Every year I go to the lake parade and this year I tried something different. I decided to take photographs rather than video.
By the same opportunity I am testing Flickr gallery, a plugin that makes including your flickr images into wordpress a two step process.
Zynga and Maxis are from very different computer gamer times. Maxis came at a time when the game was the source of entertainment. You would build a farm, worry about pests and locusts, about fertilizing the fields and having enough income to build the next series of crop. Zynga on the other hand is a game that teaches you to behave like a machine rather than a human, where repetitive actions are the standard.
Simfarm, among other games was one of those games that you could play for weeks at a time. You would select a difficulty level and according to that difficulty level you would need to use knowledge you acquired through experience. If you put cows next to fields without a fence they would walk through and eat the crop. If you didn’t save enough money then if a crop failed your farm was toast.
With Zynga you can put pigs with crops, animals in barns and more. There is no intellectual aspect to this game unless you’re a garden designer. You plant the fields, you wait a while and then you harvest. This is great if life doesn’t get in the way. How many of you know what you will be doing in two hours, 8 hours or sixteen hours? i kind of do, but my life will not center around such a simple game.
What I liked about simfarm is that it was not mechanical. There was an aspect of game strategy. By obeying certain principles you could progress quite nicely in the game. Zynga has two ways for progression. The first is patience and the second is money. If you pay money then you can have everything immediately. If you spam your friends and they participate then you are rewarded. Do you really want to have to spam your friends to progress in a game? I don’t.
I don’t like this trend, that you encourage people to spend money for a mechanical rather than intellectual game and I think that game makers should take this into consideration. If Civilization V came to facebook then I would play it. I would pay an upfront payment and expect to have the full game.
And this reminds me of a recent documentary on the BBC called Coast. Do you, as a gamer, as a facebook user want games that are teaching you a different form of managment where right decisions bring profit or do you want penny arcade style games that require that mechanical put the coin in the slot type response?
I would like to leave you with an interesting TED talk to help you think about this topic. I watched it a week ago but it’s relevant to the question of time spent gaming and what we should expect to get out of it.
Portable Apps is an interesting option for those of us who use work computers rather than our own. It is also a good solution for those of us who change desktop all the time but can’t play with our phones whilst at work.
A good method for transporting a personalised experience with you
A few days ago I wrote about Chrome as a PAF file and things have become more interesting as a result.
What I particularly enjoy are the extensions that you can install within the browser. Anyone who works in an office always faces the challenge of getting authorisation to install the simplest of applications. With google chrome and extensions you regain some of that freedom.
The browser allows you to install the extensions of your liking and use them. Some of these applications are the mobile phone version implemented in the desktop format. The best example of this is the yahoo messenger app. Very similar builds are running on the desktop and mobile phone.
The other features are google calendar, facebook and feedly extensions. There is choice. I have feedly running to let me know how many RSS items are left to read. With the google calendar application I can see how much time is left before my next meeting/time commitment. With facebook I can see how many pending messages are waiting for my action.
The advantage of this way of doing things is that you can cut down on the number of open tabs. It is an on demand interaction. It is only open for as long as you are doing something. That’s like mobile applications.
What we see here is a shift away from the traditional web browser where information is displayed according to a cascading style sheet and towards an application based system. The application is installed locally and the only information that you gather from the server is raw data. As a result even with slower connections you can participate, whether from a mobile phone or whilst travelling where roaming charges apply.
It’s an interesting space to keep an eye on. I like having the ability to customise my web surfing environment whatever the environment and platform. I wish that the app syncing would work for extensions, rather than for bookmarks and certain settings.
Finally I have received the Over the Air (OTA) update from 2.1 to 2.2 for my nexus one. As a result of this my mobile phone can now be used tethered to a computer for internet access or as a wifi hotspot. The WIFI sharing option allows you to use wpa2 PSK encryption.
The reason I was so interested in this update is for use with the iPad. I already have two mobile contracts, one through work and the second private. Both of them allow for at least a gigabyte of data per month. With these contracts and tethering I have the ability to download 2 gigabytes of data from anywhere without paying an additional 19CHF per month to swisscom.
the next step will be to see by how much my data consumption will go up as a result of this option. At least one side effect is a lot more freedom.
Disclaimer, I would add an image if it was easy to get screengrabs with the nexus one but it’s not. Google, can we get that built into the system?
There are four phones on my desk that are well adapted to tracking hikes. There is the nexus one, the e51, n95 and n97. The reason I mention this is battery life. In my experience if you go on a long hike at least one of the phones will die.
You could buy an extra battery or two to make sure that this never happens but a more practical solution is to take all of your phones, install the tracking application on them and swap phone once the battery dies.
Of course this would involve taking three chargers with you but at least this way you could track the hike in terms of chapters and somehow aggregate the data for a true hike map.
Google latitude is the perfect tool for anyone that works and has a life where logging into locations would be an unsightly thing to do. By that I mean that you can’t arrive at work and log into the location. It gives colleagues the impression you are not serious about your work.
Now take this same situation in a social context. You go hiking and the people around you are not necessarily as passionate about technology. They’re walking around with paper maps after all.
That’s where Google latitude comes into it’s own. Location is tracked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every single day that your device is on.
Why am I doing this? Am I not mad? Do I not have this location information to hide, and no shame? Well of course I have things to hide and shame but with this network only your closest friends can see where you are. And they only know your current location, not your previous locations.
That’s where the service differs from foursquare, gowalla, yelp and all the others. Your location history is private. Only you have access to it.
Then why use it in the first place? Well that’s simple. It’s a lifelog that’s not broadcast. You can keep track of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work and out socialising. Once a week I get to find out whether I was at work for more than fifty hours, whether I was at home for too many hours. More importantly i get to see whether I should not be a little more active in going out, from a personal life point of view. That’s where I’m lacking at the moment. Google latitude’s dashboard will help change that.
Now, how could it improve? First of all automatic location check in. If I’m by starbucks in Geneva airport log me in if I’m seeing that network more than ten minutes. If I’m at the apple store for that amount of time log me in there. If I’m at a bar and I lose signal in that region due to poor network coverage then assume I’m in that bar.
By being automatic and private location information could be quite a bit more interesting. More to the point that data is being collected anyway by mobile operators so why not take advantage of this?
I believe this to be the future of mobile geo-location. With more android phones out there and more devices capable of multitasking this could easily become the norm.
PAF is not just the way you discribe something hitting something else. It is also used to define a portable application file. These are self contained executables that you can use for mobile versions of your favourite browser.
One of my personal favourites at the moment is Chrome, it’s fast, light, and behaves the way I want it to. Better still it incorporates flash into the code. This means that I can view flash content without it being installed on the computer I’m using.
Once again I have deleted my twitter account. Here are ten reasons to give up on twitter.
1. Europe is neutral about the site. If you want friendships with people an ocean away join.
2. Whenever you want to post some technical problem means you have to post five times
3. If you have a real job, not freelancing, then you can’t afford to check updates all the time.
4. Lack of user engagement, when less than a tenth of your replies are responded to you know there’s no point staying up to date with those people.
5. Virtual community, unlike with facebook and other social networks the people you interact with here are strangers.
6. Spam, as more and more marketers come to the site so the more you use certain words the more unsolicited messages you get.
7. Veteran community: Aside from Facebook all websites are at their community most interesting when the users are new and passionate about the service. That has faded with twitter.
8. 140 characters; Although it was great three years ago mobile phones are now far more capable mobile devices. Limiting yourself to 140 characters is no longer an interesting option.
9. Server downtime. For three years they have been struggling with making the platform stable and for three years they have been failing. If you have to try five times to post 140 characters then something is wrong.
10. User indifference. They are indifferent about their user base. Just take a look at the FAQ and try to offer them feedback and you will first have to go through an FAQ before being able to explain your views.
Having a full time job means that my free time is more precious than before. As a result I’d rather be out in the real world doing real things. It’s also about how much time you need to invest into such a service before getting anything of any value out of it. As a result a year after I first left twitter I have left again. This time I think it will be for good. I don’t like the way the company is run and I don’t like the way the users are using the site. Goodbye twitter. On to better things.
I have updated to the latest version of WordPress since yesterday morning and it is now running smoothly. I have made sharing of blog posts easier now.
For three days now I have been listening to podcasts on the Nexus one using Listen. It is a podcast app that allows you to subscribe to and download podcasts from the comfort of the mobile device.
What I like about this app is the ease with which you can select which podcasts to listen to. If you want to listen to This week in tech for example just type the name of the podcast and it will find those feeds, allow you to subscribe or manually select which podcasts to listen to.
Another aspect of the search feature which I like is the search for keywords function. It displays a number of podcasts according to the keyword.
As an example I typed hike to see which podcasts would be suggested. I found some trailcast podcasts and so downloaded a podcast. It works well. If you enjoy the podcast then you can subscribe to and download the podcasts.
The settings tab has an interesting set of options. You can tell it to download new apps when possible, select whether you want the downloads to occur when you are using wifi or over the air using the data plan. You can set how many podcasts you want to store on the device at any one time.
One of the best features for me is that when you have a few hours to listen to podcasts rather than work by podcast subscription this software allows you to listen to podcasts in queue order. What this means is that I may be listening to This week in tech, then this week in google before moving on to the BBC history podcast and finishing with a trail cast podcast. With this system you do not need to interrupt what you are doing to get to the next podcast.
The benefit of a podcast client that is within the phone is that you can select what to listen to whilst on the move. As a benefit of this you are less likely to download hundreds of podcasts you end up never listening to.
The last feature is that it is synched with Google Reader. This means that you can see those subscriptions from any google reader application. It is stored in the cloud so should work across multiple devices.
This is the future of podcasting, and media consumption. It takes advantage of the power that modern devices can sync from anywherwe at anytime, that your habits and tastes may change and that you actualise it from any machine, computer, or mobile.
