Billed as the “first full featured football game to enter the App Store”, NFL 2010 is a solid first entry. The controls take a bit of getting used to, but work fairly well. There is a full season mode, nice playbook, and a variety of stadiums.
All in all, it’s a solid game. Madden is due to come out fairly soon, so it’ll be interesting to see how the two stack up.
Lots more information about the Facebook 3.0 app is coming out. AppAdvice has posted a variety of features that you’ll find in the new app, such as:
Still no word on the exact release date, as that’s in Apple’s hands. I’d expect it in the next few days, but you never know.
The Discovery Channel has just released their own application today, aptly called “Discovery Channel”. This app features video clips, quizzes, photo galleries, program schedules and various other things.
Sadly, the app doesn’t include full episodes for most shows — just a link to iTunes where you can buy the shows.
Their full press release is below:
Discovery Communications, (Nasdaq: DISCA, DISCB, DISCK) the world’s number one nonfiction media company, today announced the launch of the Discovery Channel App on the App Store.
Bringing fans greater access to their favorite programs, the Discovery Channel App features a robust collection of video clips from the network’s most popular shows including: Emmy(R)-nominated MYTHBUSTERS and MAN VS. WILD as well as DIRTY JOBS, TIME WARP, DEADLIEST CATCH, CASH CAB and SHARK WEEK.
“Consumers are increasingly looking to enjoy their entertainment while mobile and our new Discovery Channel App offers the ultimate on-the-go fan experience for iPhone and iPod touch,” said Doug Craig, senior vice president, Digital and Home Entertainment, Discovery Communications. “We are excited to bring viewers another compelling option with which to experience our high-quality content and satisfy their curiosity in way that fits their lifestyle.”
In addition to video, the Discovery Channel App offers a collection of quizzes, photo galleries, programming schedules and updates from Discovery News, as well as the ability to share favorite content via email and to save favorites to easily watch over and over again. The app also offers links to the iTunes Store where Discovery offers a selection of full-episodes of top rated programming for purchase including SHARK WEEK, MAN VS. WILD, MYTHBUSTERS and more.
The Discovery Channel App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.
The Discovery Channel App follows the success of Discovery’s Cannon Challenge App, a non-line-of-sight targeting game. The Discovery Channel App is available within the Entertainment Category and the Cannon Challenge App can be found under Games. The free app was designed and built by mobile video leader Rhythm NewMedia.
Not sure whether or not to get CivRev? I’ll make it pretty easy for you:
There are a few minor bugs that I expect will be fixed soon (badly mis-matched battles), but it’s a fairly polished app. It runs well, and it hasn’t crashed on me yet.
Best of all is the free “lite” version that is available. The lite version is a very complete game by itself, and will be more than adequate for most users. If you find you need a bit more, then the $9.99 price isn’t a very big deal.
Facebook 3.0 is coming out soon, well let you know how it is soon!
As I continue to grow in my use of GTD, I’m discovering just how important the trust factor with your system can be. David Allen says that you need to really
trust your system for it to work. You can say you trust it all you want, but that’s irrelevant. When it comes down to it, a trusted system works and a semi-trusted system doesn’t.
So what does it mean to really trust your system? I have a few thoughts.
Trust it like a Christian should trust God
You may or may not believe in God, but the point still works. Andy Stanley gave a great analogy for how a Christian should trust in God. He held up the stool he was sitting on and said to trust in it. To trust in the stool means to sit ON it. Not on the edge. Not with your feet on the ground a little bit. On it with your full weight. You might be nervous at first, but over time you’ll learn to trust the stool completely.
Trust it like you should trust your spouse
If you’ve been married, you can understand this. Saying you trust your spouse is one thing. Really trusting your spouse is another. For a marriage to really work, you need to completely trust in your spouse.
GTD is the same way
If you don’t really trust the system, then you can never have a “mind like water”. I’ve found that as I’ve learned the system works and I can trust it, anything I put into it is instantly out of my head. Getting the junk out of your head is the key to focusing on the task at hand, and GTD is a great way to get it done. Whether you use software, a website, your PDA or just pen and paper, make sure you use a system that you can trust completely.
While the title says “non-Diggers”, this really applies to anyone who would visit this blog and say “what’s SEO stand for?”
I find that very smart people are very confused about a wide array of technology-related items. Here are the 10 I hear most often:
10 — The Wii Remote needs to see the screen!
In some cases, yes. In most cases, no. I’ve had friends try to point the remote at the screen so it’ll accept a button press, and you’ve had friends do it too.
When you’re moving the cursor around on the screen, it needs to be able to see the bar above (or below) your TV. If you’re in the middle of a game of Mario Kart, it doesn’t care where that little bar is or who is standing in the way.
9 — The iPhone is the most advanced phone ever!
The iPhone is great. I have it, I love it. It’s slick and it works well, but it’s missing a ton of very basic features. I traded an N95 to get my iPhone. The iPhone has a much worse camera, no built-in video capture, a worse battery life and no MMS. Throw in things that it should have (like copy-and-paste) and it looks even worse.
That being said, it’s still the best phone I know for e-mail and browsing, and that’s my main concern, but it’s got serious weaknesses that other phones don’t have.
8 — The government has a live version of Google Earth.
I spend a lot of time on various Google Earth sites, and I’ve found that many people that wonder if Google Earth imagery is in real-time. When they find out it isn’t, they’re sure that the govenment has access to it. No. Trust me.
While I think that real-time imagery in a product like Google Earth will be here someday, I’m pretty confident that we’ll be in the 2020’s before that happens.
7 — Sites at the top of Google paid to get there.
They’re not talking about the paid listings; they mean the organic ones. “You know you can pay Google and they’ll give you a boost, right?”
While there are ways you can pay to possibly move up (paid links), slipping Google some cash under the table won’t do it. If they were found to be manipulating the organic results for some kick-backs, that could be the end of Google as we know it.
6 — Macs can’t get viruses
Macs are so much better than PCs because they can’t get viruses, right? Wrong. In fact, some studies have shown Macs to be more vulnerable to attacks than Windows machines. The main issue seems to be a lack of market share, and thus a lack of incentive for evildoers to attack the Macs.
On the other hand, every year we hear that “this year Macs will start to get attacked” because of their growing market share, and yet it never pans out. Still, people that think Macs are somehow “virus-proof” are idiots.
5 — “Hits” are the best measure of a website
As soon as a I hear someone tell me how many “hits” they’re getting on their website, I know I can tune them out. While hits are a technically accurate measure, they don’t mean what most people think they mean.
For example, our church website got over 12 million hits last year. Amazing! Not really. that was only 115,000 visitors and about3 million pageviews. Certainly nice numbers, but nothing like the 12 million hits. When you load a page, every element on the page (images, JS calls, external stylesheets, etc) create a “hit” on the server. Thus, one visitor looking at one page could easily generate a dozen hits on a site.
4 — I’m “on” the website right now
While this is somewhat beginning to change, it’s still not accurate. When you pull up CNN, your computer downloads the HTML, images, etc, shows them on your screen and disconnects from the site. When you click to another page, your computer reconnects, grabs the HTML/images from that page, and then disconnects again.
You’re never “on” a site — you’re just pulling each page to you.
3 — My identity isn’t safe online
Many people think that just by pulling up a website, your identity can get stolen. I suppose with the right spyware on your machine it could happen, but it’s unlikely. The majority of identity thefts occur when people simply give away their info in a phishing scheme.
You can say your identity got “stolen”, but the truth is you gave away to them.
2 — My computer might catch a virus
Viruses are big news, but really are fairly rare. Many people think of comptuer viruses like human viruses, in that you can just “catch” one. You can’t. You need to download an infected file, open an infected e-mail, or visit an infected site with your unpatched browser.
If you keep your PC up to date and you’re not stupid, the odds of being infected with a virus are close to zero, even with out A/V software installed.
1 — Google searches the internet
This is the one I hear the most often. The truth is, Google doesn’t search the internet. It can’t. It is impossible for you to search the internet.
Google simply searches a copy of the internet that they store on their servers and update as often as possible. This creates the illusion of them searching the internet, and it’s a system that works very well.
What other crazy things do you hear from your semi-technical friends?
Google Notebook and Jott are two of the cogs in my GTD system, and both just announced news that makes them less desireable.
Jott has just announced that they are ending their free service as of February 2. I was considering upgrading to their paid service anyhow so I could send notes directly to Nozbe, but I hate that they’re losing the free service. I’m torn as to whether I should pay for that service or switch to something like Dial2Do and hope that they include Nozbe support in the future. I’m thinking I’ll pay for Jott (it’s only $4/month), but we’ll see.
The other bad news involves Google Notebook. Google just announced that they’re closing up some services and ceasing development on some others. They’re effectively dumping Jaiku and Dodgeball, and slowing closing out Google Video (which was a long time coming, since they own YouTube). The official word on Google Notebook is:
Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.
I’ve been trying to decide whether to stick with Google Notebook or move all of that content to Evernote. I think that decision has just been made.
I’ve always been a pretty big fan of Micro Center. Their prices are decent, and their selection is excellent — especially for small parts that places like Best Buy would never carry. However, they’re starting to have some issues, and it’s getting worse every time.
It started a few months back. I went in there to purchase a video camera for a non-profit that I help out, and it went fairly smooth. The only change was that instead of walking up to a register and paying, you now have to walk down a low row of crap (50 feet?), make a u-turn at the end, walk halfway back, then “wait for the next available checkout”. They’re pushing the impulse items pretty hard. I used to really enjoy their fast checkout. All in all, though, it wasn’t a bad visit.
When my mother-in-law was in town a few weeks later, she said she wanted to get a new video camera. I knew that Micro Center still had the good deal, so we went there. It took forever to get some help, and then the dude pushed and pushed (and pushed) for the extended warranty. We were going to politely decline, but we nearly had to tell him to STFU so we could just buy the thing. Then they gave her the whole “50 questions” when she was checking out. We finally told them to let it go, and just let us buy the camera.
The next visit may end up having been my last. Our church needed a video camera, so I went back for another one. I walked in with a credit card in my hand and walked directly to the camera I wanted — and it took me over 30 minutes to get out!
Between waiting to find a salesperson, waiting for them to find the camera, then waiting in line for the check-out, it wasted a lot of time. I should have been their dream customer that day — walk in and pick up a $500 camera, ready to buy. Uggg.
I hope they’re making a lot of money by cutting staff and pushing the impulse items, because sales are going nowhere but down.
If you run a vBulletin-based forum, you might have noticed a BIG influx of spam in the past few days. Spammers are no longer slowed by the vBulletin CAPTCHA, and according to Slashdot, aren’t slowed by a variety of others, either.
For years, CAPTCHAs have been getting more and more complex in order to stop the bots. However, I think we’ve reached the end of that road. They’re already too difficult for most humans to get on the first try, and making them more difficult will only serve to frustrate more users. So what can you do?
I have an answer for today, and an idea for the future. The answer today is to use a “question and answer” type CAPTCHA, which many sites already use. The key is to use the right kind of question. Rather than asking something generic like “what is 3+1”, ask something that can only be found on your site, like “In our site title at the top of the screen, what is the second letter?”. It’s still painfully obvious for a human, but much more difficult for a bot. If your script can handle it, write a variety of questions and answers to help keep the bots thrown off.
Going forward, I’d love to see the questions put into a CAPTCHA-style box (embedded in an image). Doing that would add another step to the spammers job, but would still leave it quite easy for a user.
Picture this. You have:
While bots could certainly start keeping a database of answers for various sites, you can just change your bank of Q&A’s from time to time to stay ahead.This also would eliminate the popular technique of showing CAPTCHAs to users on another site in order to break into yours. For example, a bot might go to your site, pull the CAPTCHA you showed them, show it to visitors on a porn site (“fill out this captcha to see the next page!”), then get into yours. If the CAPTCHA contained a question that could only be answered by someone on your site, that problem goes away.
The problem of spamming will never go away, but we need to work hard to stay ahead of them.