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Spore Officially Sucks

I’m giving up on this piece of crap. I get to play a while, but then it hangs my machine and requires a hard reboot. I have a quad core machine with 4 gig of RAM and an nVidia geForce 8500 video card, but both my XP and Vista installations of the game completely hang the machine. Their licensing scheme limits how many machines I can put it on (even though it insists on logging in before I can play), and one of my three installs got burned on a Parallels install on my Mac that won’t run because it says I don’t have enough video card power to do it. They don’t support the Macbook video card, so even if they released a license back to me, it wouldn’t run native on Leopard - and this machine isn’t even a year old. Customer support is unresponsive, firing off canned responses that are just the same junk that’s in the read me file. I’ve had enough. Spore stinks. Don’t buy it. As many computers as I have it won’t run for crap. I’m sorry I plunked down the money for it.

Mixed Feelings about Spore

I’ve been playing Spore a bit. I’ll admit, it’s quite engaging. However, I’m disappointed by a couple of things:

First off, it won’t run on my MacBook. They were kind enough to include a Mac installer, but Spore doesn’t like the graphics hardware in my year-old notebook. If I’d been toting the thing around for four or five years I might be able to understand, but it’s really disappointing that they didn’t provide support for this very popular platform. Hopefully they’ll fix that in the not too distant future.

Second, it tends to hang - at least on my Windows hardware. The first few times I played I never got around to saving my game (it doesn’t take all that long to get through the microbe phase) and, before I got too far into the creature phase the game has locked up on me (in Windows XP and Vista both), requiring a hard restart of the machine.

It’s early in the game, so I’ll cross my fingers and hope for some updates. In the meantime, even with those annoyances, I will have to guard my time preciously so that Spore does not continue to steal hours from things I really ought to be working on.

They know where you live

It was odd… when I would hit the Maps icon on my iPhone from inside my house, the application would act like it was triangulating from cell towers (the blue circle would show up and waver, then zoom in), but it always homed in on my old address. We moved six or eight months ago. I had never actually had the iPhone in that house (we moved before I bought it). I thought maybe it was using the old address from my contact record, so I cleaned that out, but it didn’t make any difference (which makes sense… unless I had told the phone to use it, how would it know which one to use?).

So I went digging.

I finally ran across Skyhook. I’ll admit, I didn’t know that this thing was out there, but here’s what it is, in a nutshell:

Similar to Google Streetview, where they drive around with cameras installed on top of cars and take pictures of everything in site and tie them to map coordinates, Skyhook rolls around and collects information on wireless access points (using the MAC address) and hooks those to geographic coordinates. At some point in the past, the friendly Skyhook van rolled through my circle and geocoded my WAP. When my iPhone goes to see where I am, it sees that I’m connected to a wireless access point and uses the MAC address to ask Skyhook where I am. Last time they heard from it, that WAP was in another city, so it takes me to my old address.

So I used their form to submit an access point, which required my address, my MAC address, and an email address so that they can update their database. I have mixed feelings about how much they know about me now, but it’s all becoming so transparent today anyway… everyone knows a lot more about you than you would rather they did, or they can find out easily enough if the mood strikes them.

So, for good or for ill, Skyhook knows where my WAP is sitting now, and within a few days (hopefully) my iPhone will figure it out as well. Skyhook offers a plugin called Loki that will make your notebook computer able to locate itself based on the WAP it’s hitting as well, share that information with friends, etc. Attempting to install Loki didn’t work, though… Firefox 3 claims that the plugin does not provide secure updates, so it told me to take a walk.

iPhone Rollout Articles

My iPhone was bricked most of Friday (like everyone else’s) after Apple’s botched iPhone 3G rollout. I was surprised at how few articles about it hit my feeds on Friday, but now they’re starting to show up.

I can’t say it any better than Seth Godin did in this post about Scarcity.

Steve Wozniak purportedly cut in line to get his 3G iPhone.

Here’s one more from Wired Magazine.

Things for iPhone

Things is my favorite GTD tool for the Mac. It will be even better now with Things for iPhone. They got their iPhone version ready (sans a few features) in time for the iPhone 3G release, and even hit the top 25 apps list. I already paid the money for the app - I’ve been using Things on the Mac ever since it showed up in beta, so I was happy to throw them a few bucks in support. I’ll license it as soon as they’re ready to take my money.

The iPhone application looks pretty good, although it is pretty much a straight up iPhone list management tool. It will be better once they get tags implemented, and of course synchronization with the Mac version. I will wait patiently. Things is a fantastic tool.

Brevity

So far, I’ve been a pretty poor blogger. I spend too much time worrying about what others will think about what I write, or that I don’t have enough to say. But as I read my daily pound of feeds, I notice that there are plenty of bloggers who are clearly unconcerned with what other people think (given the outrageousness of what they say), and others who are clearly unconcerned with the length of their missives.

One of my favorites in the second category is Seth Godin’s blog. You may recognize him as the author of The Dip. Seth doesn’t always blog a lot of text, but he always blogs.

So today I vote for brevity and just come here to say something. To say something brief, but to say it out loud.

Do you ever stop yourself from speaking because you think you don’t have enough to say?

Tell iCal to Stop Sending Replies when you Accept a Meeting Invitation

I really don’t like that iCal takes it upon itself to send an email notification to the meeting organizer whenever I accept a meeting into my calendar. I pull them in from an IMAP client from my office Exchange mailbox, and if the meeting is in there, I’ve already responded to the organizer and don’t want to do it again. I finally found a right way to make it stop.

Find this script and open it with the script editor:

Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/Mail.scpt

Now look for this function and stub it out with comments:

on send_mail_sbrp(subjectLine, messageText, myrecipient, myrecipientname, invitationPath)

Just type two dashes in front of every line between on send_mail_sbrp and end send_mail_sbrp, then hit the Compile button.

The next time you accept an appointment, iCal won’t send an email notification.

Even better would be to make it give me the option, or open the email so I can cancel it if I don’t want it to go out, but for now I’m happy with this.

Superfine

I just got some Uniball Signo bit pens from Jet Pens. Jet Pens is a great place to get cool pens that are hard to find in the United States, like the Pilot Hi-Tec C. The Uniball Signo bit is touted as being the “World’s thinnest pen.” I like writing with a very fine pen, and this one is easily the thinnest I’ve ever seen. Almost like writing with a very sharp pencil, the tiny tip can seem to be scratching against smooth Moleskine paper until you get the right touch. The lines from my 0.38’s look downright chunky and bold in comparison with the 0.18mm lines from these.

If you’re a fine point fan, you need to give them a look. They’re not cheap, though, so be sure you mean it.

My iPhone Rant

I’ve had my iPhone for a week or so now, and I really do like it. However, I’ve got a few questions. Doubtless thousands of other bloggers have mentioned most of this same stuff, but I haven’t posted anything in a while so I’m going to join the chorus.

• What do you mean I can’t copy and paste?

  This has been a ridiculous limitation on what is touted as such a sexy and incredible device. Trying to ride on a friend’s WiFi network the other day, it was impossible to type the long security key correctly (the iPhone won’t let you see what you typed in a password field), and without copy and paste he couldn’t even mail it to me. Trying to remove large amounts of text from something you’re forwarding, etc., is also a pain since you can’t select chunks of text.

• What do you mean I can’t write software for the device, only web pages for the device?

  This is another glaring omission. This is largely how Apple lost the initial war to Microsoft - it was easier to develop stuff for Windows machines. Not letting us build native apps for this machine, depending on everything to run in the browser, is completely backward. Face it, if I want to run web apps, I’d rather be at a real browser, not a phone browser. The Safari browser works pretty well, but an application platform it ain’t.

• What do you mean it won’t run Flash?

  With the amount of Flash web content out there, Apple puts a lot of web sites out of the iPhone’s reach by leaving this out. Hopefully this was a rush to market decision and we’ll see a Flash player on the device soon.

• What do you mean I can’t search for anything?

  One of the true beauties of the Palm OS is the way you can search the entire device for a bit of information. On the iPhone, you can’t search for anything. You would think that the contacts list would provide this at the very least, but nothing I’ve seen so far gives you the option to search, short of pulling up Google in the web browser.

• What do you mean birthdays and other dates I attach to contacts don’t show up on the calendar?

  This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity for applications to work together, but the contacts list and the calendar are oblivious to each other. You see other evidence of the vacuum in which some of these were created by watching the position of Done, Edit, and other buttons. They are not terribly consistent.

• What do you mean there is no punctuation on the keyboard?

  I’m getting used to the touch keyboard - it’s not as bad as I thought it would be, although I do miss my Treo keys - but I don’t understand why they hid the period and the comma. When you type in an email address, the space bar turns into extra punctuation, so there’s clearly room. They should just leave it on all the time. They could make the symbol key itself a lot smaller and gain room for quotes or a question mark.

• What do you mean there’s no menu?

  Apple sometimes goes for minimalist stuff when it just doesn’t make sense. I would love to see a standard, top of screen menu that lets me get to settings and such for the app I’m running. If I need to tweak something in my mail settings, it’s stupid to make me leave the mail app and launch the Settings applet, then drill down to mail settings, tweak, exit, load mail and then start the whole process again.

• What do you mean not all of the apps rotate?

  People are always wowed when they see the Safari browser or the photos turn sideways when I turn the phone, but why don’t all the apps do this, or do this consistently? The browser will let me view it from any angle, but the video player has to be held a certain way. HTML mail messages are often difficult to read because they are too wide, but turning the phone doesn’t affect the mail application.

• What do you mean there is no SD slot?

  This is another place that Apple suffered in the hardware wars - expandable PC’s ruled over closed Apple hardware. They could easily have fit an SD slot in this thing and give me some power to increase the capacity.

• What do you mean the battery is soldered in?

  I know that they claim they couldn’t have made it this small and had a user replaceable battery, but I cry foul. I was comparing the phone with my wife’s RAZR. The back of the RAZR is thinner than the iPhone, but somehow they managed to incorporate a door and a removable battery. Are Motorola’s designers more clever than Apple’s?

All that being said, I still love my little iPhone. I’m just hoping that they rushed it to market and will fill in many of these blanks as time goes on. I was more surprised that they shipped it with such huge gaps. It’s got it all over my Treo (with the possible exception of the keyboard), so I’m happy I switched and I will not be going back.

Although I’m pretty sure I’ll have to upgrade if V2 has a real keyboard.

OpenLaszlo Project Blog » OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial

I’ve been looking at OpenLaszlo a little more, and found this great video introduction on the project blog. 

Link to OpenLaszlo Project Blog » OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial