Filed under computers

The State of Tech 2010

Once again it’s time for me to ramble about some of the interesting technology developments that happened this year.

And what a year! Before starting this post, I went back to re-read my 2009 post.  It seems like almost every question I concluded with was answered in some way in 2010. Last year, I summed up the year as being more evolution than revolution.  While I hesitate to say that this year was revolution, it was certainly more than the evolution of last year. So why don’t we get started?

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How To: Create a New Windows Boot Partition

Paul Thurrott recently wrote up an excellent article about how to replace your hard drive, but keeping your OS install completely intact.  The secret is using Windows 7’s backup "system image" feature to create a complete, bootable image of your old drive, then restore it onto the new drive. Check out the full article for the details.

But I always end up making things more difficult for myself.  When I was faced with a similar situation, I ended up taking a different route.

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Trowl 0.6.2–Still Alive!

All right, so it has been a while since the last update to Trowl.  For that, I apologize.  I needed a break from the development a bit, and the summer was happy to oblige.  I’ve been busy with various things, including a bit of experimentation with WPF. (The fruits of those experiments will be available shortly. But, if you follow me, you probably have a clue as to what they might be already.)

But fear not, I am still working on Trowl.  After all, I use it as my primary Twitter client, so I like to see it improved as much as anyone else.  There are some longer term, more ambitious things I’d like to do with Trowl – the top of this list being a switch over to User Streams.  While these are things I have set my sights upon, they are not in this update.

Instead, I’ve been focusing on usability stuff – things that have been suggested by users, and things I’ve noticed myself that I’ve wanted fixed.

So, with that introduction, let me detail the changes planned for this next update.

User name suggestions
When writing a tweet, you sometimes want to mention another user.  Up until now, you’ve had to know their name offhand (or have had to look it up elsewhere) in order to use it in Trowl.  But now, when you type “@”, you will get a pop-up list of users which will narrow down as you type.  Right now this list contains all the people you follow, as well as anyone you reply to.

Tweets & Search Results are Decoupled
You may or may not have noticed that, although “New Tweet” and “New Search Result” are two separate types of notifications in Growl, they are displayed together as part of the same stream of tweets.  This was good in that it kept everything together, but it was mostly bad because it reduced the flexibility you had in customizing displays and display preferences.

In 0.6.2 they are completely separate entities.  You can configure how many tweets appear on screen  at once separately from how many search results appear on screen at once.  You can browse all of your tweets before moving on to the search results.  And so on.

Higher Resolution Profile Images
By default, Twitter provides a profile image that is 48×48.  For Growl, this is usually sufficient. Most displays are small and don’t show anything higher res than that.  But some displays, as well as forwarded devices (like the iPhone or Windows Phone) are capable of showing larger images if they are provided.  So, Trowl now uses 73×73 pixel images – the “bigger” size, according to Twitter.  I’d like to bump this up to something larger, but that involves a little more testing.  But hopefully these slightly larger profile images will suffice for the time being.

.NET 4 Exclusive! – Location Support
What’s that?  .NET 4?  Yes!  There will actually be two versions of 0.6.2 – one for the usual .NET 3.5, and one for .NET 4.  If you are willing to take the jump (or already have), you will get a feature that is made possible by some of the new capabilities of the platform.  In this case – location.  It will require your computer to be equipped with a GPS device, or some other location-aware service, such as Geosense.  If Trowl detects this, you will get the ability to include your current location from the New Tweet screen – make sure you have enabled location for your Twitter account!

Various other bug fixes/code changes
The usual.

 

I think that’s it.  A preview version will be available for testing soon, so I’ll update this post when it’s up.  Thanks for using Trowl! And as usual, feel free to ask questions or suggest features on the Google Group.

Update: The preview versions are now available!

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Quick Review: Machinarium

I posted a tweet the other day about how you should check out Machinarium if you like atmospheric music, point-and-click adventures, or puzzle games. I thought I’d touch on a few more details in a quick blog post.

First thing is first though: if you have any interest in the game, check out the demo on the website. It covers the first few stages, and gives you a pretty good indication as to what the rest of the game is like. It’s the best way to decide if it’s a game you’d be interested in. For me, it was well worth $5 – if for no other reason than to get the soundtrack.

Music
Which leads me to my favorite part of the game: the music. As I mentioned in my tweet, it’s very atmospheric. It sets the mood of the game more than providing actual background music – although there is some of that as well.  As you can imagine, it’s inspired by machines of old, which the game also seems inspired by. It works really well.

Gameplay
If you know what a point and click adventure is, you know what is involved with Machinarium. The game consists entirely of moving from one location to another, discovering secrets, and solving puzzles to open the path to the next location.  The puzzles, and the presentation of the puzzles, are very clever.  Sometimes what you need to do is obvious. Sometimes it requires a lot of trial and error until you discover the one little secret that you forgot. And other times, you hit a brick wall and really don’t know how the pieces fit together. (Sometimes, literally. You have an inventory of items you collect, which you can use to solve puzzles. Those items can be fastened together to create a new item, too.)  In cases where you are stumped, the game gives you two helping hands. The first is a simple pictorial hint, which you can use once per location. This gets progressively vague as the game goes on. The next helping hand is a complete walkthrough. To get to it, you play a simple, sometimes challenging mini-game. Once unlocked, it shows you the progression of what needs to be done in your current locale, in comic-book, pictorial form.  The interesting thing is that it ONLY shows you the current location – it doesn’t tell you how it relates to stuff you need to do in other locations.

Story
The story so far has been the weakest part of the game.  You aren’t explicitly told what you’re trying to do, although pieces start to fill in as you progress.  There is no dialog in the game, just pictures in thought bubbles.  It’s a cute presentation, and it’s interesting to see how well the story is told within these limitations. But it has not been my driving force for continuing to play.

Other
This is a flash-based game, so it runs on any platform that supports flash – Windows, Mac and Linux.  Saying that it’s “flash-based”  carries certain negative assumptions with it, but it’s actually very well implemented. This is how flash SHOULD be used. I’m impressed.

Later on in the game, the puzzles become a little bit trickier to figure out, but it never becomes impossible – and, of course, you have the walkthrough to nudge you in the right direction if you truly get stuck.

All in all, it is a very charming game, and worth your time to experience.  At least try out the demo.  I bought the game on sale for $5, and that was primarily for the soundtrack. But now I’m playing the game too, and I’m enjoying it.

Try Machinarium Now

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More Fun with Panoramas

Last weekend I went to Boston, and took a few snapshots of Boston harbor.  While these are another great example of how good the iPhone 4 camera is, that’s not the focus of this post.

There is something amiss with these panoramas.  I didn’t spot the problems right away, but as I worked with them, it became obvious.  And the reason for the problem is also obvious: the stitching isn’t perfect if all the elements in the picture don’t line up exactly right.  This is especially true for subjects in the foreground, which move about more as you change positions for each photo.

Anyway, see if you can spot the imperfections in these pictures!

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iPhone 4 Display

One more post about the iPhone 4, and that’s it for now, I promise.  I found this picture that I took when I still had my 3GS: a comparison between the iPhone 4 display, and the iPhone 3GS display.

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iPhone 4 Camera

How good is the iPhone 4 camera?  I haven’t had a chance to really give it a good run, so on my way home from work today, I stopped and took some photos.  Once home, I used Windows Live Photo Gallery to stitch them into a panorama. Using Microsoft software to manipulate photos taken on an Apple device? Unthinkable!

Anyway, in all seriousness, here are the results.  For the most part, I’m impressed — especially considering these are coming from a camera phone.  But, they’re not nearly as detailed as the panoramic photos I took with my real camera while in Spain earlier this year.  Also, the afternoon sun didn’t play nice with some of the shots.

Here are the undoctored (except for being stitched together) photos. Click on them to see the full size pictures (they’re BIG, about 2-3MB each!).

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Trowl 0.6 Preview

It has been a while, hasn’t it?

Even so, I’ve been working on Trowl, and I’m happy to make available the preview for Trowl 0.6.  So why 0.6 when the last version was 0.5.4?  Well, first of all: we’re talking about 0.0.6 of a version – does it really matter? ;)  But more technically, I’ve made a lot of changes, both to the code behind the scenes and to what you see in the behavior and UI of the app.  While a lot of the changes aren’t particularly groundbreaking, taken together I think they offer a substantial improvement to 0.5.4.

Plus there is a .NET Framework 4 version – but that’s coming later, so I won’t delve into that right now.

Before I give you the download link, I wanted to go over a few of the larger changes so you know what you’re getting into.

Backend Code
I mentioned that I made changes to the code that aren’t immediately obvious on the surface.  This includes changes with the Twitter API: some of the calls are updated, and I further refined how Trowl checks your rate limit.  There have also been changes to how Trowl parses the results it gets back from Twitter.  Finally, I’ve made some modifications to how notifications are sent and received from Growl.  Observant users will notice that I added the word “try” to the “show X number of notifications on screen at once” setting.  I’ve made this a bit more flexible to handle occasional lost notifications or other oddities.  So if you sometimes see more or less than your desired number of notifications, don’t freak out. :)

Different Growls for Different Accounts
A new advanced notification setting will force Trowl to register a separate “New Tweet” notification type for each of your Twitter accounts.  What does this mean?  Well right now, if you open Growl and look at Trowl’s notifications, you will see just one “New Tweet” notification type.  If you switch this setting on, however, it will create a “New Tweet” notification type for each of your Twitter accounts.  What’s the point?  By doing this, you can configure each account separately.  Want one account to forward to iPhone, and another not?  Want one account’s notifications to be sticky, but another to close automatically?  Now you have the power.

New Tweet
You can now use the hotkey CTRL-SHIFT-T to open the New Tweet window from anywhere. (Update: You can now toggle the hotkey option, as well as what the hotkey is.)  Also, some minor layout changes were made to this screen.  Finally, I added a button to let you switch between reply and retweet.  Why?  Well, have you ever accidentally hit “reply” instead of “retweet” or vice versa?  Or did you hit “retweet”, only to realize you’d rather do an “old style” retweet?  Now you can quickly switch between the two types right from the New Tweet screen.

Refined Catch-Up Tweets
For a while now, Trowl has offered the ability to show the tweets you “missed” while it was closed.  Using a special “while you were gone” notification type, it would show all the tweets you would have normally seen if you hadn’t quit Trowl.  You can now toggle this option to show all tweets, or just replies and mentions.  (Of course, if you already have the account set up to only growl replies and mentions, this toggle will make no difference.)

Refined Silence Mode
In previous versions, “Silence” mode would simply cause Trowl to stop checking for new tweets. When you turned Silence off, it would show all the tweets you missed while it was silent.  Now the default action is to not display any missed tweets.  If you still want it to do this, “show missed tweets” has an option to include Silence mode.

Auto-Silence
Related to the previous section, Trowl can now detect when your computer goes to sleep.  When it does so, you can have Trowl automatically go into Silence mode.  When it comes out of sleep, it will turn off Silence, and then show what tweets you missed, if you configured it to do so.

Settings Backup
A new button was added to make a backup of your settings.  It puts a file in a location that can be seen by all Trowl versions.  If for some reason Trowl loses track of your settings (usually after a version upgrade) it will look for a backup and restore from it.  You can also use the backup file to easily transfer settings to another computer, or do a manual reset if something bad happens.

… and more.  There have been lots of other minor changes and tweaks too.  This is actually a slightly more rough “preview” version than in the past.  So don’t be surprised if you find any bugs – just let me know in the comments here, or at the Google Group, and I’ll update this post with any bug fix versions as necessary.

So if you get a chance, please download and try out the preview version.  I look forward to any feedback you may have. Thanks!

Trowl 0.6 Preview

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MacBook Pro – One Week Later

A week ago today, FedEx dropped off my shiny new laptop, direct from China.  Since then, I’ve been hurriedly prepping it and setting it up to see how well it would fit into my digital world – especially since that world is mostly Windows-based.

The “too much text, didn’t read” version is that Windows 7 and Mac OS X coexist very nicely.  There are certainly frustrations in doing so, however – you have to be willing to work through the issues.  I also don’t think MBP is the ideal solution if Windows is the only operating system you plan on using. But as a laptop, the machine is stellar.  And for running both Windows and OS X, the choice is obvious (not that there is much of a choice).  Read on for the nitty gritty.

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I’m a PC — AND a Mac

The secret is out — I decided to get a MacBook Pro.  It’s something that I have been considering for a while, but it still feels a bit strange getting an Apple machine.  As anyone who’s met me knows, I’m not a big fan of Apple.  Sure, I have an iPhone.  But I’m not a particularly big fan of OS X, and I’m often critical about Apple’s software and business practices.

So why a MacBook Pro?  Isn’t that like buying into the dark side?

Well, let me assure you first of all that I’m not a "switcher".  I’m not going to port Trowl to OS X, and I’m not going to start wearing black turtleneck sweaters.

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