Make life take the lemons back

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost been a year since I graduated from University. This time a year ago I had just completed the epic tome on my final year project and was preparing to revise for my final exams; a grueling and terrifying experience. The time since then has been a very transitional period of my life as I get my head around being out of education for the first time ever (let’s not count those early years where I was banging lego bricks together) and used to the idea of having an adult life.

It’s very easy with a full time job that involves hours of commuting every day to get very complacent and lazy. The simplest way out is always to get home after work and want to do nothing but veg out in front of the television and honestly, I’ve done a lot of that. I ended up as a web developer not because anyone told me there was money in it, but because when I was 15 I accidently created a video game website. It was pretty terrible and the most horrific shade of green, but the next day I went back to it and was blown away to discover that people had started using it. I didn’t realise it at the time, but that website was an incredibly important turning point in my life and I truly don’t know where I would have ended up without it.

Three years ago that website died as I was unable to maintain it during my placement year and the small group of users moving on. Since then I’ve always had the desire to fill that “personal project” shaped hole in my life with something new, but inevitably ended up in front of the television instead. It’s just so much easier.

FWXD.net

And then Mike showed up.

My former co-worker, who has this insane plan to emigrate to Australia, despite the fact I’m reliably informed they eat British people with afternoon tea, suggested one day that we make a video game blog. Mike worked at the company as a professional writer talking about how whisky tastes of “synthetic banana”, and had just gotten into gaming. I guess he just really wanted to write about it and had no outlet to do so. I think I probably agreed with him at the time, because it's easier to agree with people and normally they forget the next day. Except he didn't forget, so I guess the joke's on me now.

Mike’s enthusiasm for the idea is what got me out of my rut. We’ve been working on the site for several months (with the original idea dating back to January) and have put together a crack team to write for it so there will be regular updates. It's been truly awesome to work on and I look forward to seeing it grow.

Welcome to the aviator club

It turns out that naming a website is really hard though. It needs to be memorable and unique while containing as many Google friendly keywords as possible. Unfortunately Video Game Blog dot com was already taken and Mike thought appending the word “Nazi” to it would be considered bad form. We went through a lot of names before arriving on the one we used. Having lived with the name we chose for so long I couldn’t imagine another choice, but there was a long period of time where the best thing we had was “video game creed”. Feel free to take that one when I let the domain expire...

Nazi Clown Fish really wanted to be a website mascot...

I present to you... Gaming With Lemons... dot com.

TL;DR

 
We have a new website. It’s about lemons and video games. And video game lemons.

We need to talk, kupo

Apple did a funny thing this week. They announced a new desktop operating system with little fanfare and took the entire internet by surprise. For as secretive as Apple try to be, hiding new phones in plain sight where no one would think to look, the internet has enough rumors about them that we practically always know what they're going to announce before they do, even if some of those predictions are a year off (I’m looking at you iPhone 5). And yet, with the announcement of Mountain Lion, the internet knew nothing. I came home from work having not looked at the news all day and just discovered that it had been announced.

Perhaps the reason why the internet hadn’t even gotten around to making up features for Apple’s next OS release is because Lion only came out seven months ago. Since 2003 OS X has been on a two year release cycle (in stark contrast to Microsoft’s “when we get round to it” cycle), but Apple seems keen to break this with Mountain Lion, moving to a yearly release cycle that matches their mobile OS. This could be either good or bad really. Yearly updates mean we get more frequent feature updates, but they could just be trying to get you to pay for an upgrade more often and releases could become more iterative in nature.

Like Lion, Mountain Lion is all about bringing iOS features to the desktop, but hopefully this time with more success. When Lion brought yet another method of launching apps to OS X that looked like iOS’s springboard we all rolled our eyes just a little. Despite already having the dock, stacks, spotlight and the finder, obviously the feature the Mac was missing was iOS’s worst part.

Mountain Lion brings some great features of iOS to the desktop, such as AirPlay mirroring to an Apple TV and a unified notification center. Having a centralised place to see a list of alerts and messages you received while you were away from the computer seems like an obvious omission from OS X, and anyone who has ever tried to explain to their parents how to connect a laptop to a big screen will appreciate the simplicity of AirPlay. 

With this release Apple is also trying to make the OS make more sense. Currently notes you have syncing in iCloud end up (for no apparent reason) in your e-mail inbox and reminders appear in iCal as to dos. In Mountain Lion these have been split out into separate apps which make much more sense. Speaking of iCloud, it’s being integrated more deeply at the OS level, allowing you to save and open iCloud documents in Pages or TextEdit for example. 

I wish they had gone much further with this however. While notes in Mail and reminders in iCal were minor grumbles, everyone has complained about the monstrosity of iTunes for years. It’s understandable how it happened, but iTunes as an app no longer makes sense. iTunes should go back to being a media player and anything not related to that should be its own thing, such as iOS app purchasing/management and iBooks. In fact, splitting iBooks into its own app would be the perfect opportunity to introduce a Mac reader for iBooks, which is bizarrely absent.

The most obvious feature that should be torn out of iTunes is iPad and iPhone syncing. It’s there because that’s where you put music on an iPod, but now that iDevices are grown up and WiFi syncing means you need to leave iTunes open all the time, device syncing should become a system level feature.

Finally one of Mountain Lion’s curious new additions is Gatekeeper, a security control that by default blocks the installation of apps from the internet that aren’t signed by an Apple certificate. Getting a certificate doesn’t require you to get into the app store, but it does require you to pay the developer licensee fee. The feature can be turned off (or made more vigilant) and I don’t have anything fundamentally against it as it protects against malware and still allows un-approved apps, but the direction we are going in concerns me. In a couple more versions of OS X I could easily see the “anywhere” option quietly disappear. 

But maybe that’s just my tinfoil hat talking.

Overall I look forward to this upgrade, but I certainly hope that next years upgrade isn’t just another iOS catch up and they invest time in genuinely developing new features for the Mac.

Drink cactus juice! It'll quench ya! Nothing's quenchier! It's the quenchiest!

WOA!!!!!!So Microsoft announced on Thursday, through a monstrous eight thousand word blog post I didn’t read, more details about Windows 8. Specifically they talked about Windows on ARM, or WOA for short, because everyone loves an acronym. New acronyms are like a little piece of Christmas in February, which is fitting because there is a metric fuckton of snow outside right now. 

One of the curious revelations in this blog post was the news that Windows 8 on ARM would feature the traditional desktop (it had long been speculated that it wouldn’t), but that the desktop would only be available to use Office 15 (slightly modified for touch), Internet Explorer 10 and the file explorer. No other programs will be allowed to use the desktop on ARM. It makes sense from Microsoft’s prospective; they want to put Windows on ARM devices, but they also want everyone to use the cross-platform WinRT (Metro styled apps) to develop for it.

But from a user’s prospective this will be a terrible experience. If you give a non-technical user a Windows 8 desktop PC and a Windows 8 ARM tablet, just try explaining to them why seemingly identical operating systems can’t both run Photoshop. In fact, explain to them why they can’t do anything in the desktop. Want to zip some files to send in an email? Don’t try installing WinZip. Want to listen to music in the media player of your choice? Sorry about that.

Which begs the question; why is the desktop even there when giving users an environment they recognise just gives them false expectations of the product? The answer is obvious, this is a stop gap to allow you to run traditional Office apps and to access Windows features that haven’t been ported to Metro, such as advance settings panels, the file explorer, the registry, etc, etc. The desktop is hanging of Windows 8 on ARM like a cancerous growth because Microsoft is afraid (or doesn’t have time) to go the whole way and ditch the classic desktop.

Microsoft has been touting “no compromises” as the selling point of Windows 8, but so far it’s sounding like nothing but compromises. I understand they wanted to build a single operating system for both desktop and mobile, but if the classic desktop on mobile devices is almost useless and a terrible user experience, and desktop users don’t want the metro start screen (the experience of that is still a question), you begin to wonder if they should be two distinct products.

Microsoft could easily present them as two separate products, one for desktop and one for mobile and have the underlying core OS be the same under the hood. In fact, isn’t that exactly what Mac OS X and iOS is? Both the improvements in the Windows 8 desktop and the Metro start screen for tablets look like they could be successful products, but I just don’t understand why Microsoft seems determined to make an inferior product by making them conjoined twins.

You know, Chevy Chase woke up one day and just wasn't funny anymore

Despite being rather late to the party I really enjoyed the Assassin's Creed series to date, demonstrated by how I played them all at the start of last year back to back. Sure the first one was as repetitive as peeling potatoes and more of a tech demo than a game, but the story was unique and surprising and the core gameplay of exploring a city from the streets and the rooftops and assassinating enemies of the creed was incredibly satisfying. So it was with great disappointment that I discovered the latest entry in the series wasn't up to snuff having finally caught up with everyone else.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations clearly suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Despite feeling like games that have taken several years to develop, Ubisoft have been shitting these out every year since 2008 like they have erratic diarrhea and it's finally starting to show on their pants.  

Sure the core experience is still there and I love it, but everything new feels as ill thought out as claiming to have fallen into a life boat. For those who hated playing Desmond you will be glad to hear you will be doing no more of that tomfoolery, but unfortunately it's been replaced with first person flash back sequences which have you completing deficient block puzzles that wouldn't entertain a three year old.

Even returning features feel completely soulless. In Brotherhood burning the Borgia towers made sense for the story, but in Revelations these locations exist without any context. In the same vein you can buy and restore every bank, shop and cake establishment in the city and I will because I have OCD, but there is absolutely no explanation as to why you are doing it and there is almost no real benefit for doing so. 

To introduce unnecessary complexity, assassin dens can come under attack and be re-taken. To defend them you must participate in another oddball addition, a tower defence mini-game which isn't terrible, but doesn't hit it out of the park either. Just about every side task to the main quest seems out of place in Revelations, like it was simply included because it had debuted in a previous title.

Perhaps the worst offence of Revelations is in the title, as it provides no real revelations. We get some nice inception action as Desmond views the end of Ezio's adventure, who views the end of Altair's tale, but none of this moves the overarching story forward. 

The fact Desmond is unconscious for the entire game should give you the hint that this is the game in there series to skip. Revelation's is still a fun game, but it is in no way the must play experience of its predecessors. Let's just hope Ubisoft realises that they need a change of trousers before it runs the series into the ground.

Intercepting iPhone/iPad keyboard events

So a problem; you have a web app running on iOS that you want to receive keyboard events at any time. The simplest solution would be to make the user put focus on a designated text field that you could watch for keyboard events in JavaScript, however it's a pain in the arse if the user has to keep putting focus back when they loose it. Unfortunately the app itself can't force focus on the text field as mobile safari blocks it (only a touch event triggered by the user will bring up the keyboard). 

The solution, as crazy as it sounds, is to create a native iOS wrapper app that can monitor keyboard events at all times and forward them onto the web app. To do so all you need to do is create is a view controller that displays a UIWebView with your web app inside and implement the UIKeyInput protocol. 

@interface ViewController : UIViewController <UIKeyInput>

In the implementation of your view controller you just need a few of methods.

- (void) insertText:(NSString* )text
{
    NSLog(@"%@", text);
}

- (void)deleteBackward { }

- (BOOL) canBecomeFirstResponder
{
    return YES;
}

- (BOOL) resignFirstResponder
{
    return NO;
}

- (BOOL) hasText
{
    return YES;
}

Insert text is where we will receive keyboard input and resign first responder is the crucial method that returns false to prevent the web app from taking the keyboard if an element receives focus. Obviously the negative to this is you can never type directly into elements in the web app. 

Once the native app receives keyboard events they can be passed onto the web app using JavaScript. You just need to create a receiving method in the web app and call it in the native app like so.

- (void) insertText:(NSString* )text
{
    NSLog(@"%@", text);
    [myWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:[NSString 
        stringWithFormat:@"receiveText('%@');", text]];
}

And there you have it, intercepting keyboard events for a web app using a native wrapper.

I’ve done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!

Happy new year everyone, unless you don't believe in new year, in which case insert politicly correct good wishes for getting round the sun once more, with no offence intended to you or your friends and loved ones.

2011 was certainly a year, thats for sure. In my final semester of University I helped create a pretty awesome multiplayer flash game, I learned Object-C and created an iPhone app for my final year project and I graduated from the course with first class honours (go me!). I also got a little full-time job with some folk who sell fermented vegetable drinks online and was tricked into doing terrible things to my facial hair. 

It wasn't all sunshine and victory laps though. It rained a lot for one and the final few months of University were some of the most stressful of my life. It didn't help that at the same time as trying to complete my final year project and maintain a part-time job, I had the consecutive loss of both Tabby and Hamish, two long-term members of the family. They say a dog is for life, but you forget that it's their life, not yours. His death hit everyone hard, but my mum most of all, who became physically ill for over a week and caught an eye infection that could have made her blind (fortunately she fully recovered). On a more up beat note we also got a couple new members of the family in ones of the most unexpected ways (my older sister nearly tripped over a stray cat giving birth on her doorstep). 

The last month has also been "an experience". Working for an online e-commerce company means everything is about Christmas, and this one was the busiest yet. On one day in December the website took more orders than the entirety of 2008, so to help support the team and fix any issues that arose we had to move from our nice warm office to a very cold warehouse. Christmas was a success though, mostly because it didn't snow and we made order processing much more efficient, so yay us and all that. Next year our systems will be so efficient the whisky will be picked and packed by little robots and I can spend the last two weeks of December in Malaga instead of High Brooms, aka the coldest place in Britain.

Christmas wasn't all cold warehouses though, as for a person who doesn't drink very much, I did a lot of drinking. This included a surprise party in London for an old college and uni friend and consecutive days of going to work and hitting the pubs in the evening, which I'm positive did wonders for my programming. It was great to see a lot of people again and we defeantly need to do it more often.

I also learned in 2011 that I am terrible at ice skating. So there is that.

2011 in Gaming: Gave Up

We conclude this series of posts on games I played in 2011 (part one can be found here and part two over here respectively) with the ones I truly didn't enjoy. These are not only the games I didn't complete, but the ones I officially quit playing because of the reasons listed below.

2011 in Gaming: Gave Up:

Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii) - I love Kirby and Epic Yarn is one of the darn cutest titles on the Wii. The  way you can manipulate the yarn world is just ingenious and the things Kirby can transform himself into are adorable and awesome, but this game sucks. It's depressingly easy, there is almost no way to loose and local co-op is down right boring. 

L.A. Noire (PS3) - L.A. Noire is critically acclaimed as a classic adventure game disguised as an open world GTA detective game, with amazing facial animation and voice acting. I was really into this game initially, but I soon realised how simple the "choices" were and got bored by how repetitive the game quickly became a few cases in. A brilliant idea, poorly executed. I ranted about this quite a bit on the latest episode of Downloadable Content.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3) - The Uncharted series is extremely popular, and I was hoping to jump into it after finally getting a PS3 similar to how I marathoned Assassin's Creed, however the excellent voice acting and incredible graphics weren't enough to convince me to finish this incredibly poor third person shooter. The enemies soak bullets, the controls are awful and the the fights unnecessarily long. I'm told the sequel is excellent so I'm going to give the series another go.

Kinect Sports / Kinect Adventures (360) - I don't own a Kinect, but I did play with one. Kinect is a gimmick, it doesn't work very well, and these mini games aren't very enjoyable.

Crysis 2 (360) - I'm told this is a high-quality shooter, but I just never got into it. Just one of those "not for me" titles I suspect. 

2011 in Gaming: Backlog / Uncompleted

Continuing from yesterdays post, here are the games that didn't make it. The journeys I didn't complete, both new and old. A lot of loooong games on this list. Hopefully I can knock more than a few of these out in the next year.

2011 in Gaming: Backlog / Uncompleted

Dragon Age: Origins (360) - A 2009 game on the backlog that I briefly tried to get into, Dragon Age is an old school dark fantasy RPG with branching dialogue trees and plot points  that change dramatically based on your choice of character and party members. I just need a lot more free time. 

Bastion (360) - Wonderfully whimsical, Bastion is a top down role-playing action game that leads you through a stunningly beautiful world. The soundtrack is one of the best this year and the narrator reacting to your every action provides an incredible amount of depth to this experience.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (360) - One of those games I got distracted from near the end of the year and need to go back to, Deus Ex is an action packed first-person shooter set in a  cyberpunk world that is absolutely worth seeing.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations (PS3) - Possibly the weakest and most unnecessary edition in the Assassin's Creed 2 trilogy, Revalations is showing signs of deterioration in the series' annualisation. The series formula is still a blast, but it's time to move forward.

Tales of Symphonia (GC) - The game I famously lost £40 on because I bet I could beat it before my graduation. I had over a year to do the bet, but classically left it to the last eight days. In the 25+ hours that I played I found a brilliant classic RPG with an addictive combat system and a massive world to explore. The voice acting is up and down, but the story is worth experiencing and I intend to complete this challenge. Eventually...

Chrono Trigger (VC) - 2011 was the year of trying and failing to complete classic RPGs on my backlog. Chrono Trigger is worth including in this list because I made more progress than ever before, reaching the Forest Maze in 65,000,000 BC. It shouldn't need stating, but Chrono Trigger is an incredible JRPG, and one I might still one day complete.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PS3) - The seemingly endless battle against dragons and giants is just so big I'm frightened to become committed. I admit to not playing this epic game as much as I should. It's technically flawed in many ways (including a deteriorating frame rate the larger my save file gets), but all should be forgiven because the title screen music is just so bad ass.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (VC) - Another Zelda game I am ashamed to admit to never playing to completion. This also receives acknowledgement on the list because I got further than ever before, reaching the Shadow Temple. Ocarina of Time has suffered greatly due to its age, but it's still an amazing game and worth playing to this day. Just appreciate its age okay?

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii) - The newest edition to the franchise, Skyward Sword continues to add surprises to the classic formula, is beautiful to look at despite being SD and contains the best use of the Wiimote period. This is the Wii's swan song.