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Posts Tagged ‘Whole Lot’

How would you change HTC’s Sense?

Microsoft’s not going to allow HTC to cover Windows Phone 7 Series with its Sense UI overlay (which is going to be an interesting thing to watch in and of itself), but there’s no question that the homegrown user interface has made a-many Windows Mobile phones look and feel a whole lot better than stock. Sense is also gaining traction in the Android realm, a sector where it’s far more likely to either make a huge impact or be overlooked entirely. So, the question we’re posing here today is this: if you were granted an HTC badge for a day, how would you change Sense? Are you satisfied with the quickness? Does anything simply get in the way? Any quirks that you just can’t figure out? Any tweaks that you’d love to see made? We aren’t always serious when we say that these companies are listening to you, but trust us when we say that design folks from HTC might just give your comments a once over. Here’s your chance. Don’t screw it up.

How would you change HTC’s Sense? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Review: Knights of Charlemagne card game is simply simple, and we like it like that

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

The clever 2006 card game Knights of Charlemagne has made it to the iPhone and iPod touch as a simple little number placing app [$1.99, iTunes link]. We don’t mean simple in that it’s easy to beat or uninteresting. We mean that the game is clearly designed and plays quickly. While the beginner level (the Squire) is really only worth playing through once or twice with the tutorial minstrel on to learn the rules, getting to and beating the AI at Knight, and then the King level (which is supposed to be Charlemagne himself) is a good challenge and provides plenty of game for two bucks.

There’s a whole lot of math and bluffing in the game. That is something which is better experienced in person and using real cards, but board games on the iPhone are their own experience. So, when you want some light brain-burning with a medieval theme, look no further than this simple app. Read on to find out more.

The Game

Like Poison, Knights of Charlemagne could just as easily use pictures of animals or be a themeless collection of colors and numbers. The game starts with a deck of knight cards and ten spaces, called estates, to fight over. Five are numbered 1-5 and the others are colored one of five colors (which might cause problems with colorblind players). Each card portrays a knight who can be sent to fight at one of two locations, either the colored space that matches his color or the numbered space that matches his number. Even though there are only ten estates total, the app helpfully highlights the two spaces where a selected knight can go before you place him on the battlefield.

The deck is made up of 50 cards, two of every number/color combination, and each player is dealt half the deck. Of course, since designer Reiner Knizia doesn’t want you to be able to completely predict what’s coming, two random cards are removed before cards are dealt, adding an element of uncertainty to the end game. Does my opponent really still have a “1″ to take the first estate away from me? You won’t know until the last card is played. Speaking of which, each player will play 24 cards in a complete game, something that takes only a matter of minutes once you’ve learned the rules. Your opening hand is eight cards, and the little tent icon on the left side of your hand shows how many cards remain in your draw pile.

Why send the knights to a particular location? Whoever has the most knights at an estate at the end of the game (when all cards have been played) will score the points for that estate. The numbered estates are worth points equal to whatever their number is, while the colored estates are each worth five points. If both players tie for an estate, each wins a point. Why wouldn’t you put all of your knights on the colored estates? Because whoever wins the two lowest-value estates first (estates are scored from left to right) gets the crown, a five-point bonus, and this usually determines the winner, in our experience.

The App

Like we said, the defining word for the iPhone app version of the game is “simple.” Bare-bones would also work, but that’s sort of two words. Everything on the screen is easy to see and read. Gameplay is easy to “get” and the graphics by Schrumpfkopf are basic. There is no music, and only minimal sound effects. You load up the app, play for a few minutes and see who won and then maybe play again. If you get interrupted, the app easily saves games in progress, but there’s no win/loss record screen or any way to track how well you’ve done over time. Simplicity is the name of the game here, and it informs all areas of the design.

Want to see who’s winning a particular estate? Look for the little sword icon. Want to make the knight cards even easier to identify? Turn on high visibility mode, which transforms the cards in your hand from little knight icons into simple colored squares that are easier to read. You can’t change between modes mid-game, but that’s not a huge deal.

Another quirk is that the app feels upside down. When you play, it’s with the home button on the left, and there’s no way to change the orientation. Another interface issue that might cause you to misplay a knight is when you select a blue number five knight, since the two places he can be sent are next to each other. We’ve never clicked the wrong space, but we can see that it’s possible. Oh, and here’s a tricky thing. The few sound effects that there are in the game (and, thankfully, you can still listen to iTunes music while playing, unlike in version 1.0) are counterintuitive to turn them on or off. On the menu screen, if it says “sound on,” that means touch there to turn the sound on. Same thing with “sound off.” So, while it looks like these items are telling you the status of the sound effects in they game, they’re not.

The app can also only play the two-player version of the game. The physical game from Playroom Entertainment can handle up to three, and the earliest version, which came out in 1995 and was called Tabula Rasa, could play anywhere from two to four players. IRL, three players is a bit more fun, but the designer has said he has no plans to introduce that option to the app and it seems doubtful that a even baksheesh would change his mind. Instead, we have the three-level AI and the human vs. human options. Two-player pass-n-play works well – with the screen dimming and hiding your cards in hand from your opponent between turns – but we’re always interested in networked play. Obviously, this takes more time to program into the app, but we think the potential for doubling your sales should be incentive enough for developers (our math on that correct, right? Of course it is).

Overall, the Knights of Charlemagne isn’t quite as elegant as other Knizia games like Lost Cities (which we’re still waiting to see in the App Store) or Money, but it is a game with a lot of replay value. We know we’ll keep fighting for those estates for a while to come. This isn’t an every day kind of game, but it simply fun to pull out every now and then.

TUAWReview: Knights of Charlemagne card game is simply simple, and we like it like that originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Real Time Google Index: Will It Be a Game Changer? (Open Thread)

Google is developing a system to ingest real-time content updates from any page on the web automatically, using the open PubSubHubbub Atom protocol, we reported on Wednesday.

Google already indexes a whole lot of content very quickly, will a real-time indexing system make a big difference? There are differences of opinion on the matter and we’d like to know what you think. Search analyst Danny Sullivan told us on Wednesday that he thought it could be “the next chapter” for Google. John Battelle said this morning: “In short, it’s a new way for Google to get (more) real time signals. But honestly, not a huge deal. I don’t think. Correct me if I’m wrong…” What do you think, readers?

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Do You Think a Real-Time Google Index is a Big Deal?polls
We explained the specifics of how the Hubbub system might work in our earlier coverage so let’s talk now about possible impacts (or lack thereof).

As we wrote on Wednesday:

PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but [Google's Brett] Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away.

A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn’t be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google.

Readers Who Think This is Big

Sharon Kavanagh says:

This all sounds fantastic for the small guy as I have just created my first ever website which is for a reunion. The site will only be live for a short period as the date is May15th 2010 for the event and yet, it will probably take Google till then before my site is indexed and hence the peple I am trying to reach will never find it.

Scott Holodak says:

Previously you had to wait for spiders to crawl around the web to find changes on your site. Pages are crawled over again and again just to see if anything has changed. It’s a pretty inefficient process. Now the spiders are going to be fat and lazy because you are going to deliver your changes directly to them.

No Big Deal

Reader comments arguing this is not a big deal.

“Scott” says:

A properly designed website already “pushes” to (more accurately: gets “pulled” by) search engines and the frequency of indexing by search engines is determined by the popularity of the website.

This information doesn’t seem too new to me.

Bruce Wayne says:

Pushing unstructured content in real time can only mean the non relevant results will make it into the search results faster. To me this is another google hocus pocus distraction away from the the fact that search as it is today has hit a wall….millions of pages on unstructured data created exclusively to game the system….and now these pages of non relevant content can be pushed into the search stream in real time….

What Do You Think?

I think there is something fundamentally different about a web that Google’s index subscribes to in real time vs. a web that Google has to plow through with a spider looking for new content. I’m still wrapping my head around it, but there’s something about the PuSH method that feels like it would make the Google index a living, breathing phenomenon.

What do you think?

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What the Tweetmeme Toyota Portal Looks Like Under the Hood

Auto manufacturer Toyota launched a new Twitter-based portal called Toyota Conversations tonight and the site is getting a whole lot of press. Most people are focused on how the site seems to contain more positive Tweets than the world at large, but there are a lot of negative links on the site as well.

We got a look at the back-end infrastructure of the Tweetmeme portal system and have screenshots displayed below. These aren’t for the Toyota project in particular, but they are the same tools being put to use in a different campaign. We know you feed and data geeks fantasize about building the ultimate feed moderation system. Check out the one that Toyota put down no small sum to get to use. It’s a nice combination of heavy duty and easy to use, just like you’d expect for a big corporate customer like this. The best news? This system will be opened up to the public soon.

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No Cover Up Here

Below, an item page for a popular link shared about Toyota. Below is what appears to be the company’s direct response. Thus the name of the site, Conversations.

Easy to Use Logic Chains

Tweetmeme portal customers set up complex combinations of rules for which tweets to display using what company founder Nick Halstead calls “a mini-programming language – with a drag + drop interface for setting them up. Rules can be based on tweet, text from the story, title, meta data from the story, geo location data, twitter users who are tweeting…almost any data that is associated with twitter and the linked story that we spider as well. Each channel can have a number of chains – each chain can work separately – but be valued differently – i.e. have a confidence factor associated with it.”

The Big Dashboard in the Sky

This is what Tweetmeme HQ looks at, standing on top of all the channels. The ten person team calls its big set of rules “the pickle matrix”. Every time someone Tweets a tweet with a new link in it, or a Retweet, that data is thrown against the pickle matrix. That’s the field “access count.” Then an optimized process of rules are matched. “The data isn’t the problem,” Halstead says, “it’s the number of rules we put against it. This is 1,000 times more powerful than Twitter’s Track or search because we can apply tens of thousands of rules to every Tweet we see.”

Halstead’s company got a big boost from this deal, but Tweetmeme has been cash-flow positive for at least the last 3 months. “I think the more interesting fact,” he says, “is that I started this company for the sole purpose of doing this and companies are now only just starting to recognize the value in this kind of proposition. I think that shows how far social media has grown up. And that you have to stick at what you know is right – even if people ignore it to start with.”

No word yet on when this system will be opened up to the public, but used in conjunction with other media types like Toyota has it sure seems like there’s a lot of potential here.

Disclosure: FM Publishing, a partner in the Toyota project, is also RWW’s advertising network.

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Physicists look for the arrow of time, biologists find it

One of the nice things about being in the science writing business for a while is that, even when the science of a given topic doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, it at least starts to look familiar. One of these topics is the arrow of time, which Sean Carroll (Caltech physicist, not Sean Carroll, Madison biologist) discussed at AAAS. Briefly, time’s a bit of an annoyance to physics. For relativity, time is just another dimension in space-time. But, as Carroll pointed out, while we often find we’ve made a wrong turn and wound up going right when we meant to go left, we never find that we wind up in yesterday.

The panel Carroll organized was about equally divided between physicists who are dealing with time, and people who are working on understanding how different aspects of biology may reflect an arrow of time.

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Sony tries out new anti-piracy measure with PSP game, hits used game market hard in the process

Sony tries out new anti-piracy measure with PSP game, hits used game market hard in the process originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SXSW Gets Seat-Level Check-Ins With SitBy.Us

Thousands upon thousands of people will be in Austin, Texas next month for the South By Southwest Interactive festival – and several different services will be competing to show you where you can find your friends at the big event. Only one app, though, is focused on displaying your location down to the level of where you are sitting!

SitBy.Us is a mobile web friendly application that lets you peruse the SXSW panel, keynote and party schedules, check in to rooms and locations, identify where in the room you are sitting and then see which of your friends from Twitter are there too. The service is a little unstable right now, but it looks like the kind of thing that’s going to get slammed in Austin.

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SitBy.Us was built by a San Francisco/Chicago design and development shop called WeightShift. WeightShift has done work for Mozilla, Wordpress and others and has a strategic partnership with leading design firm Happy Cog.

If you’re going to SXSW you’ll have a lot of options for sharing your location and plans: Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Gowalla, Plancast and probably others. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole lot of people are on SitBy.Us. It’s use of your existing social connections on Twitter and its very unique value proposition make it sound like a whole lot of fun.

I found out about SitBy.Us from Portland, Oregon’s Josh Pyles. I’m going to figure out where he’s sitting in Austin and thank him.

You can make friends with the ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter, and thus find out where we’re sitting in Austin, via the RWW Team list. Sit by us!

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Firefox, Chrome Least Likely to Be Loved by North Americans

For all our supposed internet leadership, we North Americans are more likely to use Internet Explorer than people in any other continent in the world. Respected website traffic analysts Quantcast see a whole lot of people flying around the web every day and this morning the company published some browser numbers broken down by continent.

What part of the world has the highest percentage of people who use the best browser available, Google’s Chrome? Good job, South America, you’re number one. North America isn’t just #1 in I.E. use (not that there’s anything wrong with that), we’re also in last place for Chrome and Firefox. Check out the chart below.

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What’s the takeaway here? At the very least it means that we North Americans should remember where we stand in terms of online sophistication by our mainstream population, relative to some other places in the world.

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