Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

For those of you who still follow jivemaster.com (I know it’s a very neglected site), I have decided to expand into new territory (which, for those who follow me (@jive69) on twitter will find as no surprise), the topic will be – technology. I have become a complete tech head and have been obsessed in one way or another with Android phones, tablets, apps and gaming over the last 18 months. I am in no way a tech expert, but I thoroughly enjoy the stuff, not to mention reading, sharing and talking about it with friends and family, so it seems to really be the only thing that I can be trusted to update on a weekly basis.

As such, most of my time blogging and stuff will be focused on my new project, jizmo.net. This site will not be closed however – it will remain as is for the time being. Of course the alias is not dead – it will forever live, but shortly I will convert jivemaster.com into a more personally orientated site. The music, which basically stopped after my Melicious Neo Zeed project, will live at its new home neozeed.com. It is my expectation that in the future I will make a return to the Neo Zeed project in one way or another, although the direction it will take may be different to what is ancticipated.

Until then, Jive out.

Was going to have a go, but realized I wouldn’t want to put my hands on those communal controllers. Icky.

Coming form android the apple app store is painful. There is absolutely no excuse or argument to not have a trial period for all app purchases. This is the Android market’s main advantage over the app store. Android gives any app purchase a once off 24 hour cooling off period. Your transaction is left pending and not transacted until the end of the trial period, and at any time during that period you can uninstall and obtain a full refund. This can only be done once for each app. Clicking to buy again locks you into the purchase, which is fair and avoids people buying and refunding an app only when they need it.

Apple fanboys boast about their store being larger, but what is the point of a larger store if you can’t try before you buy. You just sit confused, lost in a sea of apps, relying upon websites such as this to work out what’s best, and even then you could end up with a dud. Then what? You have to buy another. It took me a whole 2 days of research on my iPad trying to work out what the best rss feed reader was for me, and at $6aud a piece, there was no way I was going to be buying two or three of them. I only need one, and I want to choose the right one from the start. It would have been much quicker for me to download the main couple I was interested in and tried them first hand, then refunded all but the one I was happy with. Instead i had to rely on the opinion of others, and those opinions don’t always lead you to what you want…

This problem is further excentuated by the fact the majority of apps in the app store are paid for.

As the apple platform is supposedly more secure than the android market, there is literally no excuse to not have a trial for everything. The only reason I can see against it is apple wants to catch you out and have you spend more money than you need in order to work out what you really want.

-Joel

A. You buy an ipad for half price – cause you’d be fucked in the head if you paid full…

Ok, after circling myer for 2 hours having difficulty in finding something worth my free vouchers (acquired through enduring a psychotic focus group), I decided to deprive the poor potential customers of myer Brisbane of their last measly 16gb ipad (wifi version only – I’m not an idiot).  **Matt D falls out of chair**. Now was as good a time as it’s gonna get for me: recently released, less than full price and hot on the heels of the latest jailbreak release. And besides, $350 is all I’m willing to pay for something that I can’t run a full blown OS on.

Let’s get down to it – the build quality is nice. I don’t think that can be disputed. It’s solid. The screen is nice and clear, even though it’s only plain lcd.

First thing that shits me: I have to link it to itunes on a pc or mac before it will even let me do anything on the device. Not cool – I had to use Rachel’s macbook because there’s no way in hell I’m installing itunes on my pc. I’m sorry – it just doesn’t belong.

The speaker has great quality sound, with decent bass … but it’s only on one side, so it’s stereo effectively mixed to mono. WTF?! As a muso this is the first major annoyance for me – I bought the Korg iElectribe drum machine (which is actually very decent) and the beats are coming from one side and it’s driving my head mental. Headphones required. Apple take notes: implement stereo separation in ipad 2.0.

Battery life, superb. Nowhere as epic as people make it out to be though, but it’s more than I expected, and will obviously get better after a few more recharges. More than a netbook obviously. If all you want to do is just web browsing, this has enough power to last for 2 nights easy.

Next annoyance: App store. Granted – there is fucktons of stuff – 3x that of android. But for something of this size you’d think there’d be a much better way to trawl through the shit and garbage better? Considering you pay through the arsehole for the device and apps, I spent 1 day trying to find simple applications. For the amount of money going and being spend at this store, it’d be great if it could read my mind or something. You basically have to know the name of what you want in order to proceed, because you don’t have a hope in hell finding something you may want. It’s hard to find ipad only apps too, you need to read really carefully to make sure it does properly support the ipad, otherwise you get ghastly horrible pixelated scaling. For a company solely occupied on eye candy to impress customers, why is there no softening used on this?!?

Which brings me to the next thing: no refunds. Well, correction, it is technically possible if you send an email to apple support and make up a story/bitch. How hard would it be to implement a 24 hour cooling off period like the Android Market has? People say the Android market is inferior, but from what I have seen over the last few days I would have to strongly disagree. Sure there is less selection on Android, but jumping through these app store pages trawling through the crap to find the actual goodness is no different, it’s just on a larger scale here, and you have to pay for more of it. At least I can try before I buy on Android. This restrictive apple policy has made me reluctant to buy anything. I have to spend hours on the internet to ensure this app I’m looking at is really what I want before I risk it. Not cool. At least give us an ipad upgrade path from an existing phone app.

Application performance: Once you jump through the hoops, the applications – when they support this big-hunk-of-screen-with-ipod-attached, look really good, especially games. You can see pixels, especially around the anti-aliasing on fonts, but it’s very acceptable, and you don’t notice it a lot (unless you spend some time on another device like your phone for a bit). Disappointingly there is only a handful of good apps that actually scale attractively and natively to the ipad’s screen (Geometry Wars being one of the few). As an Android user, I take this scaling for granted. To support the ipad, most app developers seem to be re-releasing apps as HD versions instead of building support into current apps, and these HD versions cost several dollars more for practically the same thing. This is not bad for me as much as an existing iphone/ipod user – that would give me the absolute fucking shits if I had to buy something I already owned on my phone all over again so I could use it on the ipad. Looking across the app store I’m not liking this “[insert app name] HD” trend – it’s making me reluctant to buy anything, because knowing me I’ll purchase something only available in ipod res, and the next day the HD version will be up, and I’ll have to pay the same value for the app again plus the additional HD premium. I want Street Fighter 4 and GTA Chinatown wars, but can’t commit because of this. :(

The Browser: coming from the industry standard Nexus froyo browser this is going to take some getting used to. Sure scrolling is fast on the ipad, but compared to froyo, pages on the ipad definitely load slower, and text doesn’t readjust to screen width when zooming. And checker-boarding when scrolling is so iphone 3G. You have the power. Load the whole damn page. Probably the most embarrassing thing was, on Rachel’s first attempt at web-browsing, she loaded up waynecooper.com.au, and was welcomed by a blank page, because like most clothes stores, it relies on flash. Give us flash Apple. Set aside your differences with Adobe and at least give us the option to turn it on. It is embarrassing that my Nexus one can visit gamespot or eurogamer and watch videos on the page at a decent frame rate, and the ipad has massive holes where actual content should reside. It would be great if they could add a page sharing feature as well. I do this all the time on android and I have no way from the ipad to instantly send a page to a friend or to the desktop for me to read without having to either transcribe the entire address or go through the whole circus of copy, close-app, open gmail, login gmail, compose email, set recipient, paste, send.

So is it all bitch bitch bitch?

Not quite. You’d think playing a game on something roughly the size and weight of a dinner plate would be absolute shit – but it’s not. I only have a couple of games currently but Geometry Wars Touch – which I love on xbox – is great on this thing. It’s the same game as Geometry Wars 2, but compared to the other handhelds, the screen is big enough here to actually see your enemies, and the virtual dual-joysticks are surprisingly responsive. It’s easily the best portable version of the game.

Korg iElectribe is an excellent beat making application. It’s nowhere as customisable as a real groovebox, but it’s good to have something around the same size as the real thing to use when you dont have the real thing. The virtual control surfaces to adjust levels as well as start and stop sequencers is very interesting. I have Rebirth ipod edition, but it’s so ugly on the ipad. I hope Propellerhead make an update to support the bigger res. :(

It also has the best implementation of a touch screen tablet. The screen is responsive, although it still has the problem of similar devices where it may take a few stabs at the screen to go somewhere. The keyboard is responsive and does what you want without fuss, but at the same time it’s awkward – you need to look at the keys carefully, there’s no Android style haptic/vibration feedback on key presses so you don’t always know you’ve hit the key, and even in portrait it’s not comfortable to hold and type at the same time. As long as you don’t expect to sit here typing all the time then you’re fine. I must say that typing on a phone is a lot better. The ipad is just too big. Those with giant hands probably won’t have as many issues, but girls and girly boys are going to have issues.

Lastly, there seems to be a big issue with having to tether the damn thing to itunes whenever you want to move a file/document/picture whatever. And it’s so bad that developers are adding the ability to access stuff from the device via a local webpage in order to get the file. Why is Apple still doing this?!? What is the hurt in making it act as mass storage. I will never get used to this.

So when you buy an ipad, you basically get a giant slab of screen, with all the same functions and restrictions of an ipod.  There are some interesting app ideas that have surprised me (give me more virtual drum machines), and this selection will get better with time. But it’s obvious that the ipad does nothing to address any of the problems found with its phone and ipod predecessors, including the same restrictions… but this will change… because soon it’s time to jailbreak!

Seriously, there are like 12 games here, and half are kung fu panda.

I mean seriously, WTF?!

These big publishers aren’t getting money from the 2nd hand market, so they want to slug 2nd hand buyers with a $10 fee to access online.

Why should a 2nd hand user be able to use the servers? Because it’s still the same fucking copy of the game. It’s not a pirated copy. Owners have just changed hands. The previous owner can’t use the service anymore. So WTF is the problem?!? Are you banking on us getting bored of your game and leaving it on the shelf? Heaven forbid someone else may get pleasure from playing a game someone else has owned before…

How is this any different from a hardcore user still playing the game in 6 months time, as opposed to someone getting bored with it in 1 month, and handing it over for someone else to use?

Here’s an idea – make good games we actually want to keep. Fuckwits.

Get a life. It’s just a freakin’ game.

Lucky I have no interest in Ubisoft and EA titles.

So here it is – 11:24pm on 4th March and I’m still left starring at the gamebox of Supreme Commander 2, unable to play it because Steam won’t let me until it’s 5 March Steam time. For a game that Americans have been able to play since the 1st.

They cant have it both ways. If they want to rape you money wise due to your location, which is already discrimination in itself, they can’t then rape you if you happen to get an advantage time wise. Because heaven forbid you download and play a game 11 hours earlier than their server time, for a game that’s already been out for 4 days overseas.

Don’t get me started on the fact that I’ve bought a disc version, available since Wednesday, that I haven’t been able to even install because the installer is tied to steam and I’m too early. Fuck you. It’s on store shelves everywhere. What are the non-tech savy ppl doing about this? Buying it, getting home and it’s saying “sorry you can’t install because we’re fucks and won’t let you install it until the 5th of March, and we won’t mention in that that we’re actually working off a different time to you so when we say the 5th, we really me the afternoon of the 5th. But we won’t let you know. We’ll just let you get angry.”

In addition, I find out that even though the files are on the dvd, when you do try to install when it lets you, that it insists on downloading the 7gb game from Steam rather than using the files on the dvd in your drive less than a metre away from you. Are you fucking joking. The disc version is to avoid the whole crap with “pre-loading” a game. I’ve been pre-loading with forced local internode severs for the last 2 days, and I’m up to a whopping 16% downloaded so far. Yes steam is a real good idea, I recommend every publisher use it. It’s such a fucking life saver.

Fuck you in the arse til you bleed steam.

This is the exact reason why consoles are better. Disc in and play. I don’t know how PC gamers stand this crap.

I hope the person that made this program is torn apart by rabid dogs, survives, and then dies in a horrific harvester accident, where his/her flesh, bones and organs are processed and spat out the top of the harvester.

Sorry, it has been a long few days trying to get some entertainment for the last few days of my holidays since returning from Japan.