This week, Bethesda announced an upcoming patch to correct the problems. I’ve been playing Skyrim more than any married, full-time employed person should during the time that I’ve owned it, and just hit the landmark 60 hours the other night. Coincidentally, my save file is right about 11 MB now, well above the stated 6 MB size. I’ve experienced almost no glitches, and nothing to agree with the aforementioned issues.

If my memory serves me, I’ve experienced two game freezes and minimal framerate drops, and all of it has occurred while I was background downloading content from the PlayStation Store. Since running the game is I/O intensive on the HDD, as is downloading content from the store, this does not surprise me in the least. I’ve seen videos of the supposed problem, but I can’t help to think there’s a good explanation that doesn’t fall squarely on the shoulders of Bethesda.

My question is this: Is there really a problem, or are users complaining about nothing? I bring this up, not only because I have yet to experience any significant problems during my significant time spent in Skyrim, but also because Skyrim on PS3 runs noticeably smoother than Oblivion did on the Xbox 360. Even at the worst of times, Skyrim compares nicely to the previous Elder Scrolls title at its best.

I know, comparing Skyrim to a game released over 5 years ago isn’t fair, but it’s the best frame of reference that I have, and users were crying foul back then as well. Personally, I had more problems with Oblivion on the Xbox 360 than I did with Oblivion on PS3 (yes I did play through the entire game on both consoles), and I’ve yet to experience problems with Skyrim on PS3. Maybe my life experience has made me a skeptic, but I’m not buying it. At its best, Skyrim is an ambitious game on a grand scale. At its worst, it is a flawed game with an occasional glitch and framerate hiccup, but not unplayable by any means.

And now I open up the floodgates: Have you experienced problems with Skyrim on your PS3? Am I an idiot for insinuating that there is no issue? Let me know in the comments below.

Skyrim on PS3: Took an arrow to the knee is a post from Techerator.com.

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Getting logged in is as simple as you’d expect, and Steam mobile even has support for Steam’s relatively recent Steam Guard account protection. Whenever you try to log into Steam on a new device Valve sends an e-mail containing a one time activation code to the address they have on file. You can’t log in without first entering that code. It adds an appreciated level of security for a service that many users have sunk hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars into.

Instead of trying to navigate Steam’s desktop-minded website on your phone you can now access Steam’s most useful features with an interface that has mobile devices in mind. Chat with your friends, check out active deals, or browse Steam’s entire catalog, all from your phone. You can even buy games directly from the app. If you don’t mind the extra icon in the status bar Steam will run in the background, making you available for chat no matter where you are (this service can be disabled in the Settings menu, where you can also set your preferences for receiving chat messages).

The Steam mobile app had a short closed beta period, but is now available for everyone who wants it. Get it for free from the official store for your preferred platform.

Valve Releases Steam Mobile App for Android and iOS is a post from Techerator.com.

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iBooks Author is an important tool because creating an ebook is a bit more complicated that exporting a Word document as a PDF. Self publishing services such as Lulu, Smashwords and Amazon’s CreateSpace, and Barnes & Noble’s PubIt! have free templates that you can use to create your ebook. Cover art is usually uploaded as a separate file. Your files are converted into the ePub format that will be readable by ebook readers such as Nook and Kindle.

All this is free – that is, until you actually sell your ebooks. These services can take anywhere from 15 percent to 30 percent in commissions. While that’s more lucrative than royalties paid by traditional publishers, you may want to truly self-publish your books. There are tools that will export ePub and PDF formats, allowing you to sell your own ebooks and/or distribute through one of the services.

Here are some free options that you can use to create ebooks on your own:

• PressBooks: This service is a WordPress blog that lets authors export books in ePub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML and inDesign-ready XML.
• eCub: This free app works on Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD and Solaris systems. It’s a very basic tool without WYSIWYG.
• Sigil: Free WYSIWYG ebook editor works in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

Jutoh costs $39 and is a WYSIWYG ebook editor imports text files or lets you create the ebook from scratch. It works in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Some word processing and design apps such as Atlantis, Adobe InDesign, Pages and Scrivener will export documents in ePub format.

Conclusion

It may be worth your while to create your ebook with one of these apps before uploading it to an ebook selling service. They may be easier to use than the templates provided, and having your own ePub-formatted manuscripts give you more flexibility for selling your books.

How to create, format and self-publish your own eBook is a post from Techerator.com.

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But if what I am saying is right, then why hasn’t this all come true yet? The reasons are many, some minor and easily overcome, and some not so much. Let’s start with an explanation of what HTML5 and JavaScript advancements are already doing in the mobile world.

HTML5 is the new HTML standard.

Major enhancements such as the <”video”> tag, CSS3 animations and better JavaScript support are what have made HTML5 such a hot topic. With the power of HTML5, web developers and programmers can write software in a cross-platform language and save significant time and effort.

HTML 5 Development Platforms

Some companies, such as Sencha who developed Sencha Touch, and Prism Technologies who developed PhoneGap, have created mobile development platforms that reach from Android and iOS all the way back to Blackberry and Windows Phone 7. The reason these platforms are so flexible is because they utilizes HTML5, advanced JavaScript and CSS3 to replicate a native app using a web browser.

I’ve had experience using Sencha Touch and PhoneGap (PhoneGap makes it easy for users to load HTML5 libraries into a native app “wrapper”, which can access hardware-specific functions such as the camera and accelerometer, for distribution on an app market) and have found that while it is very useful while building information and text driven applications, it is not very effective in creating graphically intense applications such as ones with photo galleries, interactive menus, or games. This leads me to why HTML5 has its limits in the mobile world today.

Mobile Browsers

Each mobile OS has a browser that is used to generate the HTML5 application. The problem is that not every browser was created equal, especially when it comes to HTML5 support. When looking at HTML5 on an iOS devices such as an iPhone 4s, HTML5 is very responsive and smooth.

This is not so true with Android and Blackberry. Although Android has good support for most of HTML5, it has many “artifacts” or poorly handled graphical renderings that make it slower, less attractive, and overall less responsive than its iOS counterpart. This is the main reason development of HTML5 has not surpassed development of native applications to date. There are a few other limitations to HTML5 such as hardware support when accessing components like the camera or file systems, but HTML5 hopes to circumvent that soon with future standards.

The conclusion is that HTML5, while being very powerful and flexible when used with JavaScript and CSS3, is not yet a suitable replacement for native development and therefore one must first consider the goal of the said application before deciding to proceed with development in HTML5 or native environments.

But don’t forget, according to Strategy Analytics, more than 1 billion HTML5 supported phones will be sold worldwide by 2013. Read more here.

You can read more about mobile HTML5 support here.

HTML5 and the Future of Mobile Apps and Gaming is a post from Techerator.com.

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Lucas Oil Stadium, home of Super Bowl XLVI, will house around 85,000 spectators during the big game. There will be even more people in the surrounding area. To handle the inevitable high demand of cellular data traffic, Verizon will be setting up three cell-on-wheels (COWs), as they’re called, in extremely high-demand areas around the stadium. There will also be 400 3G and 4G LTE antennas spread out throughout the inside of the stadium, as well as 600 free WiFi hotspots that can handle 28,000 simultaneous connections. All of this is expected to handle 2.5 times the traffic of a normal NFL game.

Cell-on-Wheels (COW)

This is the first Super Bowl that will have 4G LTE connectivity in the area, so Lucas Oil Stadium, as well as 30 other downtown venues will be packing the latest 4G LTE antennas and technology.

The cost of all this? A cool $69 million.

The best part is, all of the upgrades made to the stadium and downtown will be left in place (except the COWs). So, the next time you’re in Indy, expect to get crazy fast speeds.

There’s no estimate as to exactly how fast the 4G LTE will be for spectators during the Super Bowl, but GottaBeMobile.com was able to sneak inside the stadium before gameday and run a few speed tests. They ended up hitting 46 Mb/s download speeds. Not too shabby, but they were one of the only ones using it at the time, so don’t expect to get that kind of speed come Super Bowl Sunday.

Super Bowl XLVI will include the first ever social media command center used at a Super Bowl. A team of reps will be on hand to help you out via social media if you need it. They’ll be constantly looking for certain words or phrases that pertain to the Super Bowl. For example, if you tweet that the parking garage by the stadium is full, they’ll tweet back to you saying where more parking can be found based on other tweets. The social media command center will also be used to send out alerts if there would be any kind of emergency.

Lucas Oil Stadium image credit: Shawna Pierson

Super Bowl XLVI: The Year of Connectivity is a post from Techerator.com.

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I recently had the good fortune to play around with a tablet (specifically the Acer Iconia Tab W500) running the Windows 8 Developer Preview. While the developer preview is still a very early build (and it shows), it’s showing a lot of promise.

Right away I was impressed with Windows 8′s boot time, Microsoft is finally paying attention to an area it has struggled with in the past. With the help of the W500′s solid state drive I clocked the time from pushing the power button to staring at the log in screen at around five seconds. Compared to the 30+ seconds you’ll see on a Windows 7 desktop with a standard spinning drive that’s quite an improvement, and a necessary one for a portable device like a tablet.

In Windows 8, Microsoft added the option of tying your Windows Live ID to your standard log in. This allows you to sync things like browser bookmarks and passwords across all of your devices and facilitates downloads from the upcoming Windows Store. It’s similar to both Apple’s and Google’s approaches to tying your device to an account with the added bonus of syncing things you’d normally find in a roaming profile on a Windows-based network. Most everyone has a Live ID lying around for something or other, may as well put it to good use!

My favorite addition to Windows 8 is the expanded Task Manager. It’s actually useful! All of the stats you could ever want are available at a glance. Instead of just CPU and memory activity you can now see which processes are hogging disk or network access. Ever wonder how many threads are currently active, or how many open file handles there are? Probably not, but it’s there for you to view. The Task Manager also integrates the useful Startup (previously found in msconfig) and Services (previously services.msc) tabs, making them easier to get to.

Windows Explorer has also seen a welcome update with the addition of the ribbon interface found in recent versions of Microsoft Office. Gone are the days of having to dig through a menu just to do something simple like show hidden files and folders, you can now make it available right on the main screen by pinning it to the ribbon.

But enough about Windows 8 features in general, how does it work on a tablet? Pretty well, actually.

The main tablet interface will be familiar to Windows Phone 7 users as it’s basically an expansion on that. Big friendly buttons make it easy to go where you want to go, and standard touch screen rules apply (for example, to move an icon long press on it and drag).

Windows 8 also features a browser optimized for tablet browsing. If you’ve used other mobile browsers it shouldn’t take much getting used to. In normal mode, the whole screen is dedicated to website viewing, with additional options like the URL bar or tabs available at the swipe of a finger.

The most useful feature of Windows 8 on a tablet, in my opinion, is the fact that if you end up needing to do something that a traditional tablet can’t handle there’s still a full Windows operating system to fall back on. Sure, it’s just as clunky to use as past versions, but the important thing is that it’s there. For example, it wasn’t too long ago that Android was hurting for a full-featured video player that could handle such things as a wide variety of codecs or subtitles. On a tablet running Windows 8 that’s a non-issue, just install VLC and play whatever you want.

Unfortunately, the benefits of a full desktop OS also add something you might not want: weight. To handle an OS like Windows a tablet needs powerful hardware. That desktop processor and solid state drive don’t come light, and the W500 weighs in at around 3.5 pounds, compared to the iPad 2′s 1.3 pounds. If you have something to rest the tablet on it isn’t so bad (or if you’re using a ‘transforming’ tablet like the W500 that can plug into a keyboard attachment), but holding it up can get annoyingly tiring.

Windows 8 also features the obsession with whitespace that seems to be sweeping the design community

As previously mentioned, the familiar Windows 7-like portions of Windows 8 still don’t handle a touch interface very well. Right clicking is done by long pressing, icons and menu options are small enough to make them difficult to click with a finger, and convenient keyboard shortcuts are impossible to use. Hopefully the Metro portion of Windows 8 will be up to handling most tasks, because while a Windows desktop is useful as a fallback option trying to use it for more than short period of time is an exercise in frustration.

Windows 8 still has a way to go before it’s ready for prime time, but that’s understandable as it’s still early in development. A beta version is expected to be available sometime in February of this year which will hopefully address many of the faults found in the Developer Preview. Windows 8 probably won’t be a necessary upgrade on a desktop or laptop running Windows 7, but as a tablet OS it’s showing plenty of promise. And who knows, with Android being ported to x86 architecture and Windows 8 supporting ARM processors maybe we’ll see tablets dual booting Windows 8 and Android.

Special thanks to my dad for letting me borrow the tablet used in this article.

First Look: Using Windows 8 on a Tablet is a post from Techerator.com.

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For starters, the 2012 Macworld has been renamed to “Macworld | iWorld” to focus more on the iOS platform along with the Macintosh platform. And event general manager Paul Kent even said that this year’s expo is “not a trade show – it’s a lifestyle event.” Whatever that means.

Even with the attempts to keep Macworld as relevant as possible, attendance hasn’t been the same. The 2007 Macworld saw 44,000 attendees. That was the year that Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. At last year’s Macworld, the attendance was down to 22,000 — exactly half of the attendance from four years earlier. Is it because Apple hasn’t been there recently to show off its newest toys? Probably so.

However, some vendors say that the lower attendance isn’t such a bad thing. Veteran developer Christopher Allen says that recent Macworld expos have given smaller companies more of an opportunity to get their name out:

At its height, Macworld was starting to take on some of the challenges of CES, where it was getting so huge it was hard for a small company to get visibility. But now that we’re a smaller Macworld, it might be a little easier to get the word out.”

Still, this years Macworld is filled with nothing but accessory vendors and application developers. Don’t get me wrong, the accessories are definitely cool if you filter out all of the inevitable crappy ones, but there hasn’t been anything new ever since Apple was there — not even accessories that use Apple’s latest Thunderbolt technology. Well, except one: Western Digital’s first Thunderbolt drive, the MyBook Thunderbolt Duo. It made an appearance at CES earlier this month, but details were scarce at that point. It’s back at this year’s Macworld, but it still doesn’t have a release date or a price.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on Macworld. It does, in fact, take place shortly after CES, which makes it seem like somewhat of an afterthought, so maybe the lack of innovation and new products is expected at such an event. One thing’s for sure, though: Macworld is definitely not a news-worthy event any more. No longer will you see journalists lined up outside readying their laptops for a rigorous live blog that’s to come. It’s now simply a centralized place for companies and vendors to hawk their products to all of the Apple iFans puttering around.

Macworld 2012: Not what it used to be is a post from Techerator.com.

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IronPython is a version of Python that is tightly integrated with .NET, originally developed and maintained by a team of Microsoft engineers but recently released to the open-source community. IronPython integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio and allows you to combine traditional Python code with .NET technologies, including Windows Forms and WPF for UI design. The result is a Python-coded application that looks and behaves no differently than any other Windows program, which is a big improvement over the command-line programs typical of the language.

'Hello World' with IronPython

But how exactly does IronPython fit into the .NET world? The diagram below shows the basic functionality where the Python code makes calls to both the .NET framework classes as well as Python libraries. The Python code is then compiled by the IronPython Engine and converted to assembly code that can be executed by the .NET runtime.

IronPython isn’t just for the desktop and can be used to develop web applications that integrate with Silverlight, a Microsoft framework similar to Adobe Flash. If you’re worried about pigeon-holing yourself into Windows with .NET, fear not, IronPython is supported by Mono, an open-source and cross-platform alternative to .NET. Likewise, if you don’t have the money to throw down on a license for Visual Studio, IronPython Studio is a free IDE that runs from the Visual Studio Shell.

So, if you’re a Python developer and want to make user-friendly apps that can take advantage of all that .NET has to offer, bust out of your command-line world give IronPython a spin.

Bring Python to Your .NET Development with IronPython is a post from Techerator.com.

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1. Create a viral video that gets viewed by millions of people.
2. Create a YouTube channel that drives traffic to your brand over time.

Viral videos rely a lot on quirkiness and luck. Despite that randomness, there are some best practices that will help your video. The more methodical approach to building a popular YouTube channel requires a mastery of a wide range of online video best practices. The YouTube Creator Playbook is a guide to those best practices broken into Programming and Producing, Publishing and Optimization, and Community and Social Media.

For example, these are some of the best practices:

• Tent Pole Programming: Schedule online videos in connection with cultural events to create more interest in your channel.
• The First 15 Seconds:How to hook your viewers by making the beginnings more compelling.
• Thumbnail Optimization:Create thumbnail images that act as mini-movie posters for your online video.
• Social Media: Using social media to find audiences for your YouTube channel.

This is a very practical guide. Each best practice is introduced by a summary page that gives an estimate of how much time is required, description of what metrics are affected, estimate of how much the task will impact metrics and at what stage of production it will be used. The information helps content creators decide what is important for them to do.

The how-to part is rich in detail and ideas on how to implement each best practice.

The Playbook is a must read for anyone – beginner or pro – who wants to create and sustain an audience for online video. It can be browsed quickly for ideas and is strong on detail that explains how to implement practices. YouTube promises to keep updating the Playbook for more tips as they learn what works. There isn’t a subscribe option but keep an eye on the YouTube Creators blog.

Again, the Playbook is a must read. The advice is collected and presented in a very useful way.

Create better online videos with the YouTube Creator Playbook is a post from Techerator.com.

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Enter AirDroid.

AirDroid not only makes it easy to manage your files, but also do other managerial tasks on your phone, all wirelessly!

Setting up AirDroid is pretty painless. After connecting your Android device to the same wireless network as your computer, just open AirDroid on your phone. Hit the “Start” button (if it doesn’t start automatically) and type the displayed IP address into your favorite web browser on your computer. Then just enter the four digit password. You’re in!

Everything on the main AirDroid ‘desktop’ is pretty self-explanatory. From here you can browse text messages (and send new ones), uninstall apps from your phone, install new apps if you have the APK file handy on your computer, share clipboard contents between your computer and phone, and much more.

One of my favorite uses for AirDroid is to move files to and from my phone. File transfers are a bit slower over wireless than over USB, but if I’m feeling extra lazy the convenience of AirDroid wins out. Even better, through the magic of VNC I can start AirDroid, connect to my computer through a VNC client (I use android-vnc-viewer), connect from there back to my phone, and transfer files without ever physically needing to touch my computer. Theoretically you could take it a step further and set up a VPN to transfer files from your home computer even when you’re out of the house, but that isn’t something I’ve personally tried.

AirDroid might not completely revolutionize the Android experience, but it certainly makes managing your phone more convenient. Best of all, it’s free!

AirDroid can be downloaded free of charge from the Android Market.

Transfer files and control your phone wirelessly with AirDroid for Android is a post from Techerator.com.

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