06.11.12 |
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There are many Mac window managers out there and Moom is by far the best. Some like Divvy are mouse based, while others rely on the keyboard. Moom splits the difference and offers both forms of input control along with crazy customization options for power users. Arguably best of all, Moom has a fairly low memory footprint.
One little feature I use every day is their arrange windows option. Just press a key combo and every app gets resized and moved back to a custom arrangement of your choice. I’m the type of user that constantly shifts windows around to get stuff done to the point where after a a few hours I’ve got a pretty chaotic desktop. With an arrange windows keystroke I’m back to a clean screen.
This feature becomes amazing when you’re switching between using an external Cinema Display and running a Macbook Air solo. If you’re ever experienced it you know the annoyance of all your windows bunching up in a mess when you switch display modes. No more with Moom: I’ve got two different arrange window options (Macbook Air solo, Macbook Air + Cinema Display) and trigger each after I plug/unplug from the Cinema Display.
Highly recommended for $5. Do buy the direct sales version off manytricks.com though; Moom is a non-sandboxed app which makes it DOA for the Mac App Store going forward.
06.10.12 |
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I’m very late in weighing in on “Commissions and Fees”, this season’s second to last Mad Men episode from a week ago. It was well executed but something felt distinctly off. Todd VanDerWerff really expresses this well (warning major spoilers ahead):
I’m not sure Mad Men is the kind of show that desperately needs character deaths. I’m not saying I didn’t think the show built unbelievably to Lane’s end, nor am I saying that I wish it had just trundled him off to England to hang over the final two seasons of the show. Once Lane reached the point of hopelessness he reached around the midpoint of “Commissions And Fees,” having him kill himself was one of only two or three options that would have made any story sense, and the show accomplished this task with its usual mordant sense of humor…
Yet at the same time, the show seemed to constantly be fighting against the whole cheap, desperate feel of any TV death that comes up at the end of the hour and is meant to both shock and move us all at once. Please understand: It mostly was able to overcome this. But the whole thing felt just a little sordid, as though the show were stooping beneath itself.
I can’t wait to find out how this season wraps up when it drops into my Apple TV queue sometime tomorrow. I’m not suspecting a surprise on the level of Tomorrowland, last year’s closer, but I think we’re in for something fairly big.
06.08.12 |
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This Polygon E3 video a bit scattershot in terms of quality so I’d recommend just skipping to the 1:49 mark. Adam Sessler (former editor-in-chief of gaming network G4) rants for a few minutes on Microsoft’s SmartGlass, Ubisoft’s strong showing and Nintendo’s lack of direction. I agree with almost everything he says.
06.08.12 |
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Gamasutra editor-in-chief Kris Graft:
If you witnessed E3 as an intelligent enthusiast of video games, you realized the sad truth: The joy is dead, delight is gone. Joy and delight just aren’t worth the monetary investment anymore for big-budget games. Joy and delight are replaced by “I fucked your shit up, and I’m a bad-ass, let’s crack open a Dew.” It took all of these games in one place for me to finally, reluctantly, admit that this is what triple-A video games are now. At least that’s how E3 and triple-A game publishers apparently want to portray the world of video games. Are you not entertained?
06.07.12 |
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Yeah, Dragon Tattoo reviews aren’t exactly timely. But Matt Zeitz on Twitter recently brought to my attention late an excellent review from Slant Magazine I must have missed. Slant writer Ed Gonzalez has some astute observations of director David Fincher’s style:
Fincher is a meticulous, albeit chilly, observer of procedure, and the film derives much of its momentum from Mikael’s sleuthing into the lives of the Vangers and Lisbeth’s high-tech hacking, which passes the smell test more easily here than it did in Arden Oplev’s version, and from the elegance with which their storylines are paralleled…The film’s elegant moroseness, like the propulsive, sometimes discordant, volume of Reznor and Ross’s experimental score, seems intended to distract us from the fact that these two characters are banal stock types.
06.07.12 |
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Osfoora was bumped up to 1.2 late last night on the Mac App Store. There’s a few miscellaneous bug fixes along with a brand new, better looking high-res icon. The big win though has to be Twitter’s live streaming API; I’m not the type that keeps Twitter open on in the background but many others consider this essential functionality.
Osfoora is my client of choice on the Mac. I love the Tweet Marker support, inline images and overall speed. It’s well worth the $5 sticker price.
06.07.12 |
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Bill Murray is a notoriously private and quiet kind of guy, so I was surprised to see how much he opened up to Esquire editor Scott Raab. It’s not a super long interview but enjoyable. Murray apparently had met Moonrise Kingdom co-star Bruce Willis once a while ago:
I met him at this Andy Garcia movie I did, The Lost City. Willis is there and he’d had a couple drinks. We’ve all had a few drinks. And he says, “I just want you to know …” I’m like, “Oh, fuck.” He says, “I used to work as a page at NBC, and my job was to refill the M&M bowls and the peanut bowls in the actors’ dressing room. And only you and Gilda ever treated me like a human being. You were nice to me.” And I thought, Whew, that’s good. I felt like, Shit, I did somethin’ right, you know?
06.06.12 |
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This iMore article is the ultimate iOS 6 wish list. It’s smartly organized where every section examines what competing platforms already have (e.g. “what iOS could take from Android”). and far more comprehensive than I expected when I spotted it over on at Hacker News last weekend. Highly recommended.
06.06.12 |
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In the midst of all these quick E3 news snippets this week, I appreciated this longer Wired story on Epic Games and the revolutionary effect of the Unreal Engine on modern gaming:
Then something surprising happened: Kismet [a simplified event scripting tool] democratized programming. “There were people who weren’t programmers but who still wanted to create and script things,” says James Golding, senior engine programmer. In other words, some artists weren’t content simply to draw the monsters; they wanted to define how they acted as well. Kismet let them do that. “When we got them a visual system,” Golding says, “they just went completely bananas with it.” This was off-label usage, though; while it was a great secondary benefit, Kismet hadn’t been designed for this task, so it was kludgy and slow.
And thus was born Kismet 2, which again converts tedious lines of code into an interactive flowchart, complete with pulldown menus that control almost every conceivable aspect of behavior for a given in-game object. Need to determine how many bullets it will take to shatter that reinforced glass? Kismet 2 is your tool. Once behaviors are set, they can be executed immediately and edited on the fly. With Kismet 2, Epic empowers level designers—the people responsible for conceptualizing the world—to breathe life into that world directly, rather than relying on programmers to do it on their behalf.
I knew gaming engines were crazy, but not that crazy.
06.06.12 |
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Kyle Orland over at Ars Technica played NintendoLand, one of the main launch titles for the Wii U. It has some nice touches, but there’s a learning curve:
The main problem with the five NintendoLand mini-games the company is showing at E3 is that they tend to require quite a bit of explanation to understand. Take Animal Crossing: Sweet Day, a slightly tweaked version of the hide-and-seek tech demo Nintendo showed off at last year’s E3. Before we got going, a PR rep had to spend about a minute explaining how the four players with Wii Remotes are working together to collect candy, how carrying more candy slows a player down, and how to drop candy when the antagonists (controlled by the GamePad) got too close. It’s not too complicated by video game standards, but it’s far from the five-second “swing it like a tennis racquet” explanation of Wii Sports, and it’s likely enough to scare away anyone not already versed in how games work.
The short version: there’s no Wii Sports equivalent when this thing launches.