iPad confusion: we’re not in Kansas anymore

Posted on by Nimgimli

First I have to say, most of this post (I assume) applies to the iPhone and iPod Touch as well as the iPad.

So today I had my first lover’s spat with the iPad. It was my fault, really. I keep falling into the trap of thinking of it like a computer. And because of that, I expect it to be able to do things like a computer can. But it can’t. Y’see, Steve Jobs thinks that users don’t want a file system. Of course the iPad has a file system; we just can’t see it. But with no file system, there’s apparently no concept of uploading and downloading files, which makes some basic things a challenge.

It all started this morning when I wanted to show a remote friend what a regular iPhone app looked like on the iPad, and how it looked zoomed. I snapped a couple of screenshots on the iPad; they got saved in with my photos. My friend and I converse on a forum mostly, and I can upload images from a browser to attach to forum posts. So that’s what I went to do. Only to find out the the Upload File browser feature is disabled in MobileSafari.

Well, I was at work with a few other computers sitting in front of me, so I knew if I could get the files onto another computer I could just write my post from that computer. But I’d left my iPad cable at home. My first thought was to gmail them to myself, but gmail’s web-based file attachment widget wouldn’t work either. But I have an iDisk! I could put them on there. I downloaded the iDisk app but as far as I can figure, it’s a read only experience. Somone suggested Dropbox, which reminded me that I have a ZumoDrive. Zumo had an app too. I downloaded that, and low and behold, it’d let me move a photo from the iPad to the Zumo drive. So I did. But for whatever reason the Zumo app resized the images on the fly. Argghhh! Then I remembered I’d signed up for a MobileMe account (an Apple cloud service that’s a total bloody rip-off). I could share the images to a MobileMe gallery, then open that gallery on another computer, view the images at full size, then save them to my desktop. Finally I was able to share the files with my friend.

What a pain. I subsequently figured out that if you use the iPad’s mail app you can mail files to yourself in a pinch. And there’s an app called Air Share (I think?) that sounds like exactly what I need for this kind of thing, but it was $10 and I’m a cheap SOB (hey, I have an iPad to pay off) so I’m going to keep looking for something cheaper/free. Maybe Dropbox will work better than ZumoDrive did.

Flash forward a bunch of hours.

Goodreads is giving away Jack London’s Call of the Wild in e-book format today. Well… I dunno if you’d call it giving away something when it’s public domain, but that’s another topic. Anyway, I navigated to the site in MobileSafari and tried to download the epub version. Guess what? The iPad can read ePub books, but it can’t download them. At least not from web sites. I kept getting an error saying MobileSafari couldn’t download that type of file.

Turns out, I had to download it on my PC, add it to my iTunes library, then sync the iPad with iTunes. That’s an incredibly stupid and convoluted way to have to do something. (Just to be clear, if you buy an ‘iBook’ from Apple, or a Kindle book from Amazon, you can get it directly on the iPad.)

The only reason I can figure that the up and download functionality of MobileSafari is nerfed is because up & downloading files implies that you’ll have a file system where those files live. To d/l a file, MobileSafari would have to ask “Where do you want me to put this?” and Jobs doesn’t want you to have a “where” place to put files. Images are ok; they go into a special bucket (\smith’s iPad\Internal Storage\DCIM\100APPLE OMG a file system!) that shows up as Photos on your iPad desktop. But an epub, or a zip file? No no, we can’t have people dealing with that kind of thing. Save the users from themselves!

I still don’t get why MobileSafari doesn’t let me upload an image to a forum though.

Anyway like I said, this is my issue. I have to keep reminding myself that this *isn’t* a computer. It’s a media consumption device and a game machine. It’s a satellite device that really relies on a computer to be useful. The moral of the story is: don’t lose that cable!

I have to say, Android spoiled me. My Android phone really IS a computer. I can (with the help of apps) browse the file system, up and download files, add new browsers and basically do everything I can do on a computer.

Don’t misconstrue this lover’s spat. I still adore the iPad. I just need to remember its limitations and we’ll get along just fine.

I’m looking forward to having an Android tablet, though… πŸ˜‰

iPad ownership: How’d I wind up here?

Posted on by Nimgimli

You can catch up on my iPad journey here. It takes me through Monday morning. By that time I’d ordered an iPad online and was prepared to wait for the April 12th ship date. Then I got to work and my co-worker had his and was showing it off. It didn’t take long for April 12th to seem far, far in the future. I called the local Apple Store and they had iPads in stock.

At lunch, said co-worker (who is a HUGE Apple fan) and I headed to the store. It took jumping through some strange hoops but I walked out with my iPad (and not one but TWO Apple credit accounts…don’t ask). He dealt with the Apple sales staff, I just signed things. It’s like being in a hostile foreign country, going into one of those stores. If you bring a native guide it’s much easier to get around.

It’s been interesting watching the hype-wave crest, and break, and now as the hype runs back into the sea the backlash is coming on strong. One of the most frequent criticisms I see is “It’s just a giant iPhone.” Well first of all, it doesn’t make calls so it’d be more accurate to says it’s just a giant iPod Touch. Now I don’t have an iPod Touch so I can’t really comment on that. But let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s true. What’s wrong with it being a giant iPod Touch?

If I was running a single core PC with on-board graphics and a 15″ VGA screen, and I said “Woohoo! I just bought an i7 system with that new GeForce 480 GPU and a 24″ 1600×1200 monitor!” no one would reply with “But it’s just a giant pc” would they? No, because better resolution, bigger screen, faster processor… those upgrades are great! And as far as I can tell, the iPad is an iPod Touch with better resolution, a bigger screen and a faster processor. So how’s that a bad thing?

*shrug*

I justified my early adoption with my ITWorld blog. The iPad is such a phenomenom, for good or evil, that I felt like I needed to know the truth behind the device. I wasn’t really sure what to expect; I hate Apple products. I’m an ex-Apple fanboy and no one is as bitter as an ex-fanboy. Dude, I had a G4 Cube. I spent nearly $4,000 on the first “TiBook” laptop….that’s how much of a fanboy I was. I was torn between hoping I enjoyed the iPad, and hoping I’d hate it so I could rip it to shreds in the public eye.

I never expected to fall head over heels in love with the damned thing. But I have. And I’m still trying to quantify why. It has a lot to do with how damned pretty it is; the screen is stunning and feels downright soothing to my eyes. Ironically the lower-than-my-PC resolution might be part of that. 1024×768 but crisp and clear with apps intended for that resolution. (OMG, is the iPad the Jitterbug of computing devices!?) And a lot of it is how comfortable it is to use. I can slouch to my heart’s content. Use it sitting back with my feet on the desk, or slung out on the couch, or laying in bed. Yeah, I could do all this with a netbook too, but netbooks are awkward and slow. The iPad is snappy and easy to hold (if a tad heavy). I highly suggest the ‘binder’ case that Apple sells. It gives you more holding options and doubles as a stand. And there’s the “new to the App Store” factor for me. There’s a lot of cool apps for this thing.

Now in my defense, for *years* I’ve wanted a tablet. Essentially since watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. But until now they’ve all sucked. Angela got me a netbook that converts into a tablet for Christmas and although I tried desperately to love it, I just didn’t. It was slow and not at all responsive to touch and I constantly had to recalibrate the screen. It’s a sweet little netbook, but not a very good tablet. Her heart was in the right place and it killed me that I didn’t love it, but there ya go…

So then I was waiting for the Android tablets. I’m still waiting for those. I can absolutely see having 2 tablets because I AM that much of a geek. I love my Droid smartphone. I love that Android is open. I love that these soon-to-arrive Android tablets have 1080P displays and are powered by the super snappy Tegra 2 chip (rumored to be powering the Nintendo 3DS as well). But those are the future. The few Android based tablets that have come out: devices like the enTourage eDGe (their caps) or the Camangi Webstation, just haven’t reviewed very well. Nope, wait for the Tegra and Android 2.1 if you want an Android tablet.

But the iPad was here now, and yeah, I got caught up in the hype, and had a way to justify buying early, and, shame on me, Apple was offering interest-free credit. I haven’t done anything truly fiscally irresponsible in years; the time just seemed right. πŸ™‚

Now I just need the weekend to get here so I can *really* play with the thing. I sucked it up and installed iTunes *shudder* which I hate even more now than I did the last time I tried it, but the iPad really expects to be syncing to something, for whatever reason. So that was Monday evening shot, getting that done. Last night I tried to download a big app (the digital edition of The Elements) and found that the only system slower than The Playstation Network is The Apple Store (this was on my Windows machine so I can’t blame the iPad) and sorted through all my music deciding which of it/how much of it to sync to the iPad. And tonight of course I’m writing this blog post.

But I sneak in moments of iPad time whenever I can. During lunch at work, right before bed, in the 10 free minutes I find while waiting for dinner. I carry the damned thing everywhere with me.

The question is, once I have LOTS of time to spend with it, will I still love it or will I start to see its flaws? That remains to be seen. Stay tuned!

Pondering changing UI paradigms; is the Wii the first step into the future?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday I was working on an ITWorld post about Netflix Streaming on the Wii. In describing the navigation of your queue I said “You can click on the arrows on each end of the nav bar…”

That sentence didn’t register until this morning when I was proofreading. Click on the arrows. Clicking, on a video game system. That’s new. Now granted, there’ve been torturous control systems in console games before where you’d move a cursor via analog stick and then press a controller button to ‘click’ on an on-screen button, but the experience has always been pretty awful. And plenty of Wii games (my favorite Wii games, in fact) use a point and click interface. But doing a non-gaming task on the Wii really made me aware that I was doing something different.

On a computer, of course, we click constantly; the entire modern computer interface is built around moving a cursor and clicking mouse buttons. But the Wii is the first console that’s successfully brought that metaphor onto game systems. Presumably Playstation Move will do this as well. But not Natal (see below).

And then there’s the iPad, which takes its UI from smartphones. On the iPad there’s no concept of a cursor. You can still ‘click’ things but the feeling is different from doing so with the mouse where you see the cursor. You can’t roll-over interface items to get helper pop-up texts or anything along those lines [no, I haven’t used an iPad, I’m extrapolating from using smartphones]. On the Android platform, at least, there’s even a change in outcome depending on how long you click. There’s clicking and then there’s “long press” that will generate different results from the same icon/link/on-screen item.

And then there’s multitouch, of course. The pinch to zoom function still feels awkward to me, but it feels like just the start of what’s possible. I have one app on the Android that does interesting things via tap-patterns. For example, if you tap-press (ie, a double tap where you ‘hold’ the second tap) you can then slide your finger left and right to zoom in and out. Really the possibilities are endless, though we’ll need some standards to evolve in order to be efficient (awkward though pinch to zoom is, it’s become a defacto standard that everyone understands).

I’m guessing the Natal experience will be closer to the iPad than to a PC. With the whole “body as controller” I can’t imagine MS putting a cursor on-screen, though maybe they will. (In some cases they may have to.) I think the strength of Natal will be more in ‘gesture controls’ rather than on-screen buttons to be pressed.

I don’t have a real point to this post, I’m just pondering… as game consoles become more generalized devices, they’re borrowing from other devices and/or evolving their UI. At the same time the iPad (and the Android tablets that are soon to come) are establishing a completely different paradigm.

So what does the future look like? Will the “mouse & pointer” combo become some quaint idea of yesteryear? Probably not. Touch interfaces are wonderful for devices that you hold in your lap or that lay flat on a low table, but as soon as you have a vertical service it’s been shown that fatigue sets in pretty quickly with touch interfaces. Any time you have to manipulate a device above heart level it becomes an issue over time. For a fast transaction like using an ATM machine you’d never notice this, but in an hour long touch-gaming session where you have to hold your arms up to manipulate the game, you’d definitely feel it. Lowering the screen, of course, leads to neck strain and back problems.

It’s an exciting time and I feel like computing/gaming/human-machine interfacing is poised on the cusp of a major upheaval; one which will lead to improvements in the way we manipulate these devices that we’re so enamored with.

EVE noobs: losing your first ship

Posted on by Nimgimli

I lost my first ship in EVE tonight.

Yeah, I’ve been playing for a few weeks, but don’t for a second think it’s taken me this long to lose a ship due to any skill on my part. It took me this long because I don’t play much and when I do I’ve been puttering around in 1.0 space mining and junk. And this ship, to my eternal shame, was lost in a PvE Tutorial mission!

Anyway, here’s what I learned, so other EVE noobs won’t be as surprised as I was:

1) Insurance, even Platinum Insurance, isn’t going to get you a new ship. My little frigate was fully insured. Problem was that no one was selling a replacement for what the insurance company thought it was worth. So just like in real life, you’re going to have to have cash on hand to make up the difference between your insurance payout and the street cost of a new ship.

2) That said, newbie ships, at least, are pretty cheap. Don’t panic when yours goes boom! You’ll be back on your feet in no time.

3) Do shop around. By traveling 3 jumps (all through 1.0 space…I think I could’ve flown my pod but I didn’t) I saved about 40% of the cost of my replacement ship. Yes, and still the insurance payout wasn’t enough. At my local station, the ship I was replacing was going for more than twice the insurance payout.

4) Be prepared to refit. I had plenty of weapons and afterburners and stuff; but I had no ammo! Not a single slug. I had more than I could ever use in the ship I lost. So in future I’ll remember to carry only as much ammo as I’ll need for the mission at hand. Not that noob ammo is all that expensive but it’s just so wasteful losing so much to the void…

Hmmm, it just occurred to me… I wonder if I could’ve flown back out to my own wreck and salvaged from it? Does anyone know?

Patchwork Heroes

Posted on by Nimgimli

Patchwork Heroes for the PSP launched today. I haven’t played it, but I did play the demo a couple weeks back, and I have to say it’s worth at least trying. It’s one of those weird, quirky games that just feels right on a handheld.

So here’s the premise. You’re a tiny team of 2D heroes fighting off big 2D airships in order to defend your town. Your only weapon? Saws! The idea is that you cut chunks off the airships (by holding down a button and running, but the saws only work for a few seconds then they need a brief recharge), getting points depending on how big a chunk you cut off in a single piece. You’ll also find some of your friends are captive on the deck of the airships, so you need to save them (before you cut off the area of the ship they’re on). The air ships have gun emplacements, so you’ll be dodging incoming fire, and past the earliest levels there are repair units that will patch up the cuts you made.

And that’s really it. Oh, and there’s a time limit. Don’t cut up enough of the ship fast enough and it will bomb your village into rubble. Which leads me to a another strange facet. So you’re like 4 pixels tall, and you travel in a group of friends. If you get hit my gunfire, one of your friends will die and up pops a message that says something like “Billy Died, Age 14” {going from memory, as I said I played it a while ago}. That weird little pop-up makes the game feel personal. These aren’t little blobs of pixels, they’re kids! You can’t squander their lives!

The gameplay scratches that lizard-brain itch that loves popping bubblewrap, peeling and shredding the label off your bottle of beer, or (more directly) taking a piece of paper and a pair of scissors and just clipping it into little pieces.

The full game is only $10 but again, I urge you to try the demo first, because it’s a really weird game, and honestly I found it pretty challenging.

Sony gets down and dirty

Posted on by Nimgimli

This made me chuckle.

Look, I know there was immediate internet hate directed at Sony when they announced the Move. *waves hand dismissively* Whatever dudes, let’s wait until we see release hardware and software before we decide. I’m not a huge fan of “waggle” gameplay, but I am a huge fan of “pointing” gameplay and split controllers. Playing point and click-ish games on the Wii, stuff like Harvest Moon, is really comfortable for me. So I’ll probably at least give Move a try.

Anyway, didn’t mean to go on about it. I’m just loving Sony’s marketing department these days. Remember the creepy crying baby and stuff that we used to get for ads? Kevin Butler is so much simpler, more entertaining and, I think, effective.

3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Playstation blog has a post up with a couple of videos of this retro celebratory May 11th release. “All your childhood on a single disk.” as Atlus’s Aram Jabbari says. Well, he says something close to that anyway.

I love Atlus PR’s sense of humor. Heck I just kinda love Atlus all-around.

The video focuses on gameplay, but you need to read an earlier post on how the game lets you heavily customize the hero you play as.

It’s all about the retro, including the price, thankfully ($40). I’m looking forward to playing this one.

Weekend recap

Posted on by Nimgimli

I realized it’s been a full week since my last post here at Dragonchasers. In an attempt to convince my 4 readers not to ditch this RSS feed, I figured I’d share what my gaming’s been looking like recently.

Life has been super-busy lately, leaving not too much time for gaming. While I lament that fact often, the truth is that with scarcity comes value. When I *do* get to relax and play a game, I’m really enjoying myself.

My experiment in EVE continues. I’m *still* on my trial account but plan on switching over to a paying account when it finally runs out. I’m still learning a ton of new things in every play session, as infrequent as they are. I’ve gotten sucked into that mindset that thinks it’s ok to pay $15/month to log into a game once or twice a week since my character is still learning even when I can’t play. That’s a bit of genius on the part of CCP! Yesterday I finally went through an entire tutorial mission sequence (yes, I’m very much still doing the bidding of the Civilian/Tutorial agents), culminating in a rather difficult assignment to take a particularly irksome pirate. I limped home with 15% hull integrity and my pulse racing. So now I’m hooked.

Last Tuesday I started playing FF XIII; this seems to be a divisive title. Some people love it, others hate it. My feelings toward the game have been following a sin wave. I loved it at first, then started getting down on it, but now the love is coming back. Once the spectacle of the graphics and sounds wore off I was a bit bored with gameplay, but finally I’m getting new options and have hit some challenging bits. And I’ve found this isn’t the kind of game I can sit down and play for marathon sessions. I like it the most when I play for about an hour (which means I’ll be playing it for a *long* time). Happily save points are frequent enough that I can do that. (Can you believe some folks are upset with the frequency of Save Points? Considering they function as Shops and Workbenches as well as places to save, that seems…well… dumb. If you don’t want to use one, just go past it.)

Lastly I continue to struggle with Echo Bazaar. Or rather, Echo Bazaar continues to struggle with me. This is a wonderfully written web-based grind-fest. The problem seems to be that it is a victim of its own success. The site is glacially slow most of the time, turning a delightful little diversion into an exercise in frustration. And yet I keep going back to it to see what new Opportunities have arisen. Someone needs to write a book based in Fallen London!

And that’s about all of my gaming for the past week! Sad, no?

But PAX East is coming the weekend after next and I’m taking off a few days around it. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up on my gaming then. As for catching up on my blogging? I’m not sure when I’ll find time for that! Thanks for sticking around, though!

Flotilla?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Just a really quick post before bed. Playing EVE and STO has me thinking a lot about space battles. I’m still looking for a Honor Harrington space combat simulation, y’know?

I just came across Flotilla from BlendoGames, an Indie game dev. I have *not* played the game yet. But based on this video, I’ll definitely be giving the game a try. I know some of my friends out there are also space grognards so I figured I’d better share the link asap. Besides posting about it is the best way to be sure I remember to try it myself! πŸ™‚