Creative Techs and Luminous Works have a pretty cool preview video up of one of the new features in Adobe’s Creative Suite 4. New to Adobe Illustrator is the ability to create multiple art boards and set bleed preferences. Using the new art board tool you can even resize the art boards using their handles like you would any graphic.
What I (personally) would use this for I’m not sure but it sure is cool.
One of the cooler apps for the iPhone that has recently came out is the Wordpress app. Prett cool that you can blog directly from your iPhone, upload photos and edit old posts when you need to. Pretty cool. Now isn’t that better than the traditional “Hello World” post?
Here’s something damn funny from The Onion, “World of World of Warcraft”. You have to ability to play a player playing the World of Warcraft.
‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’
So if you’re like me you probably use iGoogle as your home page but did you know you can customize the header (image behind the words google) with your own pictures or graphics? Here’s a cool tutorial from the gang at Google on how to make your own. Not really that hard at all.
Google Developer’s Guide: “A theme is custom design for the iGoogle page. You define a theme in an XML file that contains key-value pairs for iGoogle page attributes, such as background and text color. A theme can be as simple as a color setting for the header background and iGoogle logo, or it can include multiple images and dynamic behavior.
A theme has one or more skins. A skin is a particular design for the iGoogle page. For example, you could have a theme that displays different skins depending on the time of day.
Each skin is represented in a themes specification by a different ConfigMap (configuration map). A theme is essentially a collection of configuration maps. “
Not to sound like a battery commercial but, for some reason Energizer batteries are lasting longer than the Duracel batteries I’ve used for years in my bluetooth Logitech mouse.
Duracel batteries normally last 3-4 days. The Energizer have been in there since last Monday and the low battery light has yet to start blinking. I may be forced to change my buying habits if this continues.
Blizzard released another patch this morning for the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft just a week after patch 2.2.0 which added a ton of new features including Voice Chat. This latest patch adds new content for an Octoberfest style “brewfest”, Halloween-esque items and quests and a host of new graveyards.
For the uninitiated graveyards are where your spirit goes when you’re killed in the game (this can be frequently). Once you’ve been killed you must run your spirit back to your body to resume playing or take serious penalties and resurrect at the graveyard. Distances in the game are set to mimic real life distances and running from the graveyard to your body can take several minutes (10 minutes is the longest run I’ve ever had). More graveyards should help speed up game play (and satisfy the whiners who don’t like to run).
We just got back from the Apple store where I picked up one of the new aluminum wired Apple keyboards and I must say, it’s honestly the best keyboard I’ve ever used. No I mean it. I’m a peripheral sort of guy and this is really the best keyboard I’ve owned for both Mac and PC. Typing is VERY easy and really fluid.
We also grabbed the $19 iPod video cable from Apple. It works with any color iPod and plugs directly into the headphone jack. From there plug it into the RCA jacks of any TV or converter. No problem. Be sure to go into your Video Preferences on your iPod and enable TV out. You can set it to ask you each time so you have the option of showing it on TV or reviewing.
So I’m looking at the new Google Presentation, part of Google Docs. The similarities to other presentation applications look like anyone who has ever made a presentation will feel right at home. Duplicate slide, insert image, change theme, share, publish; everything you’d expect but it’s all on the web. Pretty cool.
I don’t think I’ll be changing from Apple’s Keynote anytime soon though. It has a LOT of catching up to do to get to where Keynote is. But Powerpoint? Watchout.
I did upgrade my copy of MarsEdit to the new version 2.o and honestly, I like the old style better. Yes, the new version does look more like all the new Mac applications but that’s part of the problem, it gets lost in the shuffle.
Before it stood out nicely with the sidebar and unique shape. Now, it’s just another boxy application. I’m also a bit peeved you can’t control the width of the column that shows your blogs. It’s fixed width which means to see the title of the posts I have to expand the overall window. Not cool.
Also I’m not a huge fan of the new icon set. It looks more like something you’d find on a Linux box running KDE or ICE.
I wonder what else is out there? Suggestions? Throw me a bone. Must be a Mac application.
Two years ago a virtual plague unintentionally spread across the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft now researchers want to study the dynamics of the virtual plague to see if it can help scientists model and predict the spread of real world diseases.
Ars Technica: “There were a number of features in the virtual outbreak that actually mimicked the spread of and response to real-world epidemics. A key feature was that the disease could be carried by the game’s ‘pets,’ the virtual equivalent of domesticated animals; this behavior is shared by SARS and avian flu, among other diseases. The game’s teleportation acted like air travel in allowing the disease to rapidly go ‘global.’ The humans controlling the players also mimicked the behavior of real populations during historical epidemics. As the populations of cities were wiped out by the disease, surviving players began avoiding them, and any large groups of players became scarce in the surrounding countryside.
It took only six months for the first academic analysis of the outbreak to appear in the journal Epidemiology. The article highlighted the advantages of the WoW incident, comparing it favorably to existing computer models that ‘are limited in their potential to account for changes in human behaviors during epidemics.’ At the same time, it recognized that virtual characters might not accurately track all normal human behaviors.
On balance, the analysis in Epidemiology felt that virtual worlds might provide a useful supplement to traditional models of disease spread, and suggested working with game programmers to test a variety of disease conditions. ‘Multiplayer online role-playing games may even be useful as a testing ground for hypotheses about infectious disease dissemination,’ the author said, ‘Game programmers could allow characters to be inflicted by various infectious diseases, some of which may not be visible to the player, and track the dissemination patterns of the disease in specific subpopulations.’ It looks like something of the sort is in the works. A report from the Agence France-Presse indicates that Nina Fefferman, a researcher from Tufts University, is currently negotiating with Blizzard about running epidemiological tests in WoW.”