Posts Tagged ‘beta’
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'cause Webnotes stick on me!
Now with invites and annotations!
Ever wish that you could have a cheat sheet for a webpage? Get through all that useless junk that the author wrote? I’m sure that most of my readers do. And thus comes Webnotes.
Webnotes is a new web-working tool designed at letting users add annotations and highlighting to websites. They combine two of my personal favorite things: Post-it notes and websites, it was just a matter of time. The utility is easy to use, just install the toolbar (Firefox plug-in FTW) and you’re set. There is a button to create a sticky note, button to highlight text and a button to share what you’ve done. It’s that easy.
Once you have that done, it’s easy to place sticky notes around. I know I’m going to have the bad habit of putting them on every site I visit (I have 29 of them in sight right now around my desk offline, yikes!). The good use for this is that you’ll be able to see a site, put your options on it then send it to your friend so they can see it how you see it. Here, check out I R Blogging with some annotations I put in (I may have put a few too many…).
Some uses for this that I came up with:
- Looking at somebody’s website and giving them pointers.
- Studying notes and highlighting the parts that would be important.
- Adding reminders for the next time you visit the site (like checking out a certain link that you know will be a time-sink)
- Being used as a bookmark when going through archives.
The only thing I can think of right now that this is missing is a social aspect of this. For example, if I could make my notes, send it to a friend then have them add some of their notes and send it back to me (displaying both sets of annotations) it would make it a great collaboration tool. Also, being able to select the color of sticky note would be pretty cool as well.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few invites (Thanks Ryan!), so for those of you interested in some just leave a comment to this post. Be sure to include your email address when filling out the comment form, I’ll be using it to know where to send it.
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Twinity
At first, twinity seems like it’s just about virtual world attempting to play with the big boys at Linden Labs. In that sense, you’re right, but they have a trick up their sleeve: you.
Let’s start off with accessibility, shall we? Twinity requires a download to play and is currently only available for Windows. Though this is often a big concern down the road, I’m sure they’ll have something in the works once they come out of beta (hopefully). Next is price, which because of beta is free as well as they also give you some in-game currency to play with off the hop which is always nice.
One of the biggest things I look for in these worlds is creating my avatar (yes, I’m a fashion whore leave me alone) and Twinity gave me quite a shock here: you can actually import your face onto your avatar. I thought at first it would simply match the hair color, or eye color but no, It actually shapes my face onto the avatar. To be brutally honest with you when I was doing it (be it almost 3am) I said to myself “wow, that looks familiar…holy crap that’s actually my face!” does need a bit of work on that feature, but it’s off to a good start. The base selection of clothes/hair seems to be a bit limited, but I think it’s possible to have user generated stuff so I suppose it’s not that big of a deal.
The next list is things to do. My main interest is often creating a ‘home’ or ‘apartment’ and Twinity isn’t too bad at that. I was able to create a place that is going to charge me 47G (in-game currency) a month which isn’t too bad given that I was given 3000 when I signed up. Users have the ability to choose layout of the place, the style (apartment, office, cafe, etc) as well as location. It was the location here that shocked me, as they’re real places. I chose an apartment then for skyline chose Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Well to my surprise when I looked out the apartment window I saw the CN Tower. Now that is cool. On top of that, it has the basic abilities to wallpaper each wall, create the objects you want and has a nice list of textures you can buy as well as make and upload your own.
The interface and controls are two things that can use some work. Most of the things you need to do in Twinity involves right clicking, which is kind of annoying. On top of that, when the menu loads you have 3 different options for the one thing and none of them make a lot of sense (change texture, apply texture, change texture settings). After playing with them, you get used to them but some better wording would help, since all I wanted to do was make the walls red. The next issue is camera control, it doesn’t follow so you constantly have to be right clicking and swinging the camera around with the mouse as you walk which is annoying beyond belief. A little more user-friendlyness would be appreciated.
Another annoyance of Twinity is the fact that is a complete memory-hog and runs very slow. I understand it’s in beta, but the fact that it runs as though we were still in 1998 annoys me to the point of not wanting to play this any more. Every time I load something, I get a spinning loading icon, even if I’ve already loaded this window 3 times. A caching feature would be a nice touch.
There was also some options and talk about making movies, but at the time of this post I didn’t have the patience to check it out given how incredibly slow in seems to run.
All in all I think Twinity may show some potential for some users who want the ‘realistic’ approach to virtual worlds, but given that is lacks the friendly approach to casual players I can’t see it taking visitors away from competitors. Perhaps further along when it comes out of beta we can decide if it will actually become a player or not.
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Smallworld
Smallworld is a new MMO virtual world currently in Beta out by Outsmart. Unlike many Virtual worlds, there is no downloads but also isn’t horrible 3D graphics. I made a list of the Pros and Con that I could think of. I’d highly recommend everybody to check it out, it’s one of the best I’ve seen it q very long time. With such a nice build, I’m hoping this doesn’t end up being another one that goes from Beta to Nada.
PROS
- All Broswer based. No downloads is AWESOME. Because of the fact that there is no download, I was going into this thinking it was going to be pretty lame, but was sadly mistaken.
- Flickr/Youtube enabled. Inside of the game, they have the ability to set up pictures/TVs with Flickr photos and youtube videos on them. Not only that, but they load at a good speed when they bring it up and allow linking to the image itself. Very well done there.
- Great tutorials. Unlike most games that have tutorials that are very short and leave you guessing, Smallworld seems to have developed a good series of tutorials that send you around the world doing various tasks to get used to your surrounding. This brings me to my next point:
- Free. Most online games today that dub themselves ‘free to play’ are really only free if you want the bare essientials aka nothing. However, Smallworld did such a good job with the tutorials that each one you complete gives you tokens which you can use as currency. This is a great idea since it gives you just enough after the inital how tos to set up a decent room to sit in.
- Good range of items you can use to customize your avatar. There is a limited number of things you can edit, but for the most part they give users a good amaount to choose from for those few things. And given that it’s still in beta, they’re off to a good start.
- In-game games. You can play arcade games, checkers and pool within the game itself. Oh, and you can also beat your friends with a sword.
- Good controls, all done by the mouse. I’m used to using the keyboard due to my recent games I’ve been playing, but can’t fault a good thing with it all being done by clicking.
CONS
- They don’t have a pop-out option for the window, so you get the big ads they have at the bottom of the screen which I find very distracting.
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Firef.ly
Firef.ly is a new service currently in beta created by Betaworks that turns any of your sites into a chat room. Before you say that you’ve seen this before listen here: There is no downloads. That’s right, two lines of code thrown into the footer of my coding (totally painless) and my site has now become it’s own chat room.
If you have a look at the bottom right of your screen, you should see a floating box with # Here, # Chatting, Start Chatting. Click start and the screen gets sort of an ‘overlay’ thing going. You can still scroll and look at whatever is on the site, but you can also move your mouse around and start typing. Where ever you type, it will create a little chat bubble that anybody else on the site can see.
Some of the extra features that look to be put in are the choice of pre-loaded cursors (because arrows are boring) and what looks to be the option to use an image of your own choosing (that doesn’t seem to work yet or I can’t figure out). There is also a twitter option to have certain parts of the convo go to twitter (again can’t get it to work). What IS working though is the time line feature. this allows you to scroll along the site’s time line and check out conversations from the past, which are conveniently marked with little white lines, turning the chat room into a nice form of bulletin board as well.
I really hope this service lasts, it seems to hold a lot of promise.
What they really need now is to get a forum/blog going so we have some way to help them perfect this. They do have a blog, and it’s even listed at the bottom of the main page, I’m a tard. Thanks Andy. Anyway, check it out because it’s awesome. Remember to leave a message there when you check it out, I’ll be sure to see it.
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Movable Type 4.0 Beta
In light of my recent circumstances, I have even more time on my hands (Though I also have more to do) I’ve decided to upgrade my blogging system from Movable Type 3.2 to Movable Type 4.0. I did this for two reasons: 1) It has more options and better features and 2) It has a lot more buttons to play with.
However, I’m finding some of the things to be making me click a few extra times to get where I want to go compared to it’s earlier counterpart. I’m sure I’ll get used to it though. I’ve also moved the blog to the root site so there is no longer a need to add /blog to the URL, www.shirtninja.net will take you where you want to go. The /blog site will remain up until I’m sure that everything is hunky dorey on this new install, but make sure to update your feeds because there won’t be any more updates on that one. On that note, If anybody spots any dead links or bugs of any kind make sure to let me know as I’m sure things will make a habit of giving me a hard time.
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Movable Type 3.0
Well, I’m sitting here playing around with Movable Type 3.0D. Personally, I don’t seem to think it any higher then 2.6. To be honest 2.6 looks better too. I prefer the darker colors, because they’re easier on the eyes. The new one is brighter and distracting, not my taste. They just added more colors and made it so you have to click fewer buttons. Whoop Di Do. I know that I’m sticking with 2.6 for Blogging for Apples, though I’ll leave 3.0 up on my server just because I can. If you want to have a look at it, comment and I’ll email you the log-in info.
Edit:
OK, maybe I was harsh. There is some more stuff on this, but it’s nothing drastic that will make me want to give up my old, reliable, unrestricted 2.6. For example, I can control comments, and force approval on them. Not bad if you get spammed by comments. I can also say that you need a TypeKey (Movable Type registration) to be able to comment. Well that’s a big hell no. If I wanted that, I would have my blog on Movable Type’s server.It seems to me that Movable Type is basically trying to form a community of paying customers that will host the blogs on their own server. In other words, you’re paying them for nothing more then the name and 2 new (worthless) additions. It’s not worth it in my eyes.
However, I will give Movable Type a “Nice Try” on this. Though I’m not paying, and I doubt that everybody else will either when there are other free opportunities out there.
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