dock

Tumbledrop 6teen launched on CartoonNetwork.com today! :D This was the first thing I did when I went freelance. It's a version of Tumbledrop branded with characters from the show '6teen', including music and artwork. I am pretty pleased with how this came together. There aren't many changes to the content other than a few bug fixes, and there will be a new version of Tumbledop coming up on tumbledrop.com within a few months.


My mac is one year old now! It's been quite a rollercoaster of a year with me, and my mac is definitely one of the most positive decisions that I made. It wasn't just the mac, but rather it represented sweeping things to the side and starting afresh. It got me into game programming proper, and made Tumbledrop. It got me into making music, and now it's a hobby of mine I'm keen to pursue. It's an awesome machine and something I really enjoy using.

So, speaking of Tumbledrop and Macs, I should get back to working on the iphone version of Tumbledrop. Progress is slow and it's requiring more care than I expected, but I'm getting the quality that I want out of it which is the important thing at this stage. :)

My iPhone came on holiday with me to New York, and it was quite an experience. Even though my phone was crippled by the expensive data charges over there (£6/mb!), it was encouraging to know that I could look up a nearby restaurant if need be. In actual fact this only worked out well once, and more often than not lead us to places that were shut. (sorry about that, travel companions!) Because of the long journeys involved, especially the flights there and back, I developed the syndrome known all too well to keen PSP users, and some laptop users too.

A.B.C.
- Always
- Be
- Charging

The iPhone battery is pretty good, all things considered. The problem is more that I find there is 'too much to do' with the device. Browsing the internet, chatting on IRC, playing games, listening to podcasts, and even making the occassional phonecall... they all serve to drain the battery (especially the games!). This is potentially a bad thing, and I found myself wanting to keep my iPhone charged as often as I could when I was travelling. I also suspect that I'll keep its USB cable in my bag so that I can charge it if I'm ever out on trips or anything. This is a far cry from my old Nokia and Motorola phones, but this is simply because those phones couldn't do anything at all other than phonecalls.

I'm very worried about being one of those guys who is seen to be 'always using his iPhone', and I would encourage anyone to let me know if it comes across that way. I am constantly trying out new things on it, but that's largely because I need to know everything the device can do if I'm going to be an iPhone developer. However at the same time I don't think it's the be-all end-all device, and one of these days I'll share a big list of problems I have with it. However, much like the Mac itself, the overall effect is a device I look forward to using.

Speaking of Mac, I just picked up iLife 09. I spent a while last night using the faces feature to associate people with photos, and it was doing a good job of picking other photos with them in. I'm looking forward to using the Flickr upload feature - I intend to take a lot more photos this year, for that matter. I'm also keen to get stuck into GarageBand 09, which doesn't really have any new features, but the Tutorials look fantastic and just what I need at my stage in learning music.

Apple just announced 'iLife 09', including a new version of Garageband that has piano lessons from Norah Jones (as well as guitar lessons), where it measures your inputs to make sure you're playing correctly.

I think I might have to pre-order this software.
(not just for GarageBand 09, but also for iPhoto 09's Flickr and Facebook integration)

I am officially now a dirty Apple fan. o_o;


edit: On a related note, here is me bitching about the 'I'm a mac' adverts in May 2006 XD, and how I wouldn't be able to switch to Mac.

Also, here are Japanese versions of the 'I'm a mac' adverts!

FuzzyClock remains one of my favourite applications on my mac (I've been using it for a few months now). Somehow my mac is much more my 'at home' system, and the fact that it tells the time 'roughly' is very relaxing.

I just bought and received a Saturn USB controller, in Japanese colours. It's very awesome indeed, and works on my PS3 as well. It was something I've wanted for ages, and I consider it as a gift to myself for having completed Tumbledrop on time. Of course you can't play Tumbledrop with a controller, but maybe I should make my next game playable with controller... ^_~

Of course, there are almost no games for the mac that I can play with it... curses! XD

Since when did wired USB keyboards have firmware updates? o_o

Also, our router crapped out recently, so I have bought this as a replacement. It's really effective, and wireless-N seems to work amazingly quickly. It's also a massive improvement for all of the wireless-G devices that we have, with a better range and signal in general.

It's my 28th birthday on Sunday, so I'm looking forward to chilling out and taking it easy. I'm going to London for a 'Sweatdrop meet' the day before, so it should be a fun weekend. I'm glad it's not a work day!

I've had my imac for five weeks now, and I feel pretty comfortable with it now. I'm definitely happy that I made the switch, and it's generally a pleasure to use. It hasn't been without its problems though, and its clear that the mac is still behind the curve when it comes to support, but it more than makes up for it in other areas. I'd be grateful to hear from mac owners about some of these issues, or from anyone really who has any interest in this stuff :)

Things I really like about the mac:

• The User Interface.
  The user interface for the mac is fantastic. It takes a little getting used to, but in general it seems a lot more responsive, and much better for dealing with the sorts of files I use. I love the ability to have giant thumbnails with useful contents, and I like that I can preview PDFs, DOCs and PSDs without having to open any programs. I love the fact that there are lots of design conventions that applications adopt in order to keep the experience consistent. It sounds lame, but I especially like the fact that everything animates into position - it makes the whole experience feel very solid. I still like Windows, but I find Mac OSX to be more 'comfortable'.
  
  
• The Dock.
  Initially, I found the dock to be weird and confusing, but now I find it second nature. I like the 'stacks' feature a lot, I like the feedback on application progress (like new messages from Adium, or speed reading from Transmission).
  
  
• The Keyboard. Best keyboard I've ever used. I'm oddly smitten with the 'pause itunes' button on there as well.
  
  
• The Dashboard
  I keep a 'web clip' of my google calendar on here, as well as using the gmail gadget, and a few other gadgets too. I quite like the stickies, and in general I like the idea of all this stuff being resident but well out of the way.
  
  
• Front Row (the media-centre style front end, with remote control)
  This was something I didn't even consider of interest before I bought the mac, but I have taken to using it almost every day. It's really great to use Front Row to watch videos, listen to music, or listen to podcasts. It helps that I have 'Hazel' to automatically move any movies that I download into my proper Movies folder. I love the tiny remote control as well, and video-podcasts now make a lot more sense to me. The fact that front row sits on top of all the other applications means that I don't have to care whether the mac is doing stuff, I can just grab the remote and fire up Front Row at any time.
  
  
• Speech
  I really liked this on my old ibook six years ago, and I still like it now. Getting an audio alert when an FTP file has completed, or failed, and any number of other alerts... is really useful. It means I can concentrate on what I'm doing without a pop-up window interupting me.
  
  
• Boot Camp
  I don't use it very often, but it does work fantastically. The only thing I've used it for lately is printing (see below), but it's nice to know I have the option. I intend to give Half Life 2 another shot at some point, for example, and I will definitely be using this for 3DS Max. I have itunes setup so that it accesses all the music from my mac hard-drive, so it's pretty comfortable to work in XP on my mac.
  
  
• iTunes.
  I've been using this on the PC for ages, but it seems to run much better on my mac. I have album artwork for all my music (about 200 albums) and the general user experience is fantastic. I've never really had a 'well kept' music collection on PC before, but now I have everything tidy and organised, it's great.
  
  
• The mouse's 'scroll ball'.
  I was prepared for doom and gloom with this, but in fact I find myself making good use of it. Sidewards scrolling actuallly makes a lot of sense at times, and it works a lot better than those stupid tiltable scroll wheels.
  
  
• Sleep mode!
  I never turn off my mac. It sleeps if it isn't doing anything, and it stays awake but whisper quiet if it is busy downloading or processing. It basically acts a lot like a laptop. I've never had sleep mode work nicely on a desktop PC, but this works great on the mac and I love it.
  
  

Things I don't like about the mac:

• No 'fullscreen' option.
  This is something I'm getting used to, but it's initially a bit weird for everything to be so window based. Things like 'expose' help a lot to cope with this, but with certain sorts of work I quite like working in fullscreen mode. I'm getting used to working this way though, and it isn't too bad.
  
  
• The mouse 'movement'
  I'm not very fond of the way that the mouse pointer moves on the mac. It has a completely different set of acceleration curve and movement speed options, and it feels very different than Windows as a result. I having two large monitors makes this problem more pronounced, and I'm getting used to it, but it's not something I'm fond of.
  
  
• My Printer
  Or rather, my mac doesn't like my printer. My HP 1018 Laserjet doesn't work at all on the mac, not even with weird fruity 3rd party drivers that I wasted time with. Consider me shocked that HP would be so lame as to not have mac support. I had considered printers to be pretty 'universal' now, even with linux.
  
  
• Ejecting USB-keys / SD Cards
  Windows XP has had it for a while so that you can eject any SD card ormemory stick without risk of it breaking. The mac, however, is stillvery picking about when you remove these that they need to be ejected,which is a bit of a nuisance.
  
  
• Parallels.
  Parallels was a big fat disappointment to me. It didn't support graphics hardware properly, and has weird restrictions (like it won't access all the USB drives that my mac has access to, etc). It also buggered up my Max license too, which I need to fix - seems that max's anti piracy stuff considered parallels to be a weird hack.

Despite the problems, I'm really delighted with my mac. When I sit down after work at my computer it's a breath of fresh air, or at least air that smells significantly different to my work PC. I've done one big project on it already and that was a pretty joyful experience. I took to displaying all the stuff I had done so far (image windows, windows full of files, etc) on my right monitor. I have upcoming projects that I'm looking forward to doing, especially comicking.

Here is my mac! ^^ I've had my imac for a few weeks now, and I'm really starting to like it it a lot. There are a handful of problems I run into here and there, but I'm generally getting used to it and finding the experience to be an enjoyable one. There's a whole host of aspects of the user interface that really suit me and I don't regret making the switch. It seems like a much friendly machine to use at home, I just wish I had more time at home to do things like graphics and comics work on it.

I still have my PC running alongside it, as I'm currently using it to do 3D graphics work. I haven't had much success with 'Parallels' so it doesn't seem too well suited to 3D modelling, so for the time being I'm going to keep my PC going for stuff such as this.

Work is really getting on top of me right now, and I need to make a concerted effort to manage this better than I have been. I'm about to do some more 3D work but I need to make sure I get sufficient rest.

Oh yeah, so.. question to mac users. What LJ client do you recommend? I'm currently using some sort of Dashboard Widget, but this is a bit cramped.