Skimming in iTunes 8.0 Sucks.

It’s just such a half-ass implementation. When Steve showed off that great looking grid view and mentioned something about skimming, I got really excited. For those of you not in the know, “skimming” was introduced in the latest version of iPhoto and here’s how it works. Photos are organized into “Events” such as your best friend’s wedding or your daughter’s birthday party or whatever. All the photos from the event are in that group, and that group is represented as a square (or “box”) in iPhoto. As you move your mouse across a given event, photos from the event fly by. The idea is that you can move your mouse to an event, flick (or “skim”) through all the photos in it without actually opening the event, and when you find the one photo you’re really looking for you press the Space Bar to open it up in full view. The whole concept is similar to Apple’s QuickLook feature in Leopard. You know where the item you want is in general, so you go there and are given a super-fast way to quickly sort through that small haystack to find the needle you are looking for.

Skimming does not work like this in iTunes. In grid view, the default Album sorting has zero skimming. You scroll to the album you want to pay, click the “Play Album” pop-up and the album starts playing from Track 1 (if you have the shuffle option on it plays a random track). This is all fine but what if I want to listen to the Massive Nights, the 8th track on The Hold Steady’s “Boys and Girls in America” album. In this situation I need to find the album, double-click it to “flip it over” into a list view, and then double-click the track to start playing it. This could be much speedier process if skimming was implemented.

With skimming, could find the album I know the song is already on, and then run my mouse over the album’s cover to display the song titles. Once I’ve found the one I want, I can double click (or perhaps press Enter or some other key) to start the track playing. Here’s a rough example:

If you switch the Grid view into the “Artist” listing you get some skimming, but it’s still not powerful enough. In Artist sorting each artist gets it’s own box (rather than each album). All of an artist’s albums are contained in that box (sorted alphabetically). You can skim across the box to see all the album, but if you simply press “Play Artist” iTunes will start playing the first track of the first album regardless of which album you have skimmed to. To get to a specific album in this view you first have to find the artist’s box. From here you can skim to the album you want and double-click. This will show you all of that artist’s albums in a list view. The first track of the album you had skimmed to will be highlighted. From here you can press Enter to start playing that track. There is no way to start a specific album playing without first “flipping” the artist box into the album listing.

In the end I think the new Grid view looks really pretty but is nowhere near as functional as I expected it to be considering Apple is usually extremely good at functionality such as this. All you need to do is take a look at how easy iPhoto and Finder are to use thanks to skimming and QuickLook.

Note: This post is in no way an indication of future intent to blog (though I wish it were).

I’ve been a fan of Penny Arcade for a long time now, since the first year they were around even. Throughout the years they’ve been a bastion of gaming criticism. They say what they want and don’t take flack from anybody. Outside of my friends, they’re my most trusted source when it comes to opinions on games. With all that said, I was still worried that their game would be a steaming pile of shit.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1 was in development for two years, which is a long time for an episodic game that’s somewhere between five and ten hours long (depending on how much incredibly detailed text you want to soak up). That’s a long ass time for a game of this type. It all makes sense now that I’ve played it though. I just finished it tonight and I really enjoyed it. It’s obvious that all that time went in to making sure everything meshed perfectly. Don’t get me wrong, the game isn’t without flaws, but the atmosphere it creates is highly well crafted and manages to feel unique but at the same time part of an established universe of characters.

My friend Chris mentioned the carrot-and-stick theory once. I can’t remember if it was in reference to this game or not, but RSPD is the perfect example of this theory. It’s a mash-up of old school adventure games and Japanese RPGs (think Sam & Max meets Final Fantasy), though with a much heavier focus on the latter. The active battle system requires your utmost focus and attention to master, and is easily the game’s most engaging feature. Between battles, you’ll spend your time looking for key items (though most will be found just by playing through the game’s main plot-line). The objectives are just short enough that you want to complete one before putting the game down. Of course, half-way through completing one objective, you’re given another one. You finish the first objective and think to yourself “well, I’ve already got part of the next case done, so I may as well finish it”. Repeat this scenario until you realize it’s eleven o’clock at night and you still haven’t eaten dinner.

If the battles are the best part of the game, the writing is easily the next best. You (via a decent if not limited, create-a-character feature) join Gabe and Tycho in the 1920s steampunk/Lovecraftian city of New Arcadia. There’s a giant robot and some seriously evil circus folk to go after. Along the way you will read far too many descriptions of the most mundane items ever. It seems like every box, sign, and bench has it’s own unique flavor text to soak up, and most of it is pretty clever. My personal favorite: a letter found in a mailbox reading (I’m paraphrasing here) “Dear Mr. Van Gogh: We are sorry to inform you pirate and turtle drawings were unacceptable.” (Please see this if you do not get the joke). The banter between the characters is great, and some of the scenarios they find themselves in are just bizarre. If you’re a fan of Penny Arcade’s writing, you’ll find it here in spades.

The only real complaint I have with the game is the price. It’s being sold online and via Xbox Live Arcade for $20. It’s not much really, but for a game that most players will finish in around six or seven hours, the price is a little high. I can understand the pricing given the long development cycle. I’m hoping it’s to offset the initial development costs of the engine and such. With any luck the rest of the episodes will ring up at ten or fifteen dollars.

Saw it last night. First off, the digital screen I saw it one was beautiful. I’ve seen a few movies on it but I’m impressed every time. Let’s get a few non-Cloverfield things out of the way first. Also, there will be spoilers in this, so stay clear if you don’t want to know the big secret.

1. I have never been excited for a Star Trek movie. I am now.
2. Even though I’ve seen it before, the Iron Man trailer made me wet my pants. Batsy better watch his back come this summer’s blockbuster season.
3. How amazingly bad does The Ruins look? No thanks.

Now, as for Slusho Cloverfield, as I said before, it was awesome. The shaky-cam didn’t bother me almost at all, and really served to put you right in the thick of the action. All this shit is going down but you never get a crystal clear look at what exactly is happening because Hud, the character/cameraman, is freaking out and concentrating on staying alive while simultaneously documenting the insane events of the night. Funny thing is that even 5 years ago, this mechanic of having the characters shoot the film would have been laughed at. Today though, it’s totally plausible. The first place I heard about the London subway bombings in 2005 was Flickr and almost all the footage that the news networks used for their initial coverage of the VT shootings was from people on campus. Everybody has a camera of some sort on them now and we’ve becoming the custodians of history, which is something Cloverfield plays into very well.

There are also some parallels to the original Godzilla. By that I mean the film and not the monster. Godzilla is a movie very much born of the fear created by the atomic bombings of World War II. The same is true of Cloverfield and 9/11. I almost think that the film wouldn’t have worked had it taken place in another city. Shots of New Yorkers running from a giant cloud of debris is still a very evocative thing to show to people in America. He comes from a far away place and just throws the whole city into a panic.

The plot is simple. New York is under “attack” and Rob has to save Beth, the girl he loves. He friends come along because that is what friends do. They stick together through thick and thin. The events surrounding them are totally unreal, and it really only highlights how much Rob cares about Beth. It is a well told story and the actors do a good job of feeling like real people put in extreme circumstances. The camera work only drives this point home.

The monster, which I’m going to call Clover, was totally awesome to boot. Watching him rampage through New York was awesome. He looked amazing and was really totally unlike any other movie monster I’ve ever seen. The parasites that fall off of him reminded me of the Zerg from StarCraft, and were even scarier than Clover. They’re nasty little things and do a great job of making the whole monster attack more personal. It’s pretty much impossible for the characters to take on Clover as he’s huge and unstoppable, but the parasites can be taken out if you’re bad-ass enough to do it.

I really don’t know what else to say. It was a fantastic monster movie that isn’t ever too cheesy. The special effects, and especially the sound, are top-notch. Also, the overture played over the credits was really freakin’ good.

Apple’s announced the Time Capsule, which combines an AirPort Extreme and a “server grade” hard drive with 500GB or 1TB of storage for $300 or $500 and allows “effortless” wireless Time Machine backups of all Macs on the network. That’s awesome, unless you already own both an AirPort Extreme and an external hard drive… then you’re stuck out in the cold unless you’re willing to spend another $300 for this thing… effectively giving you two routers and two hard drives. But that’s ok, right? I mean, it looks pretty and who cares if your old router just became totally useless (at least your old hard drive is still half useful)?

Thanks Steve.

P.S. Is there a logical reason why the AirPort Express doesn’t support hard drives and the AirPort Extreme doesn’t support AirTunes streaming? Or did you just want me to buy two routers if I wanted both of these features?

Sigh… at least I’m blogging again.

1) Blog More. Likelihood: ha!

2) Work out. Likelihood: slightly above blogging more!

3) Take the GMAT and apply for grad school. Likelihood: Hopefully.

7: Flight of the Conchords
Two guys from New Zealand write funny folk songs and somehow manage to score a development deal with HBO. Their songs are all sorts of zany, and they slide into the show perfectly.

6: Ratatouille
I think Wall-E could be even better, but Ratatouille is Pixar’s most beautiful and one of their best movies ever. Only these guys could make a talking rat adorable. The water and fur effects are mind blowing, and the art direction is simply amazing. All of it is backed up once again by Pixar’s supreme character development and storytelling, two things that are just as important to them as cutting edge computer animation is.

5: Favourite Worst Nightmare
The Arctic Monkeys return with another album of balls-out rock. I must have listened to this album nearly exclusively for about a month, memorized every word and all the instrumentation. I had a chance to see them live, and the show was amazing. Their sound has grown on this album, but you can tell it’s still the Arctic Monkeys, singing snarky songs about people in bars over lightning fact licks and a super-tight rhythm section.

4: Hot Fuzz
My expectations weren’t low, but I honestly didn’t expect Wright and Pegg to make a film better than Shaun of the Dead. Hot Fuzz does to buddy cop action what Shuan did to the zombie flick. The realm of parody lets them stick to all the absurd conventions of the genre while at the same time making them 10x more absurd and not making them look like stale conventions.

3: Bioshock
Call me pretentious, but a game that studies objectivism in a 1940s era underwater city run by genetically altered super-freaks is just too good to pass up. It doesn’t hurt at all that the game looks and plays beautifully. The action is intense and the number of ways you can take them out is mind-boggling.

2: LOST Season 3
I’ve been re-watching this on DVD (and Blu-Ray) over the holidays, and it’s even better than I remember it. LOST always seems to be way better in rapid exposure. The story is addicting, and the characters just keeping getting more interesting. We learned a lot about “The Others” this year, and we’re finally getting to see the story from all sides. This year’s finale was totally unexpected, and blew all expectations out of the water

1: Somewhere in the Between
Streetlight Manifesto took over four years to make this album. I honestly thought there was no way on earth it could live up to all the hype, but it somehow managed to surpass it. The first track’s lyrics don’t kick in for almost a minute and a half. The band instead blasts your ears with a ska/punk assault that righteously declares “Streelight Manifesto is BACK!” Kalnoky and company have grown a lot since their debut, and their musical chops really shine on this album. They’ve listened to a ton of music from all over the world, and all of it seeps in to the little cracks of this masterpiece. The title track alone is worth the price of admission. It’s a lofty claim, but I honestly think this could be the best ska/punk release of the entire decade. I know a lot of you people don’t really like the genre, but missing this album would be a huge mistake.

I’m a damn genius

Originally uploaded by StrikerObi.

I’m coming out of blogging retirement to post this. I can’t believe it took me this long to figure out how to play guitar and sing at the same time without a mic stand…

1. Take a song out of your iTunes Library.
2. Open the song in GarageBand.
3. Find a segment of the song you like and crop it out.
4. Add a fade in and fade out, to make it sound all professional.
5. Export it to disk as an AAC file.
6. Rename the file extension from .m4a to .m4r.
7. Import back into iTunes, it’ll be listed under the ringtones tab when you select your iPhone in the source list.
8. Check the box to make sure the ringtone syncs back over.
9. Sync your iPhone

That’s it! It couldn’t be any easier. In fact, you can skip steps 2 through 4 if you want, but a 4 minute ringer would be kind of stupid…

The only thing now is that if I am listening to Jimmy Eat World’s “Big Casino” and I get a call I am going to be very confused, as it’s also my ringtone.