PC gaming blog par excellenceRock Paper Shotgun takes a critical look at some of last years games-related Kickstarter projects and asks: “where are they now?”
Well clearly that didn’t happen. But everybody who cares at least knows it, with every step of the development being filmed. The game, codenamed “Reds”, is getting a brand new engine, which is what’s taken up a lot of the last eight months. Development is due to “ramp up” next year. Sadly, their Kickstarter updates – while enormously detailed – are all for “backers only”, which rather misses the point of promoting a game.
I’m currently backing 2 gaming projects, the aforementioned Double Fine Adventure and Planetary Annihilation. In Adventure’s case I’m of course slightly disappointed it missed its August deadline, but the documentary and updates provided to the backers so far have more than made up for it.
I feel as though I’ve been ragging a little too much on Microsoft these last few weeks, so to offset, here’s a valid critique of OS X’s flakiness from David Chartier:
Exhibit A: Open Mail, find a message with a zip attachment, and double-click it. Nothing happens? Oh something happened. Archive Utility opened to work its magic on the zip file, but you missed its appearance in the Dock if you blinked. Don’t see anything else? Of course you don’t, because Finder opened a new window to reveal the spoils of Archive Utility’s victory behind Mail and didn’t bother to tell you. No Dock bounce, no Finder brought to the foreground to show you the folder.
To add a personal perspective on this, I’ve found that since Lion, OS X’s windowing has gotten increasingly buggy and annoying, with apps or Finder windows either stealing focus, or refusing to gain focus until I cmd-tab to them. I upgraded my personal laptop to Mountain Lion and it’s improved upon these issues (although they’re still there in certain situations), but my work laptop is still stuck with Lion and some days it can get very frustrating indeed.
Part of me is thinking that Apple is closer to making iOS as powerful as OS X than it is at fixing OS X to be as user-friendly as iOS. Which is scary, because iOS’ closed nature wouldn’t make it a very good platform for professional creators and developers… hopefully by the time iOS reaches critical feature parity with OS X Apple will have introduced a pro-sumer line of iOS devices to prevent that critical segment of their ecosystem from leaving to another platform. Although it’s hard to imagine another platform to leave to, with Windows having jumped the shark, Android having many of the same problems iOS has, and Linux being pretty much a non-starter for people who just want to do work with their tools, and not embark on a never-ending quest to find just the right distro and configuration.
Jeff Atwood once again expounds the virtues of gamification:
Since I left Stack Exchange, I’ve had a difficult time explaining what exactly it is I do, if anything, to people. I finally settled on this: what I do, what I’m best at, what I love to do more than anything else in the world, is design massively multiplayer games for people who like to type paragraphs to each other. I channel their obsessions – and mine – into something positive, something that they can learn from, something that creates wonderful reusable artifacts for the whole world. And that’s what I still hope to do, because I have an endless well of obsession left.
In June, director Martin Scorsese tried to show his 1993 film The Age of Innocence at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor for the past 40 years and a three-time Oscar winner, called Grover Crisp, the senior VP of asset management at Sony, for a 35mm print. But Sony not only didn’t have a print, it couldn’t even make one.
Daniel Eagan writing for The Atlantic, paints a depressing picture of media obsolescence, and how digitization isn’t always the answer, considering the ever advancing nature of technology: films that were digitized years ago are already becoming dated in terms of resolution.
Speaking of the Kin, Wired published a rather damning article featuring some leaked internal user-testing videos taken during the final stages of the Kin’s development:
These internal Microsoft videos, provided to Wired by a person who worked on the project, show focus groups testing the ill-fated Kin. According to our source, these are pre-production models that changed very little from the shipping product, although “performance improved some prior to shipping.” Watch them, and you can readily see why the project tanked: Kin phones just weren’t usable. Or, as our source described them, they were a “pile of shit.”
Add to that Nielsen’s damning usability review of Windows 8 and you really have to start asking yourself a couple of questions: such as what’s the point of doing user-testing if you’re just going to ignore whatever they say and release broken products anyway? Is it just incompetence, or ill-will towards their customers?
Clearly some people inside Microsoft know what they’re doing (the fact that they’re even user testing at all is a testament to this), but clearly something is preventing those people from having any real influence in the final decision making process.
I realize I’ve been ragging on Microsoft a lot lately, but it’s done more out of bafflement than out of irrational hatred. I myself was a long-time Microsoft user (hell, I grew up with DOS games) before I switched in 2008 out of sheer desperation for a modern OS that wasn’t a complete piece of crap. I just don’t understand how a company that had such a head-start in life could be so careless in throwing it all away in the space of a decade.
Charlie Demerjian paints a depressing picture of Microsoft’s past failings and how they all add up to a company that’s entering (or is close to entering) a death-spiral. This paragraph in particular is brutal in its summary:
So here we sit, Microsoft has utterly failed in phones, utterly failed in tablets, and is seen as a has been by the next generation. The company can point to technical superiority all day, but people aren’t buying. Windows 8 itself seems to be dropping sales of PCs too, and that will have a knock on effect to their server OS as well, something that is also losing share at a frightening pace. To stop the decline after only losing the majority of their marketshare, Microsoft took the unfathomable move of forcing a touch UI on servers. If this doesn’t make clear the depths of how lost Microsoft is, and how reactionary their fixes are, nothing will.
It’s really sad to see how Microsoft has been consistently failing to do almost anything right these last 10+ years (their XBox brand seems to be the lone exception). We need strong competition in the personal computing space to foster innovation, and it’s sad to see one of the biggest players fumble quite so badly in this regard.
And it’s hard not to point the finger at Ballmer and Microsoft’s insanely machiavellian office politics for an explanation why one of the richest companies in the world (both in terms of money and engineering talent) could appear to be so utterly incompetent. They were in a position to be first in both the smartphone and tablet race, but they fumbled it.
Instead of the Courier, they gave us Silverlight, the Kin and Bing. Think about that and ask yourself why the hell Ballmer hasn’t been thrown out yet.
UsabilityPost… erm… post on the (non-standard) text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; CSS property, which enables certain type specific features like ligatures and more accurate kerning. However, be aware that this extra functionality comes with a cost: performance. Read Marco Arment’s post on the topic for more details on these caveats.
