Macs and Games by Thom McGrath
I don't think there is a person alive who won't contend that Macs don't play games well. They did, a long time ago, but not any more.
This is nothing new. What is new is Steam on Mac. With its recent release, this argument has been revived. Again. I'd like to take a second to point out a simple fact:
PCs suck at games too!
Here's the key fact. A PC you buy off the shelf is no better at playing Portal than a Mac is. Both standard Macs and PCs include low-power discrete video cards, or run on integrated cards alone. This is nothing new! If you want to play games on a PC, you put in a powerful video card. If you want to play games on a Mac, you put in a powerful video card.
The problem is that Macs don't have the expansion options that PCs do. PC components almost always adhere to similar standards, so parts are interchangeable. Nearly every PC has at least one PCIe slot suitable for a video card. Macs don't.
So for the record: Macs suck at gaming about as much as PCs do. But you can upgrade the PC, making it suitable for gaming.
Oh, and I'm a PC gamer. Screw the Xbox, my PC can run circles around it. I'm primarily a Mac user though.
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Microsoft officially supports H.264. by Thom McGrath
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the mess regarding HTML5, Flash, and video. Some new developments have surfaced, which changes the game significantly.
Microsoft announced yesterday that Internet Explorer 9 will support only H.264 video in the HTML5 video tag.
All of the sudden, H.264 looks like it'll win the war. Microsoft doesn't traditionally pick the winning technology (if you need an example, Microsoft sided with HD-DVD years ago) but in this case, they're siding with Apple who usually does win technology wars.
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Apple is betting on the wrong horse by Thom McGrath
Since the iPhone's release and Apple's bold stance against Flash, I have sided with Apple in the belief that Flash must die and they are doing the right thing.
Apple is instead pushing for rich content powered by HTML5. HTML5 is a remarkable step forward for the web, although as usual, Internet Explorer isn't keeping pace with the rest of the industry. Most of the things developers are using Flash for can be done with HTML5 instead, but without browser plugins.
When it was new, Flash was fun and exciting. We knew it was unoptimized, but we expected that to be fixed. We said "hey, this is a great first start, it should have nowhere to go but up." And it did. It grew wildly, but not because it was good. Flash was never properly optimized, with its developers assuming more powerful computers would offset their laziness.
Playing video on the web is mess. You need to send a file to a particular browser plugin, but you don't know if the plugin exists on the user's computer. There was no sure-fire way to play video. Then Flash added support for video playback, and everybody jumped on board. It was an easy way to author video that would play on nearly any device without worrying about the details. Sure, it has the worst playback controls available, the quality generally sucks, and it eats up all a computer's resources - but it was easy for web developers.
Flash still isn't optimized. It still destroys batteries. For good reason, Apple has kept it off of their mobile devices. They've bet on HTML5, which has a new video tag allowing the browser to properly decide what to do, rather than rely on the website to declare the plugin to handle the video.
At first glance, this seems like the right move. Until you look at the HTML5 video spec.
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My Take on iPad by Thom McGrath
Apple's iPad announcement was completely on-par with my expectations. It is basically a large iPod Touch. There is actually nothing magical or revolutionary about it, despite Apple's claims.
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Steam is pretty cool by Thom McGrath
Steam is Valve's community and game distribution service. I was introduced to Steam some years ago when I started playing Half Life 2. The ability to download complete games was pretty neat, and I did that. The idea of having Steam running all the time bugged me however. I thought "why on Earth should I keep this running just for Half Life?"
Also, digital download services bother me, because I don't physically have a copy of the product. When I want to install a game, I really don't want to wait hours to download it.
I recently started playing Left 4 Dead 2, which requires Steam as well. This time around, however, my impression of it has completely changed. The reason behind the change is Left 4 Dead 2 makes excellent use of Steam and the community features. It is easily compared to Xbox Live, but less awful. Here's a few cool features:
- Steam will automatically download updates for Steam-powered games.
- Steam Cloud keeps my settings synced between computers.
- I can make physical backups of the games I download.
- Steam sells a lot more than just Valve games. In fact, most new games are available on Steam.
- Valve Anti-Cheat is better than PunkBuster.
- By pressing shift-tab, I can bring up an overlay which includes friend information, and even a web browser. I can do this in any game, even non-steam games. The ability to bring up a browser in-game is very handy, especially in games such as Borderlands.
I could keep going. Overall, I think Steam is pretty cool.
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Microsoft continues to threaten web development by Thom McGrath
I just read an article about Internet Explorer 9. Considering that Internet Explorer 7 and 8 have made significant strides towards standards-compliance, I was under the impression that IE9 might begin to support CSS3 and HTML5. Especially since Microsoft has taken an interest in working with the W3C, Apple, Mozilla, and Google on HTML5.
First the good news. IE9 brings significant improvements to JavaScript performance. This is fantastic since IE8 cannot keep up. I've actually disabled some features on the REAL web site when using Internet Explorer because it just is not fast enough.
The bad news is that Microsoft is continuing to threaten standards. Rather than supporting the proposed cross-platform WebGL, Microsoft intends to support their own Windows-only Direct2D. Once again, developers will need to choose which side they're on. It is nothing new either. In the IE6 days, developers needed to choose to do things right and support everything except IE6, or do them simple and wrong to support IE6. This will be even worse, because a developer looking to do 3D will have no choice than two write two sets of code, or choose to support only IE9 or standards browsers.
Does it surprise me? Yes and no. It surprises me because it seemed as if Microsoft was interested in making a good browser. It does not surprise me because Microsoft gets everything else wrong, so why would this have been different.
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Feedback Tricks by Thom McGrath
Here's a short list of some neat secrets about Feedback:
OpenSearch Support
If you use any OpenSearch enabled browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, you can visit http://feedback.realsoftware.com/ and your search field will light up with the ability to search our Feedback database. If you add it as a permanent search provider, you'll be able to search Feedback from your browser. The results will still launch Feedback and display the results there, but it can be handy if you are on our forums or read the mailing lists using a webmail app.
iSeek Site
For the few and far between users of iSeek, I've prepared this search site that will allow you to search Feedback from your menubar.
Alternate Theme
Feedback uses three different themes to render its content. On the Mac, either Aqua or Graphite is used according to the user's system preferences, and on Windows & Linux, a more neutral theme is used. Currently, only the action bar is rendered differently, but that could change in the future.
You're not completely confined by your OS though. If you want to use the neutral theme on Mac, fire up terminal and type
defaults write com.realsoftware.feedback "Use Neutral Color Scheme" -bool YES
And reset it by using the same command, but replace YES for NO. On Windows and Linux, it's a little trickier. On Windows, you need to edit the registry. The path is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\REALSoftware\Feedback and add a value for "Use Neutral Color Scheme" = 0 to enable Aqua.
Linux uses an XML file in ~/.realsoftware/Feedback/Preferences.xml which you can add a key to:
<element><key>Use Neutral Color Scheme</key><value type="8">0</value></element>
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