Archives for category: Software

Ear­lier this week I picked up the book Rogue Lead­ers: The Story of Lucasarts by Rob Smith. There’s an inter­est­ing his­tory that cap­ti­vated me from the get-go, pri­mar­ily because I’m a part of this fas­ci­nat­ing lineage.

Lucasarts & Quan­tum Link

Habitat coverLucasarts (then called Lucas­film Games) was founded by Peter Langston, a musician/game designer who hand-picked a group of young and eager game design­ers to cre­ate orig­i­nal game properties.

In 1985 Lucasarts was work­ing on a Com­modore 64 vir­tual com­mu­nity game (cou­pled with a 300-baud modem attach­ment) called Habi­tat.

In the game you were to cre­ate an “avatar” (yes, they coined the term in this con­text), pick­ing from a selec­tion of col­ors and clothes using the “GET” and “PUT” com­mands and then chat and inter­act with other peo­ple within a some­what graph­i­cal UI.

They part­nered with a com­pany called Quan­tum Link to pro­vide the on-line ser­vice com­po­nent and dis­trib­uted a beta test. How­ever, the game itself proved to be too pop­u­lar and their servers couldn’t han­dle the load, so it was can­celed never mak­ing it to retail.

Mean­while the tech­nol­ogy was sold to Fijitsu in 1989 and was later renamed Club Caribe.

Post­mortem

Lucasarts went on to cre­ate many orig­i­nal gam­ing prop­er­ties (suc­cess­ful adven­ture games like Maniac Man­sion, Grim Fan­dango and Day of the Ten­ta­cle) and Quan­tum Link even­tu­ally changed their name to Amer­ica Online.

The rest is history.

Addi­tional reading:

http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​H​a​b​i​t​a​t​_​(​v​i​d​e​o​_​g​ame)
http://​www​.nation​mas​ter​.com/​e​n​c​y​c​l​o​p​e​d​i​a​/​Q​u​a​n​t​u​m​-​L​ink
http://​www​.nation​mas​ter​.com/​e​n​c​y​c​l​o​p​e​d​i​a​/​H​a​b​i​t​a​t​-​(​v​i​d​e​o​-​g​ame)

Update: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of Joost allow­ing unlim­ited invites every­one who added a com­ment and those who leave a com­ment from this point on will receive an invite.

Joost [logo]For weeks on end I’ve been patiently wait­ing for a Joost beta invite. Why am I so excited about some­thing that on the sur­face seems like Tivo™ for the web?

There’s an easy answer for that, so let me spill it. Before I do that how­ever, I’d like to thank Paul for send­ing me the invite.

Joost Oozes With Quality

It doesn’t take a spe­cial decoder ring to fig­ure out what Joost does. The offi­cial site describes its func­tion­al­ity quite perfectly:

The magic of tele­vi­sion, with the power of the inter­net built right in. Joost puts you in con­trol, and TV will never be the same again.

This could be con­strued as a bold claim, as if the creators/developers/masterminds (the peo­ple respon­si­ble for Skype and Kazaa) behind this oper­a­tion could not pos­si­bly con­vince them­selves otherwise.

Yet, when you con­nect the dots, eval­u­at­ing the whole enchi­lada for a ser­vice like this (brand­ing, web site and tech­nol­ogy) you can’t help but be enthralled by the polish.

Spec­trums, Rain­bows and Magic

Have you ever looked through a spec­trum? There’s a infi­nite amount of col­ors that appear if you hold one up to a light source. It’s inter­est­ing that the cre­ators of Joost chose to theme their ser­vice around the con­cept of spec­trums and color vari­ety. Although, I must admit they do look a bit like col­ored Kryp­tonite, not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.

Ear­lier today I was doing my best to describe the pro­mo­tional video on the What’s Joost? sec­tion to a friend. Halfway into explain­ing how cool it was I real­ized it’s just one of those things you have to see for yourself.

At first glance the demon­stra­tion video seems a bit awk­ward, or at least it did to me. After watch­ing it I real­ized it seems famil­iar and that’s because it’s some­what like a med­ley of Bat­ter­ies Not Included, Cocoon, The Last Starfighter and Tron. Like I said, you need to see it first­hand because my descrip­tion just won’t cut it.

Beta Means Slim Pickings

I would say that my only beef with the ser­vice is that the chan­nel offer­ings are slim at best and the video out­put ranges from near DVD qual­ity to sub par Youtube qual­ity. One moment it looks great, the next it just dis­tracts from the over­all expe­ri­ence but I’m sure in time it’ll improve.

As far as the con­tent is con­cerned other than watch­ing some “vin­tage” Ren & Stimpy car­toons with my daugh­ter and a cou­ple Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel spe­cials on lions and pyra­mids, there’s noth­ing else that peaks my inter­est for the time being.

That will change as Joost con­tin­ues to sign con­tent providers but in the interim there just isn’t a lot to con­sume at the moment. Although, this is still in beta so that’s just par for the course. Joost has promised to con­tinue sign­ing con­tent providers; for instance, they just added a vari­ety of shows from providers like Com­edy Cen­tral, VH1 (the chan­nel you switch on when you’re bored, or, at least I do) and MTV.

Beta Invites

If you haven’t expe­ri­ence Joost yet, well, that’s just not right. I’ll tell you what, leave a com­ment and I’ll use the magic of the inter­nets (and a handy script to ran­domly select a num­ber) to choose three lucky peo­ple to send an invite to.

Ready, set, go!

Matthew Carter [profile]Matthew Carter, born British but now resid­ing in the Boston area, is the cre­ative force behind many widely used fonts today includ­ing Ver­dana, Tahoma, Geor­gia, New Cen­tury School­book and Hel­vetica, to name a few.

punch cut­ting and even­tu­ally tran­si­tioned into using dig­i­tal meth­ods to cre­ate his fonts, a more expe­dited method than tra­di­tional processes.

In a pre­sen­ta­tion given to mem­bers of the AIGA (New York Chap­ter), Carter reflected on his many expe­ri­ences with devel­op­ing the fonts he’s so famously known for and revealed that many, if not all of his cre­ations, were inspired by actual type­faces from his­tor­i­cal architecture.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, Matthew Carter “co-founded the Bit­stream type foundry in 1981, which he left in 1991 to form the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone.”

Bit­stream, Inc. was a first of its kind, a com­pany formed solely for the pur­pose of the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of dig­i­tal fonts and their respec­tive licenses. Unlike tra­di­tional type foundries, where the typog­ra­phers would sell wood and metal type­faces, Bit­stream dealed exclu­sively with dig­i­tal fonts.

If not for the hard work and impres­sive efforts of Matthew Carter, design­ers would be lim­ited as far as font selec­tion for print and web.

Whether he knows it or not, Matthew Carter has left behind a legacy that will con­tinue to thrive in future gen­er­a­tions, all because of his desires to pre­serve his­tor­i­cal typefaces.

Here are a few ran­dom thoughts that I’ve had through­out this week, that on their own could poten­tially be expanded, but for the time being will remain in crys­tal­lized form:

Ele­men­tary Schools and Teachers

ChalkboardEver since I accepted a posi­tion work­ing as a cleaner (jan­i­tor, cus­to­dian, slop mop guy) at an ele­men­tary school I’ve gained a new per­spec­tive and greater appre­ci­a­tion in regards to every­thing that occurs behind the scenes.

Prior to work­ing at an ele­men­tary school, I had a very one-dimensional view of how schools actu­ally ran, see­ing as though my last encounter with a pee­wee edu­ca­tional fortress was many years ago.

Yet, when you pull back the cur­tain and real­ize that teach­ers have flaws, library shelves do in fact get dusty and there’s a bit­ter­sweet human ele­ment to it all that’s hard to describe, only then do you real­ize why schools con­tin­u­osly run themselves.

All of this boils down to the teach­ers them­selves, who in turn are modi­vated by their student’s achieve­ments, which fuels their inner pas­sion to edu­cate, look­ing past the spit­balls and dirty looks, know­ing full well at the other end there will be a result.

On that note, since we live in the era of Google, I was think­ing how much smarter a teacher can seem if he or she has access to a com­puter in their room. With Wikipedia and Google at their fin­ger­tips, said teacher can instan­ta­neously look up unlim­ited sub­ject mat­ter, print or project, and con­tribute end­less amounts of infor­ma­tion to the edu­ca­tion process.

It’s really fas­ci­nat­ing, con­sid­er­ing when I was younger all we had is an Apple II and maybe, depend­ing on if you were good or not, Ore­gon Trail with buf­falo shoot­ing action all at a gru­el­ing pace.

Wii!

For weeks on end I’ve been think­ing about Nintendo’s recently unvieled and renamed con­sole, Wii. I’ll admit that at first I was a bit taken back by the name (shocked even), see­ing as though the con­sole and it’s premise sounds kind of silly.

How­ever, after think­ing about it some I’ve grown to actu­ally love “Wii” and all it has to offer. Espe­cially after see­ing the slew of E3 demos that have popped up on sites like YouTube and Gamespot.

There’s just no deny­ing the fact that you’re no longer just play­ing, but par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game using their Wii-mote, which looks like your aver­age TV remote but rec­og­nizes 3D space and move­ment. How cool is that? Way cool!

Spore

With sites like Total Spore appear­ing out of thin air, there’s some­thing intrigu­ing and unde­ni­ably mouth water­ing about Will Wright’s newest sim cre­ation, Spore, that has the media and blo­gos­phere and maybe your neigh­bors in a gam­ing frenzy.

Spore isn’t just going to change the way peo­ple look at sim­u­la­tion games, it’s going to turn the gam­ing realm upside down. From the pre­views to demo footage and demon­stra­tions given by Wright him­self, it appears to be a mish mash of evo­lu­tion, cre­ation, old school gam­ing, clay mod­el­ing, strat­egy and sci-fi (amongst other things) all rolled into one.

I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years, not since I first laid eyes on Sim­c­ity and Populous.

SEO Company, Directory Submission, Phone Cards, Calling Cards, International Calling Cards