• Can’t “hide”" unwanted apps – On blackberry, you can hide any icon or application with a simple option in the menu, then this icon will be hidden unless you select “show all”.  This was handy because Verizon would push new apps or services to the phone, and if I didn’t want to use them, I could hide them.  On Android, Verizon and the other carries have shipped the phones with certain apps preloaded, such as the Amazon Kindle app.  These are treated as system apps, and therefore cannot be uninstalled …unless you root the phone.
• Keyboard - I actually liked the surepress screen on the blackberry.  However, I’m beginning to love Swype more.
• Apps - Now here is the biggest difference of all.  Blackberries use some sort of antiquated system whereas the system RAM and available application space are the same, ergo the more apps I have installed the less total RAM I have, and if you hit that limit the phone at best becomes very slow, at worst becomes unstable or crashes.  The BB Storm has a paltry 128mb of “Application Memory”, about half of which is taken up by the system ROM to begin with.  In essence, you get penalized for installing apps that you would only use occasionally.  The rest of the internal storage, and the 8gb memory card?  Only for pictures, music and movies.  On Android, I get all 8gb of the phone’s internal storage, plus I can store apps on the memory card as well.  So I have the freedom to keep as many apps on the phone as I want, with no worries of running out of space or making the phone unstable.
• Browser – Blackberry’s default browser is terrible, it’s slow and awkward.  Putting Opera mini on the phone makes it marginally better, but browsing the web on the Storm was only marginally tolerable.  Android is worlds better, and now it has flash support too.
• App Store – I honestly don’t know if it’s just the demographic of the droid market versus Blackberry, or if there is more going on, but in my experience BB apps cost more and do less.  That nifty little Leveling app that the iPhone has?  Free, free on Android too, but Five Dollars on the Blackberry.  This is just one example.  The first lightsaber app that I saw on the store was also a paid app.

What did I like about blackberry?  The unified inbox.  All IMs, Emails, Facebook messages, SMS, etc., all went to the same inbox.  It’s split up a bit on android.  And while it wasn’t as fast as my screaming droid, I prefer the way it handles the email interface and the like.  Also, I might be a bit old fashioned, but I like to have hardware buttons to pick up a call and hang up, which most android phones lack.

Plus, I can remote desktop to my home PC from my android phone, that’s worth so many geek points.  So many.

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.

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.

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.

]]> http://www.brandorf.com/?feed=rss2&p=475 1 http://www.brandorf.com/?p=466 http://www.brandorf.com/?p=466#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:18:16 +0000 Brandorf http://www.brandorf.com/?p=466 Well you can only devote so many hours a day to job hunting. What do you do with the rest of the time you have, when you don’t have any money? Well, you play games. It’s been said before that books will get you through times with no money, while this is true, if you are a voracious reader like I am, you don’t tend to get a very good dollar vs. entertainment time value. So let’s stick to games, here’s what I’ve been playing lately:

The Longest Journey:
A classic point-n-click adventure game, hailing from the bygone years of 2000, where adventure game like this were still relevant. I’ll be honest this game has not aged well at all. However it has three things going for it that will always be relevant, regardless of how dated the graphics look. A fantastic story, superb voice acting, and some of the best writing I’ve seen in any game to date. Also for a point and click game, it does a good job of keeping the pixel hinting down to a minimum, and the puzzle are pretty logical.

Dreamfall : The Longest Journey:
The sequel to the Longest Journey, it’s interesting that it does not follow the format of the original game. This is a 3rd person action adventure title. It continues the story where the previous game left off. It’s a good game overall, the controls are a little awkward at times, and the game oddly enough includes some very broken combat and stealth mechanics. This time, however the graphics are very good, and we have a return of the excellent storytelling and voice acting that has become a hallmark of the series. I’ll warn you though, the game ends in a cliffhanger and reading Ragnar Tornquist’s blog, it looks like the continuation of the story, Dreamfall Chapters, may be a ways off.

The Maw
An absolutely adorable platformer with cute, likeable characters and an interesting primary mechanic of feeding the maw. The game itself is very simple, but the presentation is extremely well done. Short and a bit on the easy side, I still found it refreshing.

I’ve mentioned before that Steam’s weekend deals are a personal weakness of mine.  I’d bought all these games off of Steam ages ago, but just now got around to actually playing them through.  I had started and stopped TLJ several times before just now finishing.  Like finishing up that stack of books you’ve been meaning to read it feels good to polish off some games that have been wanting your attention.  I’m almost caught up on games now.  Unless this weekend’s deal on steam is too hard for me to resist.

We all hope you enjoy the game, we worked very hard on it.

Some other games from my graduating class:

http://www.runningincircles.org/
http://dystopiangames.com/

Luckily, all three of the book sellers at GDC had some wonderful books that I had never seen before, and some of them were brand new. Racing the Beam was one of the books that I crammed into my bag to take home with me. Racing the Beam serves both as a history of the Atari 2600 platform, but also an account of how some of the bizarre hardware constraints of the system shaped the fledgling art of game design.

Its quite enjoyable to read the sort of “war stories” that come from working on games or any sort of technical or design challenge. And the fact they they were able to do anything at all with such incredibly frugal hardware specs is laudable. The ‘lowest’ platform I’ve ever worked with is the Gameboy Advance, which is an absolute powerhouse in comparison. The 2600 does not have a framebuffer meaning not only do you have to manually redraw the screen every frame, but since you lack the framebuffer, you have to do it as the TV’s electron gun was scanning across the tube, taking care that whatever calculations you needed to do happened when the electron gun was resetting its position either horizontally or vertically (hence “racing the beam”). Also mind boggling is that the system only had 128 bytes of ram, to help you put that into perspective, the total number of bytes of raw text I’ve written so far for this entry is over 1700 bytes.

It was both enlightening and inspiring to read about the devious hardware trickery that went in to some of the early Atari games. Perhaps because I enjoy reading about other people being clever. This book is supposed to be the first in a series, so I look forward to whatever platform they do next.

Better insight into the book itself at wired.

The book on Amazon