Wow Item Creator!

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Yes, that's a map of Middle Earth on it.

I was fortunate to receive a Barnes and Noble Nook for Christmas this year. I figured I’d sum up some of my feelings about the device.  First up the screen; it’s a beautiful screen, seriously a joy to read on compared to a normal LCD monitor or my phone.  Even though I was reading ebooks on my blackberry previously, there’s no comparison.  The whole device fits well in my hand, and I can use it equally well in either hand.  The Touchscreen on the bottom is nice as well.

Pretty much the only faults I can find with the device are all related to the software.  First gripe the “More in store feature” the premise is that if you take your device to an actually B&N store, the Nook notices this, and you get special features and offers while you’re there.  I tried this last week for the first time.  While the Nook did acknowledge that I was in fact in a B&N store, nothing else happened, no special features or offers.  I ended up asking a manager if she knew what was supposed to happen when I brought one of these in, but she wasn’t able to tell me much.  At this point, I’m willing to assume that this is some sort of infrastructure problem, or perhaps it’s too soon for these features to work?

Next, no browser.  This is pretty minor I suppose, but there is one thing that the Amazon Kindle can do, and that’s lookup things on Wikipedia over it’s cellular net.  I get a little geek thrill over the idea of this, as it’s pretty much the closest thing we’ve got to a Hitchiker’s guide to the Galaxy.  Granted, the Nook is an Android device, and it has already been rooted such that we can put our own apps on it, including a fine web browser, it’s a bit of a pain to do so.

The Nook as an interesting feature called “The Daily”, this is where you magazine and newspaper subscriptions show up, as well as where a couple of daily columns show up.  The feature falls a bit flat in my opinion for two reasons.  First, the daily columns are just that, daily, meaning that if I don’t check todays articles, they won’t be around tomorrow.  The ability to go back a day or so would be most welcome.  Second, there’s no capability to customize this content.  This would be the perfect place for a news feed reader to go, I’d like to be able to subscribe my nook to one or two RSS feeds out there, and have that show up on my nook.

The last gripe is the music player, I have no doubt that it was put in as an afterthought.  I didn’t have an need to put music on the device, but I figured I’d try it out.  It’s lacking some incredibly basic features which I expect from just about any music player, Like playlists, browsing by artist / album and cover art display.  With the exception of cover art these are things that my $5 Sansa player can do, there’s no excuse to put a music player on a device like this, if the user can’t easily select what they want to listen to.

That’s it for my rant I suppose.  Overall I do like the device, and B&N has promised some sort of magical firmware update to address some of these problems, but I’ve heard that sort of talk before.

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When it comes to programming projects, I can be a bit schizophrenic.  I can be right in the middle of working on a project, when all of a sudden I drop everything and start another project.  In this case it’s just a simple WOW addon, but I’d been meaning to learn Lua programming, so it was a win-win for me.

You can see the fruits of my labor on curse.com, which I must say, is a very well done project site with its corresponding curseforge.com.  I was very impressed with how quick and easy it ended up being.

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Well, my friend Ari, despite going for his masters, apparently has the spare time to go out and do more work on the side, how’s that for dedication?  (Instructors, I don’t think you are giving him enough homework.)  At any rate, his enthusiasm is contagious, and has me now pledging a portion of my free time to work on an open sourced game. 0 A.D. I’m quite impressed with what this game has accomplished so far, it reminds me very much of Age of Mythology or Age of Empires, two of my favorite RTS games to date.

After talking with their lead programmer I’ve been accepted into the team, it’s been a trip getting my head around a project of this size (and it is HUGE).  I hope to make some solid contributions to the project over time.

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