Semi-realism mod for Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 OS X

Semi-realism mod for Unreal Tournament OS 9 and OS X

An unparalleled giggle collection, from any semi-realism FPS

(Aug 30): Super secret press conference: Apple has scheduled a secret press conference on Sep 7 at the San Francisco Moscone center for what the Apple marketing machine promises will be an earth-changing event. Appleinsider thinks the invitations hint at the announcement of an iTunes-compatible phone, and Motorola is indeed ready with the FCC for such a device. Even the NY Times seems to have sources that concur. Now that wouldn't be as earth-changing as the Intel announcement, and the Mighty Mouse doesn't register on this scale. Maybe it will be as big as the Segway, the vehicle that perhaps excels best in lowering one's sex appeal. Apple has the sex appeal aka coolness factor down, so probably we won't have to worry about them pulling a Segway.

(Aug 26): Mighty Mouse: Well I've tried Apple's new MIghty Mouse for a few weeks, and I have to sadly give it a thumbs-down. I'll write a full review elsewhere, but all in all it's a good-looking product hopelessly crippled by to competing design goals. Why make a multibutton mouse that looks and can function like a single-button mouse? The beginners don't want to pay extra for a single button mouse, and power users don't want a compromised unreliable multibutton mouse. Here's the brief scoop:

The top shell can be pushed down to click, like the standard Apple mouse. If the left side is pushed, you get a left click, if the right side is pushed, a right click, and if the scroll ball has pressure on it, then it's a middle click. The lower sides may also be squeezed together for a fourth click. The left, right, and middle clicks cannot be alternated in rapid succession, nor can they be pushed simultaneously... more of an issue for gamers probably. But there are more problems. The mouse is so small and skinny your index finger tends to go to the top center of the mouse-- this makes perfect design sense for a single-button mouse, which the MM is based upon, but is a liability here for two reasons: 1) clicks near the center of the mouse nearly always register as right clicks. The default should be left, the most common type of click. 2) the scroll ball is placed too high, so that in the course of a day's use, and almost certainly during fast-paced gaming, you will often do a middle click by mistake. There is no tactile border giving your finger the unconscious map of how far to wander. What is so great about a smooth single top shell anyways? MacMice's The Mouse also has a dead ringer single-top shell, which is split in the middle top, and presumably has two separate button mechanisms, a much better compromise in my opinion. And all those revolutionary features are not so: side buttons exist on other mice, and horizontal scrolling has long been a part of some PC trackpad drivers. The side squeeze click is sort of weird too... I had it set to Exposé's hide all windows, and if you give it a squeeze, the windows go, and if you do it again, the windows come back. Great. But if I squeezed it really tight, and didn't let go, the windows disappear as expected, and as soon as I released the sides, Exposé kicked in again, and the windows came back. Neat!

The scroll ball is great though, but weird-- if you give it the lightest touch while scrolling, nothing happens... it needs a slight amount of pressure. But press too hard, and you get a middle click-- the designers can't make it harder to click, because it's the same mechanism (entire shell depresses) as the left-click, which needs to be relatively easy. The result is the requirement of a "just-right" touch that gives me a cramp after extended use. Nonetheless horizontal scrolling is great in editing apps (Garageband, iMovie, Peak, etc.) But forget about teaching your fingers to click & drag using the top shell-left click and holding it down with one finger, while dragging with the scroll ball less than an inch away with another finger.

Overall, the drivers are funky too. Scrolling doesn't work unless your mouse pointer is inside the actual window-- it won't scroll the topmost window of the top app by default. This makes sense for apps with multiple internal panes such as Garageband, but it doesn't make sense for websites-- frames are passé, and at least it should default to the main frame. Vertical scrolling usually works great, but for one weird bug: scrolling down simply does not function if the mouse pointer goes over a google ad scrolling by. (At least some forms of google ads). For example, if you have a MM, go to this page, stick your mouse in the center top of your screen, and scroll down. Other OSs also were weakly supported-- Windows simply uses the default M$ mouse CP, so horizontal scrolling is not enabled, and the middle click and side clicks are haphazardly implemented (side clicks often register as "Back" in Firefox). If you use Terminal or X11 from OS X, you'll find familiar middle-clicking functions that you are used to for unix apps, but horizontal scrolling doesn't work.

All that aside, I always felt a mild ache using the MM, and was glad to go back to my standby Kensington trackball. It just worked, and left clicks were always left clicks, an right clicks were always right. I do think Apple is onto something with the scroll ball, but as long as it is mated to a top-shell click mechanism, it will remain handicapped as far as comfort and reliability. You all can probably guess by now how much of an Apple fan I am, so it's with a sad heart that I say that I cannot in any way recommend this device. Apple if you're listening, fix this first before you jump to making a wireless Bluetooth version... but then again, maybe Apple already know that, which could explain why the BT version wasn't released in the big launch. Steve: let your design team free. They can make a bonafide multibutton mouse, and do it best, but not when trying to make it look like a single button top-shell-click mouse.


Google VoIP: I've got to say I'm on a variety of IM protocols, but I have avoided the open source Jabber, largely because I know no one who uses it. I really despise iChat's lack of collapsable buddy list group, which is why I even prefer AOL's AIM client. But these days I'm all about Adium. The looks and sounds are customizable enough, and I can log into AIM, ICQ, and MSN simultaneously. Most importantly is tabbed chatting, something as important as tabs in web browsing. If you haven't experienced tabs and you frequently chat with more than one person at a time, you simply need to try out Adium for a week. It's a little flakey on extras protocols such as file transfer, but I transfer files much less often via IM than how often I talk to several people at once. Now, to the topic at hand: Google Talk.

Google is entering the VoIP (voice over IP) and IM fray. Their chosen protocol is the open source Jabber I just mentioned, and I've just added two jabber accounts to Adium, because I suspect a lot of my friends will soon be on it. Why? Google talk's sign in is the same as your gmail accont. Many of my older friends ( in the tech world that means over 25 or 30 ) have gmail accounts but do not use IM, so this makes it easier for them to try it out. I know, it's not any more easy or difficult, but I'm talking conceptual roadblocks to trying new things for these folks. This older group is demographic unlikely to be using Skype already (and even regular IM), so it might become big, and the rest of the younger or tech-savvy market might go for it too, because all of these folks also tend to have Gmail accounts. Windows has their own dedicated Google Talk client, but us Mac folks can just use iChat or Adium or any other client that supports Jabber. In iChat or Adium, just create a new account, select Jabber as the pulldown, enter your entire gmail addy (XXXX@gmail.com), then find the option for server, and enter: talk.google.com. That's it. And everyone has a gmail account, right? =x

On that note, I read an interesting article on Google as the new evil empire, displacing Microsoft for the title. Read it here.

(Aug 13): AMD Mac: One of my iChat acquaintances has been a bad boy. I rarely talk to this individual, but he's one of the few people I know that do hardware tweaks on Macs (something much rarer than in the PC world), everything from casemods, overclocking cpu & vidcards, to flashing peecee video cards to work in Macs (something that requires running with strange dogs). Well I haven't heard from him in over a half year, and he sends me a video chat invitation with his iChat, and voila. His AMD is running OS X. It was still very slow as he said he needed to patch a file related to rosetta. System Info shows all the supported instructions such as SSE3 (like altivec for PCs) for the new athlons and precotte p4s. He had immediate Bonjour (Rendezvous) firewire networking with his ibook, and the iSight picked up its FW port immediately as well. Safari was running was well, although video acceleration wasn't working as he didn't have the driver for his device ID, and thus no DVD player functionality. He had read that ethernet may not function with his mobo, but hadn't tested it yet. Here's a screenshot: (there were some refresh artifacts so I've pasted two screenshots together, the top & bottom half). It's an iSight video chat screenshot, so it's blurry, but you can see that the Athlon is clearly recognized.

I should amend my comments from yesterday btw. Certainly if this OS X for x86 goes retail, that's the end of the Apple hardware line, more or less. The Apple PBs will probably be safe since nothing on the PC side compares (have you seen the fugly Dell XPS that is being marketed as the high end laptop with good looks? omg. It's even uglier than a Compaq.), and likewise the iMac line and MacMini line are probably safe. But Apple will certainly protect its eventual public release of OS X x86, probably better than the current beta. Nonetheless the seal has been broken, and I'm sure the fanboys will have dual boot machines next year. Still, Apple's line should be safe as long as the average market demographic can't or won't install OS X on non Apple hardware. But expect the pressure on Apple to release a legitimate retail version to be enormous. Maybe Michael Dell will cut a deal that will allow TPM ( trusted platform module protection ) to allow only Apple and Dell hardware. Ånything is possible in this brave new world. See you next year, and we'll look back at this journey.




(Aug 12): The Ultimate Conspiracy: dev MacTel OS X hacked to run on nonApple PCs...
The latest news out of the P2Psphere is that the pirated version of the developer-only Mac-Intel OS X has now been hacked to bypass the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip, and can now run natively on some non-Apple peecees. Yessir, you heard that right. The sky is falling, but you knew it was coming right? IMHO this is the perfect stealth marketing from Apple, and Microsoft can't actually cry foul because all Apple has to do is lock down their OS tightly, but not tight enough. They know full well that everyone is going to try to install their OS X on PCs, and doing so with the developer edition simply stokes the appetite for when the real deal flies the coop as the first MacTels ship. In short, all they have to do is lock, watch, and wait, and come down slightly less fast, and slightly less hard on the P2P networks without actually circulating internal memos to their hired attorneys. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.

Every tweakerfanboy who previously had to have a dualboot Linux/Win system will now have a new badge of ultimate 1337ness: to have a triple boot, overclocked OSX/Linux/Win box decked out with neon and an Apple sticker.

Anyways the dev site seems to be down: OSX86 Project. For now, read the Wired Arrticle.

Other conspiracies: Ok, this one is just a joke, but just mayyyybe it's for real =] Steve doesn't know.

(Aug 8): Space Shuttle: I heard as the shuttle was delayed for landing that the astronauts spent some time practicing landings in simulators. I really wonder whether that simulator was Austin Meyer's X-Plane. I know NASA bought the app from him after hearing about his Space Shuttle simulator. I have a set of interview questions over with Austin right now, so I'll be sure to drop him another line and ask him. I can't wait to see try out this app on my G5, and try my own hand at a manual Shuttle landing.

Macintosh Folklore: Folklore.org has some really really fabulous stories about Apple. Check out the screenshots from the development of the GUI with mouse. Link here. This is the birth of the GUI as we know it. It really is, which makes these polaroid photos absolutely fascinating. Yes, XEROX provided some of the inspiration, but not all! The top page for Macintosh stories is here. Very good reads here, by the people that made it happen.

(Aug 1): America's Army: Well the cat's out of the bag, so I can talk about it. Ryan Gordon just let us loose on OS X AA v2.40. I can't tell you how many hours of my life are permanently gone because of that. I never played it really, and it took me a while to adjust from my tactical ops clanning days. I finally have some crazy nade rushes down, but it's very much a camper-friendly game, so either I get smackeddown fast, or I surprise and frag a whole nest. The learning curve was steep, and the Honor ROA penalties are significant, and after all those hours, I went down to an 8, but am back to 11. Frag Out, indeed. Anyways the good news is that it's finally on its way. If OS X 10.4.3 supports that " GL_EXT_framebuffer_object" function, then we'll get working full shadows too. The server browser workaround (since **** Gamespy is not doable), Ryan's "Simple MBS" system, will proably remain for now-- hey, at least you get to play online right? Thank you Ryan, for anything that works anyhow. I'm a bit miffed the IMG news piece on AA2.40 reaching beta was obviously paraphrased from my post at Macologist, down to the vehicle support and UE 2.5 engine, which was very suspicious indeed. Oh well, that's how it goes, we see news there too of course. Cesar, one of the other MacNinjas, has now got his paws on it, so he'll get the rest of the bugs listed, he's the AA expert. I've also been hearing rumors on the audio engine for Unreal, but I could be wrong, and but there's nothing solid yet, I'll keep you posted. Anyhow, AA 2.4 servers are rampant with hackers, even on the Official US Army servers-- the AA dev team are aware of the issues (read their forums for more info), but at any rate you probably will get a cleaner game for now playing 2.3.0.


(July 30): Tech news: VoIP Encryption: Phil Zimmerman, the developer of PGP encryption for e-mail, who has garnered the interest of the US gov't for producing a privacy tool that goes too far, has developed an encryption method for internet telephony, or VoIP. This new method is being prepared for distribution, and will not require the use of a public key using system. Of all the articles I read so far, Wired had the best explanation and covered the history well, you can read it here. 9 Megapixel Cameras: Although I'm an old-fashioned film snob, I'll admit digital has really become enticing. And wth, who am I fooling, I never was making cibachromes from slides, I was shooting on film negatives like every other wannabe semipro amateur, albeit on my tank-like Nikon F that's older than I am. Lately I got my photo taken by the head photo reporter for my city's newspaper (because I'd wirtten some game reviews), and he was digital. It's just that much more convenient, and it's not like we're shooting fashion glossies on medium format. Anyways, FujiFilm is preparing 9 Megapixel cameras for market, read more here. Digital Theatre: Hollywood has done it. They've agreed on a format for digital projection of feature films, read more here at Forbes. I read a great article in Wired's paper magazine about the problem to come: who is going to pay for converting all of those darned theatres from celluloid projectors to digital? The expense is simply phenomenal at the moment, and if the studios don't chip in, you can bet the economics won't make sense for the cineplex conglomerates. Therefore, there's this new tech, but the people who have to buy it probably won't. Someone will have to budge...

Gaming: R6 Ravenshield fans can finally sigh a bit of relief... there's a new anticheat app out for Macs. Monoman from macgamingmods.com was telling me that the devs had started work on it, but stopped.... but that recently cheating was so rampant that they had the community support to finish their product. Get iGuard here, and support info and background here. Postal 1: If you want a bit of oldschool nostalgia for the 3/4 top-down shootemup gorefest that started it all, it's been ported to OS X by Ryan Gordon, and you can get it included on the current special issue of MacWorld (it's an extra issue, not part of the regular subscription) called Totally Tiger. Ryan is telling me it will likely be the only place to get this game for a very long time. The Totally Tiger issue is $9.99 and is available here. X-Plane: I've been talking on the phone with the engineers that run the industrial-strength flight sim X-Plane, so I'll be seeing a review copy soon, and hopefully I'll have an interview to publish before then in August. How good is X-plane? The exact software system is part of a flight sim rig that is FAA certified for real logging of flight time hours for your pilot's license. Microsoft Flight Simulator, step aside. The difference? Randy, the dev Austin's former engineering schoolmate who is now doing PR, told me what it was in a nutshell. Microsoft uses a table to calculate what the plane does. It knows all the flight variables such as your current speed, flight controls, etc., and it simply looks up what the plane does next. Translation? The programmer told the simulator how the plane flies. That's why the plane doesn't respond as it should in real life, and neither do the instruments. The MS flight sim is just a glorified camera flying over a 3D rendering. X-plane actually calculates the aerodynamics. Translations? The programmer tells the simulator what the plane is shaped like, and the simulators tells you how it flies. Big difference. Just ask the FAA. Or NASA. Or Boeing, or Scaled Composites, or any of the other big names that use X-plane. You get the picture, we'll know more when I get the interview done, so stay tuned.


(July 25): DC: Turns out our DCX 0.9 wasn't really 0.9, but a pre-release 0.8x build due to some confusion on the DCX website. We've fixed the download, so click on the Macologist DCX link below for a fixed version (same URL). I'm not certain if the MacGamingMods mirror of DCX 0.9 is fixed yet. Also, if you want to do a manual install without waiting for our relatively slow FTP server, do the following:

Steps to install:
1) Got to DCX page here and download zip
2) expand
3) copy DCX folder to /path to battlefield/Data/Mods/
4) play

Microsoft's Reality Distortion Field: Read here.... Looks like Microsoft's new mapping system (Virtual Earth) has wiped the Apple campus off the face of the earth. They claim outdated photos, but the photo copyrights are all in the last year or two! It's a war out there, and Google responded immediately with their own new beta features for Google Maps, which can now superimpose road maps on aerial photos, read more here.

(July 24): Updated downloads links: includes fixed EoD.

Desert Combat Extended 0.9 (DCX) Macologist, MacGamingMods
Desert Combat Final (DCF) Macologist, MacGamingMods
Eve of Destruction 0.42 (EoD) Macologist, MacGamingMods
Galactic Conquest 0.53 (GC) Macologist, MacGamingMods (Star Wars mod)
Galactic Conquest Extended (GCX) 0.53b Macologist, MacGamingMods
Forgotten Hope .67a (FH) Macologist

Note: there is some possibility that DCX 0.9 may be labeled "0.8_", which may or may not be correct. Stay tuned for updates.


iBook Rumors: There's more and more frenzy at the rumor sites. . . Look for widescreen iBooks new from Apple this week! I guess Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he said there were several more PPC macs in the pipeline. With aggressive pricing, these make the PBs less and less moneyworthy. BTW if you want to mod your iBook's Apple logo to be colored, check out this relatively easy case mod from Macmine. One user did a Pink logo mod here.



(July 23): File download fixed: The "Eve of Destruction 0.42" mod below was corrupted (both at Macologist and MacGamingMods). The corrected version is here:
Eve of Destruction 0.42

(July 21): Macologist Desert Combat Final multiplayer server: We have a mac-based test server up, it's at: adamward.dyndns.org or
adamward.dyndns.org:14567 (if the above doesn't work)
password available here.

Battlefield 1942 mod fix patch released: Get it here at Macgamefiles (9.1M).

Mods now work. Desert Combat works. So does Forgotten Hope, Galactic Conquest, etc.

As for mods, you can download them from Macologist, but our site is being overwhelmed lately, and it may take several minutes to load the front page. Monoman from the site Macgamingmods has graciously offered to mirror some of the most popular files. For now he has the following:

Desert Combat Extended 0.9
Desert Combat Final
Eve of Destruction 0.42
Galactic Conquest 0.53 (Star Wars mod)

I'll see if he can also mirror Forgotten Hope, as well as the upcoming Desert Combat Realism (official mod site), which we will convert for you over at Macologist. The DCR mod attempts to bring the DC weapons behavior closer to reality for those hardcore realism fans.

If Macologist is not overloaded, here are some of our download links:

BF1942 mods category
Desert Combat Extended 0.9
Desert Combat Final
Eve of Destruction 0.42
Galactic Conquest 0.53 (Star Wars mod)
Galactic Conquest Extended 0.53b
Forgotten Hope .67a full install




(July 19): DC/BF1942 Update: Apologies, Macologist is having some load issues, and it'll be up and down. The general press release from Aspyr should be out soon.

Some important details include: "The two major additions this version of the game has are support for more mods, including the popular Desert Combat Final & Extended mods, and built-in support for Game Ranger for finding Mac-specific multiplayer games."

Also, our testing has confirmed that all punkbuster issues seem to be resolved.

Version number will be 1.61, so stay tuned Thursday, and download those mods :)

(July 18): Desert Combat Fixed: You heard it here first. Go to Macologist and check our news here. The bottom line is that Glenda & crew at Aspyr decided to get in there and fix mod support for Mac Battlefield 1942.

Yes, the end result is that mods will work, with a particular attention to Desert Combat Final, Forgotten Hope, and Galactic Conquest (star wars). This is really wonderful news, and the fun part is that some of our Macologist staffers were given a courtesy call by Glenda so that we could help the engineers (Tim Fuller mainly) nail down the behavior of the bugs. Kudos to Rogue & Adam. After all this time Aspyr stayed to the line that they were not offering mod support, my unofficial bird tells me that they probably got enough potential customers writing in to say they wouldn't buy the game without DC support. Anyways the result is a happy ending for all. The patch is due Thursday, look for it at MacGameFiles.


(July 9): Saddened: It almost goes without saying, but I'm utterly saddened by the events in London. I had been IMing two people in the UK at the time (one from Macologist, one from Feral Interactive), and they found out early when the news reports were still very uncertain. I checked on old friends who live and work there, and you know what, *everyone* uses those underground lines that were hit, it's chilling. . . but overall, it's a deeply sad and lonely feeling I get when hearing about it all, seeing the wreckage, seeing the sign. My thoughts are with everyone affected over there.

(July 3): Podcastpodcast: I'm not sure I get the whole podcast thing. There I've said it. I'm not sure Apple does either, and Randall Stross of the NY Times ( article here )seems to agree. His article cites another analyst:
"I was surprised to see how prominent podcasting was," Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, told me last week, after he saw the new iTunes store. Mr. Munster explained his hypothesis: the podcasting phenomenon had simply become too large for Apple to ignore - it had to embrace it or resist it. By opting to embrace, the company regains the aura of revolutionary; by introducing many people to podcasts, he added, Apple "will reinvigorate conversation about the iPod."

It's a marketing tool at the moment. Rob Griffiths, a mac icon that I highly respect who now writes for MacWorld (who wrote a tips article for OS X users for O'Reilly Macdevcenter back in 2003 that I still send to people) seems to have some sharp words for the current implementation. The new article on podcasting is here, and he writes:
"
* Difficult to use for reference info: If you’re listening to a podcast about technology, for instance, and they mention a Web site, you’re going to find yourself quickly lunging for pad and paper, or opening Stickies or TextEdit to type in the URL...That’s why I greatly prefer the Web, magazines, and newspapers for content such as this...

* Not easily searched: Though you can easily save podcasts, thanks to iTunes, you can’t easily search them. So if you have 250 episodes of The Tech Talk Show saved up, and you want to go back and listen to the bit about Macs on Intel again, you have to remember not only the date of the show, but roughly where in the show the bit was that you wish to listen to again."

There's even a more technical article about tags explaining how the inventor of RSS suspects Apple has a hidden agenda in its podcast implementation to make this open medium something slightly proprietary, read more at the always interesting Tom's Hardware. If you just want to have fun with meta podcasting, podcast about podcasting, or a podcastpodcast, you can listen to a podcast interviewing Steve Jobs on the topic here. Veering only slightly off-topic, I had always wondered if the new iPods were still 4G (fourth generation), and according to apple (at ipodlounge), they are. It's probably still more of a semantic distinction rather than one of ROM revision, but the going theory is that 5Gs will coincide with iTunes 5.0. iTunes 5? Now where is all this going?

Here's my guess. All large iPods are now going photo-only. Apple is slipping in the features list of its music players in comparison to other competitors (although not in actual usability, design quality, overall hipness, or sales), and they know they need to up the ante soon to keep their lead, and the photo ability just doesn't cut the mustard. Steve Jobs has gone on the record saying the public demand isn't there for watching videos, but maybe he'll backtrack. Anything is possible after his little announcement at WWDC!

So far we have the recent embracing of the currently mediocre medium of podcasting + the speculation of video ability.

The logical combination in my head is video podcasting. But we have a kleenex-xerox brand word for that already: Tivo. I could be wrong, but if I'm not, well I said it first. Watch pre-recorded TV/Cable/Satellite broadcasts on your 5th gen iPod integrating Tivo (or a competitor) with iTunes 5.0.

iMac Heat: My detail-oriented friend Rob-ART Morgan of barefeats.com has another article that has me thinking about the iMac G5. Turns out the design of the machine allows the hard drives to run much hotter than spec, especially the internal temperature reading on SMART-enabled drives. Read his article here. He has a report from a user with a Rev B iMac G5, but I tested my Rev A, and it was also running at a very very hot 68C. I ran disk utility to repair permissions (to run the disk to generate more heat), and the temperature hit 71C (160 F). I'll try to make a heat sink out of copper foil or sheet metal, and in the mean time, I'll have to seriously consider getting my Applecare coverage in the case of likely premature hard drive failure. Check in frequently at barefeats.com for any updates on possible third party heatsinks.


C&C Generals: For all you Zero Hour fans out there, one of my new staffers super_kev has bundled up a mac version of the WWII-themed full conversion mod Blitzkrieg 2: The Finest Hour. More info and download URLs are here.

(July 2): Old stories & Stealth: I was just recalling a conversation I had recently with an acquaintance of mine who used to work for Apple in Australia, and she was telling me the story of how she met her husband (and Apple) way back in the earl 80s. She didn't work for Apple back then, but he did. One of their early dates was a trip to Napa Valley (I think it was Napa, because we had just been talking about wine), and he took her to a bomb-hardened underground bunker complex of offices that looked every part the military secret base, complete with gleaming walls and high-tech robots. Military? Nope. This was the Apple Computer datacenter, the brains and records of the corporation. Is it still there? I don't know. I didn't get the full story, but I would guess that the location was fairly secret, and he must have pulled some mighty strings to get her down there for a casual visit. I would guess that it's also fairly far removed from the major earthquake-prone fault lines of the Bay Area. And you know what, I bet it's still there, or something like it. Do any of you know? I haven't Googled around yet, but I guess I'll get around to it. You know our generation is lazy when we can't be even bothered to Google something. I mean, I get upset when people IM me URLs without explaining what they are, and I'm too lazy to just click. Don't laugh at me, I'm sure you've done it too.

On an even more non-sequitir direction, I was just thinking about Stealth marketing, and how Apple seems to be hip enough to use it, but hasn't. Plastering iPod posters all over targeted major cities (subway areas, contruction sites, etc.) doesn't count. Here in the US, there's a fun X-file-ish television show called LOST, that seems to be predictably formulaic (think Survivor and bad reality TV) at first glance, but isn't. Far from it. Anyways, the setting (although not the reason why it's interesting) is that there are survivors of a plane crash on a desert island, and everyone including the island seems to have secrets, some of them mildly supernatural. The point is, that producer ABC has quietly launched a website for the fictitious airline Oceanic Air, which looks spookily like the real thing. I think they hit the mark. Click on Track 815, then spend some time working through the seating arrangement. There are even fan sites already, such as one devoted to the hobbit's (Dominic Monagahan, aka Charlie Pace) band Drive Shaft, complete with mp3s and photos from ABC: driveshaftband.com. Even the mainstream automaker Audi got in on the action, if you noticed what looked exactly like a call for witnesses to the theft of an Audi A3 at an autshow. It was also fictitious, and an ouvre to a whole online game. The ad looked real, although the game site was less deadpan... however you know it's successful when half a dozen fan sites immediately pop up on the Net after a stealth launch. ABC is even cooler, as they haven't really advertised their Oceanic Air site at all. Very cool. Come on Apple, where is your stealth marketing, and where is your datacenter =P If they don't shape up soon, the iPod is in danger of past-cool backlash... well at least it will be when the competitors' alternatives are actually worthy (hardware design + software usability taken together). On that note, it looks like initial reports are trickling in, and that the developer edition of 10.4.1 for Intel does not install on other Intel machines. *Sigh* Now THAT would have been the ultimate in stealth marketing, leaking a working OS X for Windows. They could even have engineered future versions to be incompatible, and the leaked version to be unupgradeable. That would have won the stealth award in my book. C'mon Steve, where's that killer marketing instinct? Think different already...

(June 28): Apple updates: Go to your Software Update so your iTunes is better integrated for podcast functionality. I haven't tried it yet, and I was still trying to get over why Rendezvous is being renamed. Anyways at the Apple Store, the GeForce 6800 Ultra is being replace by the 6800GT, and the ATI X850 XT is replacing the X800 XT. Rob-ART Morgan of benchmark site Barefeats.com already has benchmarks posted here. In fact, the X850XT product is so new, it wasn't even listed on ATI's Mac products page.

Widgetgripe: OK I admit, I think I'm going to like the Widgets, despite the fact they remind me of Borland's old Sidekick for DOS, back in the day a pop-up utility window (in a commandline operating system) was simply revolutionary. My gripe? The calculator blows. I mean it's just an adding machine. For heaven's sake, any solar-powered Casio calculator or TI calculator with red LEDs from the 70's is going to have exponents and square roots. No, don't tell me to download the Inverse Polish Notation (RPN) Scientific Calculator, my mind doesn't work like that, and I bet most non-double-Es will agree with me. Why is there no "normal" calculator widget? I might have to learn how to code one =\ C'mon Apple. I love the skin too, it just needs a bunch more buttons. The closest I found was FormulaCalc, in which you type in a java computation, but it just irked me that it didn't accept exponents with a carrot, a la BASIC or Excel: 2^3 should be 8, but it wants something odd like pow(2,3). Gr. GRRRR. The Wikipedia and shatter-resistant pixel ruler widgets are cute (and useful) though.

(June 25): More MacIntel: Jim Rossman of the Dallas Morning news had more on the theory that Apple is hedging its bets with an OS X that could run on any Intel machine. He claims that the developer edition OS X seems to run an any current Intel machine, according to his sources. His opinion is that in the long run, leaking this dev edition may begin to convince part of the buying public to demand OS X at some time in the future. Read more here. I haven't heard the latest, but I think it's not out in the wild yet on the P2P networks, but it's probably only a matter of time, and Apple surely knew it from the start, yet still decided not to add in protections? We'll hear more I'm sure. Oh and BTW, Steve Jobs was invited to be on the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Pretty cool, and well-deserved considering the truly unique record of continuous hits at his Pixar.

(June 23): Frag: I was reading online news from Iraq last week and learned something I didn't know about jargon I associate with gaming: "frag". The term has sort of a depressing origin, that of the intentional killing of an officer by men under his command, something often done with a fragmentation grenade, hence "frag." If the officer was unpopular enough, so goes the story, the death would be blamed on enemy fire, and no one would contradict the story. Apparently this was done not so much because of interpersonal difficulties, but from a feeling of desperate self-preservation of soldiers who felt endangered by poor leadership. Then came Doom & Quake, and we have our term. Wikipedia seems to equate Frag with Gib, but gibbing is different IMHO, sort of a UT-style explosion of body parts (with physics) instead of an intact carcass model that falls.

(June 16): MacIntel: 1) Reading list: I've updated the reading list with a few more relevant links over at Macologist in this thread. 2) Also creating huge buzz today is Mike Kirkpatrick's article in Fortune. Why? He got Michael Dell to admit he fired off an email to Apple Computer saying he'd love to sell Dell computers with OS X installed as an option. Wow. M$ has to be watching this carefully, and Longhorn better not be any later than it is. I still have my bets on OS X Leopard coming out before Longhorn. 3) Despite rumors that OS X 10.4.1 (the run that runs on the Apple-Intel Dev machines) has made it into the Wild of the P2P networks. Apparently this news is, so far, premature. A few seeds have been spotted, but these have all been bogus files, or trojans. There was a neat macrumors thread explaining issues, scroll down to post #89 & #90 by user "MagnusDreddd." 4) BTW the conspiracy theory, which I almost have to agree with, is that Apple could be intentionally leaking OS X for Windows. All they would have to do is somehow disable updates or compatibility with later versions. The reason would be to create such a huge buzz, for potential switchers. . . Sorry Michael Dell, at least for now. 5) Apple has copyrighted the word "Mactel". Whether they plan to protect the term from use, or plan to actually use it themselves is unknown.

Other stuff: Before we move on to non Mac-Intel news, I simply have to quote Walt Mossberg's opening line from his last article below: "The war in Iraq rages on, the European Union is fraying and North Korea may have nuclear weapons. But if you read the business and technology news this past week, all of that seemed to pale before an event variously described as seismic, epic and stunning: Apple Computer has decided to adopt processors made by Intel for its future Macintosh computers."

Anyways, going over older items you may or may not have heard about. Google has yet another beta function, and this one is a Map function. Look out Mapquest! Try it out, it's search-based, just go to maps.google.com. Enter "Apple" in the left search field, and "Cupertino, CA" in the right side. Heck look up your favorite BBQ restaurant in your own home town. It really works. I can see Google in the automobile navigation system of the uber-wireless future, mark my words. And for social networking, I suppose it's old news that Friendster is out, MySpace & Xanga are in, but for college kids, it's all about TheFacebook. Originally started at the Harvard Campus, where the freshman photo directory is known as the Facebook, it has become ubiquitous, and its connectivity and relationship functions are legendary in their completeness and usefulness. I've heard of high schoolers who are itching to make it to college, just because of thefacebook.com. Ah well, and for the marketplace, call me old-fashioned, but I'm still an eBayer at heart, but I will try selling *services* more and more often at Craigslist. I'll keep you updated.

(June 11): Macologist birthday: Macologist.org was launched on this day last year, and how far has it come! ScvWebFire and I wanted a central place for the downloading of a few mods (mostly SAS, Tactical Ops, FragOps, and Red Orchestra), as well as a central discussion area for the lone "mac expert" of each mod. Very rapidly, we had all of the mac people for all of the UT2004 mod teams, then suddenly we attracted mac experts for BF1942 mods (as well as some official beta-testers), and later C&C Generals, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, Halo, and more. We edged into doing reviews, and were fortunate that publishing houses such as Aspyr and Feral took a chance on us, sending complimentary review copies. One of our high points has to be our mega-effort, the Doom3 benchmark piece, which is now a referred URL from Aspyr's Support pages. w00t! On a fun note, the Santaduck Benchmark for UT2004 has been added to MacWorld's official benchmark list, thanks to Clan MacAddict's Braniac_7 for spotting that one! Be sure to visit Clan MacAddict Forums for a variety of games =) I think the various divisions are currently looking into developing Tiger Dashboard Widgets as gameserver browsers. Anyways you can read my birthday thank yous here, which includes a list of over 30 new downloads (mods & tools) for Call of Duty, C&C Generals, ZeroHour, Ghost Recon, Homeworld 2, and Unreal Tournament 2004. And a big thank-you to Rogue for updating our site logo, so now we no longer have over a halfdozen copyright issues.

Intel/Apple news Worth reading: I've compiled a list of articles worth reading... here we go:

Ryan Gordon's 2nd WWDC update

Jon "hannibal" Stokes at ARS technica speculation intel roadmap for Apple

Macworld interviews game devs at WWDC

John Siracusa at ARStechnica

IMG gets game dev comments

minor article: sales chill predicted (as does our macologist poll)

Walt Mossberg of WSJ still recommends buying PPC Apples now:
He didn't have to say that, but he did.

Apple Matters' editorial: don't wait for Intel Mac

Apples Universal Binaries Page

Transitive supplying Apple with foundation for Rosetta technology

Intel Mac benchmarks These guys just don't quit =) T.S. convinced someone to break the EULA.


(June 7): More on Apple on Intel: Mac_Jedi has put together Macologist's first editorial feature on the whole Apple shift to Intel, you can read it here. I've culled together some interesting links... Macworld just interviewed game devs at WWDC about the Intel move. Altivec code is a problem, so Rosetta apparently will do little for game code. Arstechnica's John Siracusa had an interesting piece here, and he follows it with a nice speculation FAQ. He notes that hardcore powerusers are likely to be able to make OS X boot on current x86 hardware. In the other direction, if you want more on whether people will attempt to load (bootable) windows onto Apple-on-Intel machines, he has some more comments in an arstechnica thread. We'll be trying to interview some game and hardware devs soon at Macologist, so I'm looking forward to that. My remaining questions: How disadvantaged are Mac game devs now? Will purchasers of current and upcoming games be given patches to enable them to run the same purchases on newer Intel hardware? Will Classic support be dead? Will M$ still produce VPC, given that it's likely to run very very fast on Apple-on-Intel boxes? Will Pentium M (read: slow but low wattage/heat) be used in the first-gen Apple-on-Intel boxes? If so, look to see these on switch-friendly (and small heat-prone) machines such as the next-gen Powerbooks and Mac Minis. Look out Shuttle! And as Mac_Jedi speculates in the above Macologist editorial, will Apple and Intel finally move beyond the stultifying x86 architecture altogether? This would make sense for the performance machines such as the Powermac towers. Is M$ worried? Two questions for them: will Leopard on Apple-on-Intel be out before Longhorn? And you bet they noticed OS X running on a current-make PC. Steve Jobs probably believes that releasing OS X commercially for PCs will kill the Apple Macintosh hardware line, but it's certainly an option for the future, should Apple ever abandon hardware computers and move solely to iPods, OS X, and lifestyle and pro-cinema software.


(June 6): Keynote in progress; Intel move by Apple confirmed:
Here's the IRC log from #macrumors at irc.krono.net so far:

(UPDATE: keynote cleanup):

Official Announcement by Apple
QT Video of WWDC Keynote
Keynote IRC Transcript by MacRumors

(June 5): Keynote Countdown to the Answer: Will Steve Jobs in fact announce that Apple is moving to Intel architecture? Find out Monday June 6 at 10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -7) at the resources to be listed at Macrumors.com, which is when he is slated to make the keynote address at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. I'd check the Macrumors website and also come in early to their IRC and idle: #macrumors irc.krono.net, and maybe the WWDC site will have something in real time too, although I doubt it.


In the meantime, I'll leave you with an extra Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend screenshot that didn't make it into the Macologist Preview Gallery for P2:AW:


(June 4): Apple Intel: Of course, the hottest rumor around is that Apple is considering using Intel chips in its computer products. There were some rumors swirling around last month due to a Wall Street Journal report, but I think most people discounted it as scaremongering by Apple suits, in order to gain leverage over IBM, who has been deficient in many ways including producing & shipping enough chips on-time, and in particular, failing to design a G5 that will work in any elegant fashion in a laptop. That Apple is still selling G4 PBs and iBooks, when even the iMac is at a G5, is quite telling-- and I could use unkinder words here, so you can imagine that Mr. Jobs is unhappy, to say the least. And there's also that small matter of making him look bad with his 3Ghz G5 promise of so long ago. And was Apple ever in on that Cell deal?

Now there are more rumors that Apple really will do this, despite some worries of how the current Macintosh userbase will accept this change (although it may facilitate developing a new userbase, so look to see the first adoption in the MacMinis and iMacs, the units directly pointed at potential Switchers). The rumors say they may make the big announcement soon, at the WWDC, the big Apple Developer's Conference. Definitely stay tuned for this one, and in the meanwhile until Monday when the WWDC announcement might be made, you can read more here and here.

And myself? I'm hoping that this event will make it one-step closer to the end of Windows domination, the monopoly of mediocre. How? Finally getting the Steve Jobs OK to fully develop OS X for current Intel architectures-- now that Apple OS X is bsd Unix based, it's certainly a deliverable product.

Xbox: Just so you know what's hot outside of Macs, check out the E3 trailer for Advent Rising (XBox). The trailer is corny, and the spaceships are very Babylon5-spooky, but this is one of those really big-budget titles that hopes to create a full universe, story, and ... a set of sequels, a la George Lucas, but in the gaming world. Looks to be big or the up-and-coming version of what was previously the Halo demographic. I think the storyline is something like humans are a legendary race among all the alien races of the galaxy, and we are rediscovered and nearly extinct. I might be wrong, but I didn't care to read up.. I guess I'm not part of that demographic =x

(June 3): Virii: I was just reading an article in The Register about how the largest ever zombie bot attack might be brewing on the horizon. How it works is that an initial worm exploits vulnerable computers, then opens a slew of backdoors that make it vulnerable to subsequent Trojans which enable hackers to utilize these computers as "zombie" machines in a coordinated attack. I was thinking about whether it would be possible to write a "good worm", in essence something analogous to virus-delievered gene therapy in human medicine-- write a virus that exploits the backdoor opened by the first worm, in order to *secure* the computer and close the doors (maybe closing the door after a certain time period such as a week or two to ensure the good worm spreads to other compromised servers). Think about it, those computers would be compromised already, since I'm not talking about writing a virus to exploit vulnerable computers, un-updated computers which have not yet been compromised by the first round malware worms. I'm talking about writing something that would spread among infected machines to 'cure them', and spread the cure. The legal issues would be something to be careful of, as well as the fact that your "good worm" could be subsequently modified to be bad, but given that there is presumably already a bad followup worm out there to exploit the opened backdoors, it's really a non-issue. Think it through...

Machinima: Back to an old topic, real-time game-engine driven movies. Of course it already has a wikipedia entry, which mentions Sims and Halo, the most famous probably being Red vs. Blue. Did you know George Lucas used the Unreal engine for some previsualizations? I find it hard to believe, but I'll ask a friend of mine who worked on the RoSith as a previsualization guy (and on the Final Fantasy film as a texture artist). I haven't really kept up with Red vs. Blue (yes you can subscribe), or the world of Sims Machinima... there's a whole set of forums just on Sims at Machinima.com, and the Sims Machinima site Sims99 (check out the shows/movie-series sections of both sites). But I was thinking, now that Mac Sims2 is listed at Gold Master over at Aspyr's project status page, Mac users will be able to make their own Sims2 machinima with the new built-in movie tools, and can even enter contests such as the contest jointly being sponsored by EA and USC's film school. Oh wait... scratch that, the movie entries were due 5 days ago. Ah well, at least you'll be able to play the movies back on your game engine, which should be higher resolution and framerate than downloading the rendered result. I'm sure there's tons of machinima from MMORPGs like WoW and Second Life, but now it's getting overwhelming... maybe I'll make time to see Anna, a film about a flower I've heard a lot about, as well as Diary of a Camper, made years ago and credited by some as being the first intentional Machinima ever, and done in Quake. Machinima is going places, keep your eye out... for now the only "real world" exposure is for art house and fanboy applications (although check out this fun emotive demo that is interactive in your web browser), but it's just a matter of time before we see it everywhere. In the mean time you can wikipedia plot summaries of the big Machinima series like Red vs. Blue here. Oh, and btw if you want plot summaries of TV series, check out televisionwithoutpity.com. Some of their writers are not so good, but the guy who does the summaries for "24" is really a fabulous nut case, in a good way. He goes through each episode frame-by-frame, and can basically pick up on little patterns in the show, and whether or not they are followed... he really gets into the head of the writers. You'll have to get used to the nicknames he uses, but you'll learn to love them... like: DoDer, guess who that is. If you're even marginally a fan, you'll be impressed by these writeups.