Apple will offer another version that runs on the other carrier’s networks. The question is when. Is there going to be enough lead-time before the inevitable widespread iPhone availability? Somehow I doubt it.

The iPhone for all its glory, is still a first generation product. It will have its issues. By the time they work out some of these issues, I believe other carriers will carry the device, and it will probably be cheaper than it is today. I’ll wait until my contract is over before I go for it (2.5 years left). By then, this whole thing will have hopefully sorted itself out.

Let me begin by stating that I have not used Windows Vista, and I have not seen it in person. All my assumptions are based on the screen shots of vista and on the design of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP.Now let me begin with a little background information.

There is a concept called Fitts’ Law. Basically it translates extremely well to computer GUI interfaces (graphical user interface, basically, using a mouse to click on icons etc). In simple terms, Fitts’ law shows that the difficulty to point a mouse pointer at a target is directly related to the distance the mouse pointer must first travel and the size of the target. Seems pretty obvious, I know. There is a mathematical formula to gauge this movement, but I’m not getting into that. Truth be told, you don’t need to be able to use the formula to make better designs with Fitts’ law in mind. Understanding how it works is more than enough.

You may have also noticed that when using a Windows, Macintosh, or a Linux machine, the mouse pointer cannot move outside of the boundaries of the screen. Go ahead and try, you’ll never get that last sliver of the pointer to leave the screen. Now together, Fitts’ Law and the inability to extend the pointer beyond the screen creates an excellent phenomenon. Essentially, the edges of the screen have infinite area.

Something that Apple Computer (now just Apple Inc.) did way back in the beginning of their GUI interface design, was patent the placement of the menu bar on the very top edge of the screen. This lends a HUGE usability advantage to Mac users. It is far easier to target a menu when it has infinite height.

Windows doesn’t have this advantage. But it don’t count it out yet. Windows places the “Close” button in the upper most right-hand corner of the screen. A user can close applications so quickly with the mouse by simply throwing it upwards and to the right. It has infinite width and height. It is much faster to do that than it is to aim right at the center of a little “X”.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. The button design in Windows Media Player 11 is slightly different from that of version 10. The button’s are done using the new Vista style. They are attached to the very top of the screen, but not the right hand side. There is a seven pixel gap.

Users (such as myself) continually fail to close the application because their brains are trained to heave the mouse to the top-right rapidly without regard. The button is less usable than it’s older version, despite being wider (which I believe Microsoft widened for this very reason).

This style of button is present on all Vista windows and programs, as far as I have seen. This is a huge loss of usability to the Windows Vista interface. I can’t and don’t understand why Microsoft would make critical design error, especially since they had already did something good. Of all the features that they’re “copying” from Mac OS X, you’d think they’d try not to give anything up.

Here is the proof that there is a god!

You can bet I’ll be posting my thoughts and impressions as I play the beta. Boy am I excited. For Halo 2, the wait was nearly unbearably long. This will help scratch the itch.

To anyone asking for a Joost beta invite, here’s the official word:

Can I invite friends to join Joost™?

Yes! Keep an eye on the web site and blog in the next few weeks and you’ll see that you’ve been assigned special tokens that will let you invite your friends. In the meantime, we’re sorry but we’ve currently closed the beta test application form while we process the applications we already have.

I’m thinking, depending on the number of “golden tickets” that I receive, I may run a contest to give away the invites to Joost. I may also just give them away to anyone. Maybe once the invites are available, anyone will be able to get one anyway. We’ll see how things go.

They say that first impressions are what really matter. Joost is proving that second look doesn’t hurt either.

After my initial post on Joost, I went back to the program and dug a little deeper. There are a number of other excellent features. There’s some really slick plugins that you can overlay on top of the video.

The one that I really like is the “News Ticker”. It’s really just an rss feed display. It’s small and not distracting at all, to my surprise. Usually any sort of video overlay distracts me entirely. You can only view the plugins when you’re watching Joost in full-screen mode. That may be why I’m not distracted by it. It cycles through all the rss feeds one by one, and one entry at a time. You have to copy and paste the rss URL into the program manually, so the usability could be improved a bit. Nevertheless, the functionality is there.

It also has channel chat rooms that you can join as guest. It allows viewers of a channel to discuss topics while watching the video. A unique idea indeed. I wonder if future versions will have a feature more like a regular message board, so that comments can be viewed at a later time by other users. Maybe a most discussed link comes up first… digg-style?

You can also overlay a chat application that runs on either the jabber or gtalk network. Particularly handy if you want to talk to your friends but still watch tv. Basically an alternative to watching TV in bed with a laptop.

The more I watch it though, the more I would like to see more content. I’m sure once the service is up, and enough users are on board, finding new content won’t be as difficult. It is in the project road map to add content. Basically, I can’t wait.

I’ve been lucky enough to be included in the beta test for Joost. Joost is an online streaming TV application created by the guys who did Kazaa and Skype. If you could say one thing about those two guys, I’d mirror what Molly Wood said (editor at CNet and Buzz Out Loud podcast host). I don’t remember the exact words but it was something to the effect of

“They took file sharing and made it easy. Then they took VOIP and made it accessible.”

And now here’s Joost. Sure ABC has dabbled in online TV. NBC has ordered clips removed from youtube. But this is a whole different animal. These are not videos of your buddies blowing up propane tanks in a fire, or episodes of Lost (not available online in Canada, but good start anyway), this is a channel surfing machine. Everything feels like an actual TV feed on your computer. The quality is on par with regular TV on a PC, but looks a little better to me (and some channels are better than others). You have a guide you can surf, a search box to exploit, and only a few seconds of buffering between channels. Joost is unlike any other video site/application that I have ever used.

But what about the content? After all, it’s content is king right? Well, I don’t know what the plans are for the content, but as of right now I’d say it’s not bad considering it’s currently a beta. Just under 30 channels on my last count. Surprisingly to me there are shows from Much Music (basically Canadian MTV that still plays some music videos). I also watched some car driving test from the UK, and even the World Poker Tour. I believe if Joost can grab some more common TV content (smaller network content perhaps like Spike, G4, Space Network, Teletoon, Comedy Network etc), this thing will explode. The web will forever be changed. Noticing a theme with these two fellows?

I’ve only played in it for about 10 minutes. But seriously, this is going to be big.

Well, I have finally taken the plunge. As a web designer, one of the things you kind of need is a website. Crazy I know. Well, I have got my web-space care of dreamhost, and this blog care of wordpress. Now, I’m only just beginning to teach myself javascript, and php and mysql are on the palette as well. Thank goodness my HTML and CSS are solid (though I will have a few minor adaptations for XHTML). What that means is for now, I will have a wordpress theme, and it will likely slowly morph into a design of my own. Learning this in my spare time will certainly take time. Here we go…