anderegg.ca

Glitch

2011-07-11

So there’s this Cal Henderson guy. I first heard of him when I was trying to decide if I should focus on Rails or Django. His talk at DjangoCon 2008 made me laugh my ass off. Many of the problems mentioned in this talk have been addressed, but it’s still worth watching if you like to chuckle.

Anyway, the next time I saw this guy was when he was talking about the building of Glitch. His talk was interesting, but I didn’t care as much about the game as I did about the technology. The game wasn’t coming out for a while and its concept was airy. I didn’t quite get it.

Fast forward a little bit and I see this come up in my RSS feed. Holy fuck. So Keita Takahashi is going to be working on this? Check out that trailer video! I’m now pretty excited about where this thing is going.

There’s a beta signup available on the Glitch website, which also states that the game is being released this year. I’m fairly stoked to give it a shot.

My personal browser war

2010-10-10

Remember the first browser war? I do. I was on Netscape’s side. For better or worse, they lost.

I’m not here to bore you with war stories. I’m just trying to put a picture in your mind. Back then there were two big browsers, and the underdog (Microsoft) stole the show from the market leader (Netscape).

Today, a lot of people still look at the web through an Internet Explorer window, but some sources say that it’s no longer most people. This time there is more than one underdog — and that’s awesome! Except, I can’t figure out what side I’m on anymore. To be more clear, I know I’m behind WebKit, I just can’t figure out which vendor is proving the best experience.

The contenders in my personal browser war are Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari. At home, I do my browsing in Safari. It’s the browser I started using in 2003 after being a long time Navigator / Communicator / Mozilla user. It’s extremely solid, fast, elegant, and has exceptional developer tools. These features have come over time, and Apple has done a great job of not letting the default browser for Mac OS X fall behind in terms of features. They’ve even given back to the community with the WebKit project, although this hasn’t always gone smoothly. In short, Safari rocks — Chrome just rocks a bit differently.

I started with Chrome in December of 2009. I decided that I would use it for a week before going back to Safari. I didn’t go back. Not at work, anyway. Its developer tools were always closer to the WebKit nightly releases than Safari’s, and that meant a lot. Plus the syntax highlighted “View Source”, the middle-click-to-close tabs, the unified URL bar… I was hooked.

So why not use Chrome at home? Well, Safari has its own set of features. Inline PDF viewing being chief among them. Most recently, the addition of Reader has kept the scales balanced, too. More than that, though, Safari still feels more solid. The text entry areas in Safari benefit from Cocoa goodness (meaning spell checking works in all text fields, as does the dictionary/thesaurus, and applicable Mac OS X services), where Chrome’s text fields don’t.

These are minor nit-picks however. The main point is, for the first time in the history of my use of the web, I don’t have a favourite browser. I have two. Perhaps one or the other will become a clear winner in the future, but for now the war continues to rage. At least in my head.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm UI tweaks

2010-10-02

Recently I was invited to the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta. I’m not actually much of a WoWcraft fiend. I mostly pretend that it’s a single-player game and just enjoy the solo PVE bits. Because of this, there’s a lot I don’t feel confident commenting about. I don’t care if anything has been “nerfed”, as I don’t do PVP or raids. What I do care about is the new experience. Specifically, I’m excited about the lengths to which Blizzard has gone to make the game easier to play for everyone, new and old players alike. Right now I want to focus on the tweaks to the UI.

The new UI solves problems I didn’t even notice I was having before. More than that, there are touches which add flavour and deepen the experience. Here are just a few of the ones I found really notable.

Multiple point-of-interest markers in the mini map

Say you’re an herbalist. Most of the time, you’re going to have “Find Herbs” active on the mini map. When it comes time to search out a mailbox, bank, or repair shop, you could switch to one of those and no longer be herbs on the map. In other words, only one thing could be tracked at a time. Now you can select more than one point-of-interest and they’ll all appear with distinct map icons. Awesome! This is something I wouldn’t have been able to ask for specifically, even though it has always bugged me.

Crafting interface

There are now two options:

“Have Materials”, and
“Has skill up”

Even at level 40 I’ve had a hard time keeping track of what I need to be crafting. These two filters will help immensely.

New ability notification upon level

When you level up, there is a new overlay displayed. It has a fade-in-and-out effect similar to the text shown when you’re entering a new area. If there are new skills or abilities available at your level, they’re pointed out in this overlay. Now there’s a lot less guessing about when you should visit your class trainer.

The above image also shows the “content download” widget at the top. I talk a bit more about this below.

Updated spellbook

This may seem pretty minor, but I was extremely impressed with the look of the new spellbook. It’s much more clean now that there aren’t different levels for basic class spells and abilities.

Updated skills

In the same vein, there is now an updated look the the Skills interface, now called Professions. Because there are no more defence or weapon levels, this screen only shows the skills associated with your professions. So much cleaner!

Inline tutorial

There is now an in-game tutorial. It starts out with simple movement commands and keeps going as you learn more skills. Some may find it annoying, but I think Blizzard has this right. WoW, as it stands right now, is a daunting game to get into. A tutorial is a great step toward making the game more friendly.

Quest directions

Another step in making the game more friendly is the addition of a “next quest waypoint” arrow in the mini map. This is akin to the sort of thing you see in a lot of other games, and it makes sense here as well. This functionality already existed in the full map, now it’s just easier to see at a glance.

Client update indicator

As I mentioned when talking about the level-up overlay, there is a content download widget which can show up. This is because you don’t have to fully download the game, or the newest patch, to begin playing. The updater will download a certain amount, at which point the game will be “Available”. At this point you can play, but the game will chug a bit as it streams down new content. After a bit more time the game becomes “Playable”, and there are only superficial pieces of content left to download. This seems like a good idea, but I found the “Available” level of play a bit too sluggish.

Overall, I’m really happy to have a chance to test out this new expansion. I love all of the UI changes, as well as the other tweaks which have been made.

I know there are lots of folks getting riled up over these tweaks to “their” game, but I find it all refreshing. Rolling a new mage, even in familiar territory, everything felt new. I suspect Blizzard understands this. Bored players don’t renew subscriptions, and those who have seen it all before need a reason to see it all again.

git commit

2010-09-23

Around the beginning of July, my hosting package with A Small Orange was expiring. The company had treated me well, but I was becoming unhappy with hosting on a shared server. I had completed a project earlier in the year that involved hosting Django on a Linode instance. This whet my appetite for more Django work, but I didn’t feel that it made sense to host a tiny, never-updated blog on a VPS I would later have to babysit. Instead, I looked to Google App Engine.

I’d worked with App Engine on a couple of small personal projects — toys, really — and one medium-sized site for work. I liked using the provided web framework, but hadn’t been successful at getting Django really working on it. This time, though… well, at least I got it working. There were all sorts of fiddly issues — no PIL for image manipulation (even though I needed PIL on my local machine for emulating the production environment), gaps in the Django to Google Accounts authentication bridge, and a number of other small nit-picks. I decided that I could just go forward with the Google provided framework, but at this point I was also a bit disheartened. I wanted to look around for other options.

After a time, and many reviews read, I found Webfaction. I was told by all the reviews I encountered that they were the best Django shared host around. I gave them a shot, but they didn’t fit what I was looking for. Everything about the service was extremely flexible, but there was a strange disjointedness. There were many things which could be done through the administration panel. For the most part, admin panel tasks were straight-forward and Just Worked™. However, there were often tasks which required that you do a thing in the admin panel, SSH into your account to twiddle some scripts, then do another thing in the admin panel to finish the task. I felt like, if I already had to SSH in to get things done, why not just pay slightly more and have a full-on VPS? Of course — again — I didn’t really want a VPS just for a silly blog.

Eventually I cancelled my account and was given a full refund. I really don’t want to seem too harsh on Webfaction, as I didn’t really give them a fair shake. I just showed up, saw some things which rubbed me the wrong way, and left. By the amount of others who can speak no ill of them, I’m sure they’re doing something right. However, I was realising at this point that I just wanted something simple and very light. I also knew that I wanted to have absolute control of my markup, so a Wordpress or TypePad sort of thing wasn’t going to cut it. By this point, I was feeling sort of fed up with the whole personal site thing, and I stopped looking around for a while.

It wasn’t until quite recently that I stumbled across toto. This reminded me of Osxome, which I was using on A Small Orange to host the previous version of the site. Now, Osxome isn’t very good, and I can say this with some authority, being the one who wrote it. It worked passably for its primary use, getting the North Knight Software site up quickly and cheaply, but for everything else it was too cludgy and unpolished. toto on the other hand looked pretty slick. It was developed for use on an amazing looking service — namely Heroku, it uses Markdown instead of plain HTML, and (most importantly) it’s designed to use git to move posts to the server. I wish to heck I had’ve thought of this.

So, yes, I could have dusted off Osxome and tried to make it not suck, but I decided instead to give toto and Heroku a shot. That’s where I am right now as of this writing. Hopefully I’ll not lose the blogging urge for a little while yet!