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- Manage Your D&D 4E Characters On the iPhone
Every Friday night, I get out from my Mom’s basement, um, my wife lets me get out for a night, err, I get together with my old High School gaming group for a fun night of D&D 4th Edition.
One of the things that was a bit of shocker in 4th edition is how much administration there was. Gone are the days of just whacking creatures and getting healed. Now I need to deal with healing surges, at-will powers, encounter powers, dailies, etc. It can get to be a bit much. To help with a lot of the back-end creation I subscribe to the excellent Wizards Insider (sadly, this is Windows-only). Among its core features is a very handy character builder that uses all of Wizard’s published source material — even if I don’t own that volume — and creates a very handy, easy to read character sheet.
However, by the end of a gaming session, that sheet of paper looks like the crib notes to a physics final exam. The hit points section is a blur of eraser marks. The encounter powers have been checked, unchecked, rechecked, and double-checked. I was originally hoping that viewing a PDF (and maybe even annotating it) on an iPad might be an ideal solution to outsource the administrative details, but then I stumbled upon i4e in the app store.
This handy program either lets you input your character by hand — not recommended since it stores none of the powers and items from the game, so you’ll be entering in a lot of stuff on a small keyboard — or you can simply import your character from the Character Builder. Naturally, this is the option I chose.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t 100 percent successful. Most of the abilities are missing some of the descriptive text and it wasn’t taking into account the bonus to hit from my +2 sword and the base damage to the full-blade. According to the developer’s web site, this is a limitation in what is stored in the file, so there’s not much that can be done about it. At this point, if I wanted to, I’d have to input a lot of this data by hand. For now, though, I’m simply shrugging and keeping a printout of my character in front of me. Also, to check something I created a weapon within i4e and it still didn’t use the proper values.
That may seem like a complete deal-breaker, but the areas I wanted it to shine — handling the administration — it does. For example, the below screenshot is what happens when I select the hit points field. From here, I can either take damage, get healed (and say if that heal uses a healing surge), or add temporary hit points. This is very handy if you completely suck at math like I do.
I’m also impressed with how it handles powers. In 4th Edition, there are three types of powers you have: at-will powers than can be used at any time; powers that can be used only once per encounter; and powers that can be used only one a day. In i4e, I can click a power, tap the “use power” button and that power will appear gray in the powers list. When we’re done with an encounter and take what’s called a “short rest” (which resets the encounter powers) I can press the “short rest” button and, you guessed it, it resets all my used encounter powers. Naturally, there’s an “extended rest” button that’ll reset my all used powers.
After a full night’s game session, I asked myself: can I run a nightly gaming session using only i4e and an imported Character Builder file? Right now, with not having all the powers descriptions there, that answer is no (the character builder file gets updated too much for me to keep re-entering all the missing data). But, it’s not by missing the mark by much. I make PDFs of my character each update to send to the other players. Using Dropbox and the new Quickoffice Connect, or the Dropbox App, I can store the PDFs on the iPhone without needing to sync to iTunes. Sure, it’s not ideal with the small screen, and I’ll at least need a PDF of my main sheet, but once I get an iPad, I predict a paperless D&D night is in my future.
Переслать - Mozilla to Drop OS 10.4 Tiger Support? Say It Isn't So
Another nail in OS X 10.4 Tiger’s coffin was recently hammered in a post by Mozilla Foundation’s Josh Aas.
Support for Tiger Already Terminated
Aas reveals that development support for OS X 10.4 Tiger was terminated as of September 2009, but much of the code required to support 10.4 was left in the tree in case the developers wanted to reverse that decision. The point has arrived that a final decision to either restore 10.4 support or remove the (large) amount of 10.4-specific code from the next iteration of Mozilla’s Gecko browser engine must be made.
He presents the not unreasonable case that the developers want to take advantage of advanced technologies in later OS X versions and retaining OS 10.4 support has been a hindrance, as workarounds consume valuable time and effort.
25% of Mac OS X Firefox Users Still Running OS 10.4
Aas concedes that approximately 25 percent of Firefox’s Mac OS X users (roughly 1.5 million) are still running OS 10.4, but would continue to be supported by Firefox 3.6 until it reaches end of service several months after the next major Firefox version release (built on Gecko 1.9.3) later this year. Cold comfort and a mighty short time window for those of us still running Tiger, the last OS X version that supports G3 Macs and G4s slower than 867 MHz. I’m hoping to get at least two or three more years of production service out of my two old Pismo PowerBooks running OS 10.4.
Aas counters that in the past Mozilla hasn’t lost appreciable market share after dropping support for a Mac OS X version, making the fair observation that they’re typically one of the last vendors supporting older Mac OS X releases. However I wonder if any of those previous abandonments represented a quarter of their user base.
OS 10.4 a Special Case?
I submit that Tiger represents a special case because of its straddling of the PPC/Intel transition, and that there are more PPC diehards likely holding on to older Macs that only support up to Tiger for longer this time than would customarily have been.
Some of us Tiger holdouts either don’t want to give up on computers performing superbly and reliably for us, as my Pismos are for me, or simply can’t afford to upgrade our systems during this economic period.
I accede to the eventual inevitability of Tiger’s demise farewell, and Apple itself could terminate security update support for Tiger any day now. I just don’t welcome it and hoped it wouldn’t arrive quite this soon.
How about you? If you’re still using Tiger, how big of a deal will Firefox support termination be for you?
Переслать - Microsoft Starts Over, Announces Credible iPhone Competitor
Of all the companies competing in the cellphone industry, it is perhaps more than just a little poetic that Microsoft should be the first to offer a truly compelling product to rival Apple's iPhone.
I never thought I'd write that sentence.
Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Steve Ballmer unveiled Microsoft's newest phone platform, awkwardly-titled Windows Phone 7 Series.
Quick rundown; it's based on Windows CE kernel 6.0 (the latest WinMo is 5.2) is finger-friendly everywhere with swiping, pinching and multitouch, sports a virtual keyboard and offers music and video playback via the awesome Zune UI. Oh, and, there's not a stylus in sight.
And here's the thing; Windows Phone 7 Series actually looks good. I mean, it looks really good, even though it's clearly unfinished.
As such, the UI is a bit slow, finger touches are sometimes ignored, and it's clear that the fancy animations and transitions are something of a drag on the processor. Microsoft engineer Joe Belfiore said of the new OS;
“What we’re doing is building and delivering a different kind of phone […] a smart design that puts the user at the center of their experience. We’re moving beyond the phone as a PC-like item that moves beyond separate applications and brings together the key things that are important to people […] like pictures, and music and video, and productivity.
Users have one simple place to go and access their web services, access the functionality in their applications, and access the data on their phone. Those are the fundamental ideas behind this new user experience.”
On the matter of its fresh new UI, Windows maven Paul Thurrott wrote in his (even more awkwardly titled) Windows Phone 7 Series Preview Part I;
This is an important difference between the iPhone and Windows Phone. When you use an iPhone, you go into an app, which takes over the device. If you want to do something else, you must leave the first app, navigate around the home screens, find the new app, and launch that. Rinse, repeat. (And the iPhone’s lack of a Back button let alone sophisticated multitasking is, of course, still a huge issue.)
After years of heavy daily iPhone use, I can't honestly say the lack of a back button or "sophisticated multitasking" have ever been a "huge issue." I had those things in Windows Mobile phones years ago but never used those devices anywhere near as much as I use my iPhone. Maybe Thurrott is right – though personally, I just don’t think it’s the issue he has long made it out to be.
Credit Where Credit is Due
But this shouldn't be about taking cheap shots at the competition. Microsoft deserves credit. The new Windows Phone 7 Series is a compelling glimpse at – maybe – a bright future for a platform everyone thought was dead. The UI is stylish and looks really fun to use. It even makes the iPhone's OS look more 30 years old than three.
We're just not accustomed to Microsoft doing bold, exciting and compelling work. Maybe that's the result of having the wind knocked out of its sails by the EU Commission, or because it tends to focus more on business solutions than it does personal consumer-facing solutions. Whatever the reason, it hasn’t done anything this exciting and new in a long time.
There's still opportunity for it to mess-up. If Microsoft has any sense at all, and wants to claw-back some of the marketshare it has lost since 2007, it’ll need to exercise far greater control over OEM's (enforcing strict minimum specifications on Windows Phone handsets) and Carriers, too (insisting end users be free to install software updates – traditionally, Carriers required users buy a whole new handset should they want to upgrade).
Apple's iPhone success owes much to its closed ecosystem; Apple designs and builds its own hardware which is coupled with custom-software. Updates are available for everyone everywhere and carriers have no say in the matter. Even third-party apps are vetted by Apple in order to ensure they don't tarnish the universal iPhone 'experience'.
Microsoft has never demonstrated it cared about user experience in Windows Mobile. Now, it seems obvious it’s adopting a new attitude.
So here's the big picture; Microsoft has produced a powerful new mobile OS in Windows Phone 7 Series. It offers all the same basic functionality as the iPhone. There's an app store. The Zune media platform. System-wide social network integration. It will likely be cheaper than an iPhone and Carrier-agnostic from day one. It won't need iTunes or the iTunes Store, either (though I'm not suggesting the Windows Marketplace or Zune Social is any better).
Windows Phone 7 Series Marketplace (Image by Engadget)
I look at today's current best-competitor for the iPhone and it's clearly an Android-based handset such as the Nexus One. But let's be brutally honest – Android is a mobile OS for Geeks. Android's huge gain in market share probably owes more to the fact that it's free than to any other consideration.
Meanwhile, the iPhone's remarkable success proves that consumers are willing – even during a recession – to pay real money for a great product if everything is done right.
Microsoft might have finally figured this out. And ain't it fun to imagine that, a year or so from now, the most credible competition to the iPhone may come not from Android or RIM, but from the company we all stopped caring about years ago. Somehow, that's just perfect. And I can't wait to see how Apple responds.
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