An Artist's Rendition v3.6
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Fixing a broken key

I got a new notebook. I decided to pick up the HP Pavillion tx2500 convertible notebook. I was looking at some netbooks including an Asus EePC or the HP MiniNote. But there was a pretty good deal on the tx2500 at the time, I couldn’t the resist the larger screen or the tablet. I’ve actually been using the tablet mode to surf the net very frequently. It’s very nice to see more of a longer view of the page.

i did run into one little problem though. After a couple of times of use, one of the keys fell of. I was able to snap it back into place temporarily, but it continued to fall off. It was very annoying, this needed to be fixed, but I didn’t want to have to send the notebook in for something that looks to be a simple thing to fix. So, I had to look it up. Found a good site that explains how you, if you’re gutsy enough, can fix that pesky key problem for yourself.

09:09 pm | Gadgets and Hardware
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Rock Band 2 Cometh

I’m really exited about Rock Band 2. While there hasn’t been much Rock Band playing at our place of late (due to my stupidity in breaking the drum pedal), Kate and I jump at every chance we get to play. We recently helped out some bands out at Chris and Fla’s house and at Nakfoor’s place as well. It’s really such a great Party Game, or make you feel good game, that almost a year after release, we’re still playing. It’s no surpirse that we’re both looking forward to Rock Band 2 coming out in a couple of weeks.

While looks to be the Rock Band 1 that should have been:

• No weird leader for bands
• World Tour playable by offline and online players
• No vestigial “Guitar Hero” solo tour
• Solid instruments.

We’re not going to pick up the special edition this time. Sure our pedal is broken, and it would be nice to have wireless drums and guitars, instead we’ll be enhancing our experience with the Omega Pedal. While it’s been extremely unfortunate we’ll be getting our new pedal a solid two months after we ordered it, I still can’t wait to get it and play some drums. Sure, Rock Band 2’s drum pedals will have a supporting metal plate, but even they won’t compare to the difference of the pull springs in real drum pedals as opposed to the push spring of the game instruments.

If you’re looking to enhance your drumming in Rock Band, there are several other modded pedals you can find online (there’s the Destroyer Pedal or the Rock Pedal). I decided to go with the Omega Pedal mostly because I couldn’t find a matrix with the difference of all three pedals, and because of the good review from Ars Technica.

It’s really great that Harmonix and MTV could get most of Rock Band 1’s songs transferable to the sequel, as well as all of the DLC. I’m sure Kate won’t be missing the three songs that won’t be transferable, I am a little sad that “Paranoid” was in that short list. It’s no matter, I don’t mind losing those songs in comparison to the total list of Rock Band 2’s songs. I’m in particularly looking forward to enjoy:

• “Feel The Pain”
• “Everlong”
• “My Own Worst Enemy”
• “Come Out and Play”
• Spoonman”

And if they release The Colour and the Shape like rumoured I’ll be in Rock Band Heaven. Just take a look at the gameplay trailer that features “Everlong”. That single clip made me wish September was actually much earlier.

08:30 pm | Video Games
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The UI Still Burns. UI Problems in Soul Calibur IV

I’ve been enjoying Soul Calibur IV the past couple of weeks, it’s been frustrating but fun and challenging in such a way that I’m still coming back to try to perfect it. Unfortunately, my online game has been horrible and as such I’ve sworn off it. Instead, I’ve just relegated myself to only using grabs against the CPU – especially when fighting against Vader’s Apprentice – when I get too frustrated that I can’t land any moves at all!

But there are some things that are really distracting me when I’m playing the game, and I’m sad to say that It’s the UI. Sure it nice and polished, but there’s just too much of it sometimes, and sometimes there’s not enough.

Story mode is nothing more than a series of predetermined fights sandwiched by flat loading screens with random text and icons. I was really disappointed by the execution of this mode. It definitely seemed like one of those ideas that was never going to have enough time to execute properly, so it gets added with minimum fuss with the use of UI. For example, the beginning story on most of the characters could have been cut in half with the other half done as in-game cut scenes. The character showdown/loading screens could have been as nicely polished as the Arcade version, but instead is left as a dull screen with icons and skill points. And the chapter screens: do they really have a point? There isn’t a lot of extra plot dialog before and after the fights for them to make any sense! Like I said, this mode was really disappointing.

Story Mode loading screen with character info. Very Flat compared to the Arcade loading vs Character shots. Image source: Kotaku.

On the other hand, the Character Creation mode could have done with a little more options and information to keep it from being overwhelming. Starting off, you’re taken to the same Character Selection Screen as any other mode, but if you’re new and you’re not reading the manual, how do you know that selecting a regular character just creates a new wardrobe for that character but to create your own character you need to select the button with the male and female portraits in the middle?

If you do end up selecting an existing character, it might then be a surprise to see that the several options in the Model Information page are disabled and unchangeable. This makes sense in context since you aren’t creating your own fighter but adding a wardrobe to a current one, but how are you supposed to know that? This is a usability problem that I’ve yet to see a good solution for. Should you just not show all the options if they are unavailable? Show them but leave them to be selectable or unchangeable? Show a hint somewhere as to how to enable them? Are they unlockables? I think on this case, it would have been better to only show the options that can be changed for the current fighter. I know a couple of people who were puzzled by their inability to change these options their first time creating a character.

Custom Characters have all options available

Notice the black options on the left side

Also, you have to be careful when creating a brand new character. Depending on the decisions you make for your fighters basic traits, changing one piece of clothing could leave you without enough skill points for a skill that was added depending on your traits. I’m not sure what the idea behind this was, but I was surprised that the mode wouldn’t let me save and exit after creating my first character because I didn’t have enough skill points to fill a skill! It was odd, because I had yet to assign any skills to this character, yet I was already over loaded on them!

These are really just minor points. The character creator is rather well done over all, allowing you to change most of the major colors in just about anything, selecting from a variety of equipment, and allowing you to pick different skills for each character you create. But there were definitely some minor areas where they could have polished the experience a little more to alleviate some possible areas where users could have become confused and frustrated.

Is this really necessary? Can you tell what it’s for? Image source: Kotaku.

11:02 pm | User Interface , Video Games
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Another credit under my belt

It’s just 4 more weeks until Tiger Woods 09 will be available for sale. Because I’m not a seasoned veteran just yet, I’m still somewhat excited about the third game I have helped create and the first title I’ve worked in its entirety. I came in close to the end of the cycle for last year’s Tiger Woods 08, so while I was excited I had done some work on it I feel even more so for all the extra work that I did for this years release.

Very excited at what the public is going to think of our features this year. Take a look at what we’ve got prepared in 09:

While this years release of Tiger Woods isn’t on my birthday, like it was last year, it’s still coming out around that time. You can expect to see it on store shelves August 26.

10:26 pm | Video Games
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The sad state of Windows Mobile

Kate and I recently upgraded our phones. This is the second time around that we get identical phones (well, almost identical, mine is red). We ended up getting the Samsung Blackjack after an afternoon of going to all the cellular stores having Kate play with all the keyboard phones. I had actually been eying the Palm Centro because of its bigger and touch capable screen as well as built in threaded messaging, but decided against it as I had a friend run in to problems running Opera mobile on it. I’m also not a big fan of Blackberrys, so I too decided I would give Windows Mobile a try, thinking that because it’s a windows device, there should be a good amount of decent software for it. I was mistaken, to some extent.

One of the nice things about the Windows Mobile platform, is that if you’re capable, it’s somewhat simple to create your own custom home screens. There aren’t too many resources available, or plugins for that matter, but it is a possibility. The home screens are simple xml files that contain information on which plugins to use as well as simple layout information. All the home screen files are kept in \Application Data\Home folder of your phone. You can just place a new file there, and the display settings will read it up. I just used the ones that came with my phone as reference, and moved some stuff around to create something that I found useful.

Decent software has been a little bit harder to get a hold of then I originally thought. While there seems to be a renewed interest in creating good applications for the windows mobile platform, it seems to all be directed purely at copying the success of the iPhone. This means that all the really nice applications are touch only. I tried downloading some of the applications at I (Heart) Windows Mobile.com but couldn’t use any of them because they are touch only. I actually encountered that with several applications I installed. Thankfully, the creators of iContact added regular input to it so that I can still use this application without the touch feature.

Even iContact makes me feel like a secondary citizen. Without touch input, I can access some of the buttons on the screen! Use of the soft buttons, as well as the back button in windows mobile devices is not consistent at all. ExtremeText, the application I’m using for threaded messaging, doesn’t do anything when I press the back button, same thing with the IM app my phone came with. One would hope that pressing back would take you to the previous screen, but this apparently needs to be done in the app level.

Setting up ActiveSync in vista has been really simple though. So, at least that’s a nice break. It’s really nice to be able to sync your pictures and music from phone to your computer. Syncing is so painless, I’ve been thinking about trying to get podcasts to load onto my phone. I did have one snafu though trying to connect sync through bluetooth. After syncing with the computer through a USB cable, and setting up the bluetooth connection, you still have to run the ActiveSync app on you cellphone to connect. Still simple, but an extra step I hadn’t though of until I googled it.

10:56 pm | Gadgets and Hardware
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UI Fail! Winamp

I know I’m not the only person that runs windows with the task bar somewhere else besides the default bottom of the screen position. While I’m particularly taken to have my task bar at the top, there are many a developer I’ve seen use the taskbar on the side as well. And why shouldn’t people be able to move the task bar? It’s such an easy thing to do in Windows, back in the heydays of Windows 95, it was as easy to resize and move the bar as it was to just select something inside of it.

So why is it that more then 10 years since it’s original inception, we still see things like this:

That’s Winamp’s update alert visible under my top oriented task bar. Tsk. The Winamp developers are apparently unaware to the fact that this is a very probably place for the task bar to be, but they care not. Winamp will incessantly keep placing that damn alert window at the very top of the screen whenever the program is opened, even if i bother the move the window down before closing the program.

The worst part is not that the window appears when Winamp starts, but rather that under Windows Vista, it can’t be closed to easily. The task bar in Vista, unlike that of previous Windows versions, can’t be shrunk manually. To close this errant window, I have to make the task bar auto-hide, be careful not to get too close to the edge for the task bar to show it self again, while I try to press the (x) to close the window. I can’t even right click on Winamp and un-select the alert window, like I could un-select the Playlist window to hide it.

I seriously doubt the Winamp developers really wanted to make closing that popup such a pain, but due to their lack of forethought about different monitor and task bar configurations, they have made what should be simple, rather complex. And that’s a problem for me, because as Jeff Atwood stated, we […] tend to radically underestimate the impact of the dozens of small events in our lives throughout the day. Every user interface for your application should always be simple and straight forward to use. As tools, applications have to be as out of the way as possible to let the user do what they want with the application. When an application adds just a little bit of annoyance, or a little bit of uneeded complexity, it’s UI is failing you.

10:03 pm | Software , UI Fail
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