Pay attention Sega. This is something the whole industry could benefit from actually. Put your game out on 3 platforms, and the multi-player base will likely be smaller unfortunately. What you should really start striving towards is allowing your Playstation, Xbox and PC customers all play against each other online. In order for the multiplayer and overall longevity of the title to sustain (DLC, etc), cross-platform play would open up the greater likelihood that the people who enjoy the multiplayer, will always have some people to compete against as well as the success of their alternate revenue streams (DLC). Games like this in particular I see doing alright overall across all three platforms, but ultimately the number of players online will dwindle. I have faith the industry will eventually adopt a the videogame as a medium similar to that of a movie, where the consoles will eventually just play one format of game and we can buy the hardware off of different companies, and all play happily together online... (Note: PC's are pretty sweet, and at least you can have total control of the components, but we all benefit from a generation of hardware like the current PS3, 360 [in terms of similarity] Right?.. maybe I'm just baked.)

As part of one of my latest projects, I had to venture into the land of jQuery. It wasn't long before I realized how powerful the platform was, and even shorter before I started browsing for plugins that I could leverage to add that extra layer of polish to my project.

This is when I found Galleria, a powerful gallery plugin, with the extra-sexy feature of creating thumbnails for you. "Great," I thought, "this will fit perfectly into my website!" Wrong.

"Exception thrown and not caught, Line: 2799" - AGHHHHH!

Due to my ignorance about jQuery, I struggled trying to get it to work. I'm not a newcomer to javascript, even with complex javascript thanks to webOS, but this plugin was just NOT working. It took me a good hour or two before I realized there was probably some incompatibility between jQuery versions, and shortly after I discovered the plugin only worked with up to 1.2.6. This was a problem for me, because a lot of my plugins required 1.3.X, and the newest version was 1.4.1. Googling the interwebs, I also found that other people suffered from the same problem as me but no working solution was ever created.

Fear no more! I have fixed Galleria to work with jQuery 1.4.1. I used the underrated javascript debugger built in Visual Studio 2005 to locate the incompatibilities and resolve them. Those were:

• @rel need to be changed to rel (no @)
• The thumbnail preview was attempting to parse an image that didn't exist, so now a check is made to ensure a URL is present
• There was an extra quotation mark on the same line

All in all, very simple changes. I think this goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: I take no responsibility for any problems you may have with the jQuery I have attached. Any charity you wish to show for the plugin should be directed at the official developers for their hard work. I want none of it!

If you are lazy like me, and I suspect you are, you probably just skipped to the end of this article to find the download link. Well here you go:

FIXED jquery.galleria.zip (4.46 kb)

Video game publishers are seriously starting to piss me off.

I read recently that Electronic Arts (one of my most hated companies) have "begun" prepping DLC for their latest title Dante's Inferno. This struck me as odd. At the time the game hadn't actually released yet, so where was the indication that it would A) be a hit/mega seller, or B) generate enough popularity and interest to be deserving of additional content? Hmmm... Maybe thats because of the paradigm shift in the industry that now has companies seeing nothing but big green dollar signs. I'm talking about the latest and greatest initiatives to present Downloadable Content to consumers. Now don't get me wrong, I love the idea of being able to purchase small patches or additions, expansions if you will, to a title I have purchased and enjoyed thoroughly. What I do not like, is how I am seeing trailers or reading all sorts of information regarding it before I can even buy the retail version of the game.

The way I see it, I'm almost certain that when designing the games these games, companies are sleazily looking to nickel and dime their loyal customers by stripping out content intended to be in the retail version, exclusively so they can repackage and redistribute it for an additional fee. It seems like a great economical strategy for these guys. I would not be one bit surprised if Dante's Inferno was to include all of said DLC, but some smart executive decided that "Hey, by leaving this stuff out - we can actually just charge them extra for these features". 

Back in the good ol' days, we used to have expansion packs. Typically these would release sometime after the game had been a proven success, and would give you more reasons to keep playing and enjoying a title you were particularily fond of. These days, DLC and other paid 'features' are being pumped into games wherever they see an available opportunity to charge for content. Case and point - I am a fan of the NHL series from Electronic Arts. This year we had the pleasure of purchasing stat and equiptment upgrades. Now, this wasn't actually too sleazy a move. You could actually unlock all of these rewards through playing the game. The problem was, in order to do so, you really had to go through some rediculously stupid challenges. Some of which, still did not unlock your reward - in some cases, not following a particular order of completion, would render that reward locked indefinately with the only ability to unlock coming through a purchase. Similariy EA has done so with the Skate series, enabling all of the games locations unlocked if you would pony up rather than struggle through some of their (yet again) rediculous challenges designed to unlock as you progress. Now the major problem I had with the NHL case, was that in order to be competitive in the online mode for the game, you needed to obtain some of these unlockables. Anyone who had been playing since the release can attest to the unbelievable unbalancing of characters who had and who hadn't. Essentially, this resulted in 90% of the people I know who played the game purchasing upgrades, and the other 10% stopped playing all together.

That was just one example of what I consider to be a pretty scummy move. In some cases we have even found that pay DLC may have been included on the disc only to be unlocked after a code had been purchased from PSN or XBL (whichever your poison). Now that is downright evil.

I'm not against DLC, I just believe the subject should be approached with some morality. A studio should set out a very clear intention for their game, while also some potential DLC ideas, but should not even begin to work on the extra stuff until the game has shipped and been well received enough to warrant such a thing. I'm all for standing behind your game, supporting it over time, but I wont stand for taking advantage of your fan base or for scheming up ways to turn a $60 game into an over $100 investment for a gamer - only to receive what he/she should have in the first place. If this is going to be the case, we need to start avoiding these games and studios like the plauge until they reduce the prices on those games and it starts making a stronger case for releasing only bits of it at a time. You know, we do have a such thing as episodic content as well, and it's actually a pretty wonderful idea. And it may even benefit developers and gamers to take note of how Sony approached Siren: Blood Curse, which not only is offered as a full game (download or retail), but also as a game split into episodic chunks. (Granted that has NOTHING to do with DLC, its just something I thought was a pretty sweet idea for a game that also released as a full version on a disc. Sam & Max would be another example, but they release like one episode a year, so nobody follows what the f*&% they're doin')

But this could just be my opinion.  

Yes, thats right. I want you to sell Palm. I want you to sell them so that I can afford more. I can't believe that this stock has taken this kind of hit. This is ridiculously under valued right now as we head into CES.

Think about it!

Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein has been talking about CES.

Palm has been teasing CES 2010.

Although they are playing coy with us, those of us who have been using and getting to know the Pre for the past little while really understand the untapped potential inside the device and are patiently waiting for the WebOS updates that will unlock the real power.

Ares just went open beta last night and developers everywhere cannot stop gushing. It's an excellent step in the right direction and the direct result of this is a development environment available to anybody with a computer, and the internet. This could very well change the game. Providing Palm doesn't implement any license fees for amateur development, this could mean that every single person with a computer and an internet connection is a potential WebOS developer. Not only that, but its actually quite impressive.

We already know Palm has joined Adobe's Open Screen Project and can expect WebOS to be one of the first platforms to adopt Flash, and can't even begin to lecture you on why that is a big deal. You should know this by now.

Anybody's guess is as good as mine for what's planned, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some applications that have access to the GPU finally, in order to show they are legit they'll need some games. Why carry a GPU thats capable only to not give any developer access? That's silliness. It's coming, we know it. Hopefully if not at CES they do talk about it sometime soon.

My point is manly this.. I'm sorry to see all the investor confidence flee this company when its doing so many great things, has a great piece of technology on its hands, and has a future that actually gets brighter as the products lifespan increases!

I for one can't wait to hear the exciting new things that are coming.

Sadly, this will be the last effort I put into battery monitor. My interest in homebrew development waned as soon as the official app catalog opened. Also sad is the list of changed features is shockingly sparse.

• Removed capacity since it was unreliable and caused more headache than it was worth
• Removed front page, moved options into the application menu
• The detailed status can also be accessed through the application menu
• The runtime should now report days, and also won't report data that is 0

com.palm.futurepr0n.batterymonitor_1.0.2_all.ipk (25.22 kb)

Edit: Found a bug and was forced to release a new version!

If you still like my app (please do!) and want to show support, feel free to donate.

This post is to help anyone who might google not having any audio play through their headset speaker on the Pre.

So there I was, listening to some streaming radio with headphones on the commuter train home when I get a call. I realize that you can answer the call fine and talk through your headphones but, through natural habit, I unplugged my headphones and tried to talk on the phone normally. All of a sudden, there was no sound! SHIT! My phone is barely a month old and already the speaker is broken.

There is a bit of confusion around this specific problem because there are really two problems with the same symptoms. These being:

1. You hear no audio through music apps without headphones
2. You hear no audio when accepting a call (except through the speaker phone)
3. The proximity sensor doesn't work, or the screen doesn't turn off when you put the phone to your face during a call

Through my past experiences with my xbox breaking, I've grown more and more restless in dealing with warranties. So I decided to investigate the problem on the single most powerful resource for the Palm Pre, precentral.net. I immediately found that many people were experiencing this problem, and the accepted solution was either doing a soft reset (sym+orange+r) or by plugging in the headphones back in a couple times to get the phone back into normal mode. This, however, did not work for me. Growing frustrated, I tried pulling the battery, several resets, plugging in the headphone over and over with no luck. As a last ditch effort, I used webOSDoctor to erase my phone back to factory. Still nothing.

Fuck!

Well, this is where the useful information may come for you. As I said before, there seems to be two unique problems with the same symptoms. The first being a software issue, the second being hardware. Yes, believe it or not, there is a hardware problem. The good news is you can fix it completely by yourself!

Before doing what I suggest, please know that I accept NO responsibility for any damage you do to your device. I do not work for palm, nor do I represent them in anyway.

Continuing on, the problem has to do with the headphone jack becoming blocked with dirt - dust - or some sort of fragment. This tricks the phone into thinking that the headphones are always plugged in. Not good! To fix this, you need to simply follow these steps:

1. Shut down the Pre, remove the battery
2. Get a Q-tip and remove some of the cotton so that it will fit in the Pre headphone jack (see where I'm going with this?)
3. Dip the Q-tip into rubbing alcohol and shake off any excess
4. Clean out the inside of the headset jack thoroughly (if you don't see anything on the Q-tip, don't fret - neither did I)
5. Use the other end of the q-tip to dry out the alcohol

Done! That's it! This is what worked for me and I'm hoping it will save you the trouble of dealing with warranties.

I had originally intended on closing the books on BatteryMonitor, since it was my first app and was being used as a learning tool. I really wanted to start on an app to release when the official App Catalog opens up to make some extra cash. However, I received such a resoundingly positive feedback from the precentral members who were kind enough to make suggestions that I've been a little inspired to make one last tweaked version.

With that in mind, I'm compiling a wish-list of the most popular (and feasible) suggestions I saw on the forums. Please feel free to comment if there is something else you want to see.

1. Run as a background application (This is a maybe... mostly because no one has REALLY done it successfully yet)
2. Remove first setup screen and put options such as notifications, polling time and graphing in the application menu (top left drop menu)
3. Add a polling time for one second
4. Make the Drain Per Hour resemble the current drain more, take the data I currently create and move it into a new category called "Overall drain per hour"
5. Graph and show the current signal strength and band (EV, 1x) at each polling interval
6. Grab running apps (if possible, this is another maybe)
7. Save each session to the depot, to be viewed on a separate scatter-plot graph on selection. This will have a short 4 or 5 letter label so the plots are identifiable
8. Add a Donate button to the precentral entry page!!

Thanks everyone. I feel like a little bit of a dirtbag for saying this but if you find my app is useful, please think about donating even a small amount. I put a great deal of personal time to get this up and running and, even though I think getting the positive feedback and recognition is more then enough payment, recognition doesn't pay the bills.

Big news this week for everyone who was waiting for Apple's latest press event regarding iPod products, namely new additions to the popular touch line-up. 

This was a pretty crappy event from what I read.

A couple of stand-out points in my mind were:

• Lack of an addition of a camera to the touch. Of course we will just have to wait until next year I suppose for that. They increased the storage size at least... Though the prices are a bit high.
• The addition of ring-tones for the iPhone to iTunes. $1.29?? For the ring-tone? Maybe I mis-interpreted this one. Because the price of a song is $1.29 as well correct? So I suppose you when you buy a song, you automatically get to activate it as a ring-tone as well right? Because if not that would be pretty stupid. It would be pretty stupid for someone to purchase the same song twice because they wanted to hear it for 30 seconds whenever they might have somebody dumber than themselves who maybe fancies a retarded conversation.
• Finally an addition of a FM radio. Only iPod I've known to date to have a built in transmitter.. only the oldest fucking technology finally available albeit on its deathbed. It's one of the reasons I hadn't owned an iPod prior to the original 2G iPhone. I just couldn't find a reason why an iPod was superior to any other DAP.

Addition of special album features are key, that shit should have been around for ages. I'm pretty sure I was pitching that idea around when I was seven years old. It's just a shame this is probably going to drive the cost of the album up which I hope I'm wrong about, as the cost got higher because sales did better and they are only helping allot more people find a reason to pirate rather than obtain legally.

I think they confidently showed a few signs boasting about the amount of songs they sell on iTunes and how many iPods they've sold. This is the part where I start to disconnect with whats going on and start wondering if this is for the fans of the products, consumers that are looking for the next big thing, or shareholders interest. They always seem to lack in how far they go with the tiniest incremental advances in their newest technology but yet have a highest percentage of all competing brands in the portable audio market.

When is this tablet thing coming?

Oh well, I don't know what else might have been important to cover that happened there. I'm sure a couple crappy bands may have dropped by and theres probably a new hip commercial.

Update:

Now available on fileCoaster as of September 10th. Thanks to everyone with their positive feedback and excellent suggestions on the precentral forums!

The Pre battery has never been a strong point. As a result, there has been a good deal of guess work on battery life based on configurations. Should I turn off my GPS, should I keep AIM offline, should I keep my cards open, or close them? There really isn't a good way to determine this right now. And what about new OS versions? Most people can only say it seems better.

What BatteryMonitor does is it tracks battery usage over time. Using this tracked information, it can guess how much battery you lose per hour, how much time you have left, as well as illustrate your battery usage in a graph.

The way I do this is by polling for the battery status at defined times, which you select when you first start the application. As a result, the information isn't very reliable until used for an extended amount of time - I'd say a minimum of one hour. Without this larger sample set, the chance that a one-off skewed data point could muck up the results. I suggest using smaller intervals - but you have to keep in mind that polling every 1 minute also has a small impact on battery. With larger intervals, such as 10 minutes or more, you may need much more data before the numbers normalize.

Graphing is implemented via the google chart API. This means that a data connection is required to download the chart after each update. It is normal for the line to look mostly flat at the beginning, again give it some time before judging results.

The notifications option will send a notification with the current battery level, the drain-per-hour rating and the calculated remaining life after each poll. I suggest not using this if you set your polling time anywhere less than 30 minutes because it will become very intrusive. In fact, I'd probably suggest not using it at all.

The application needs to be running at all times to track the data but can be running in the background. So you are encouraged to do day-to-day use while it is running and see how much battery life your current configuration is using.

Feedback is welcome but I don't plan on modifying this application much. Being my first app, it was more of a learning project than anything else. As a result, I want to focus my efforts on more ambitious endeavors.

The code is free to be reused by anyone should they want to, given that it is NOT for commercial use.

Screen shots:

Version 1.0.0 - Initial Release: 

com.palm.futurepr0n.batterymonitor_1.0.0_all.ipk (24.34 kb)

So I'm just about finished my first webOS application, and reflecting back on the past couple days, I noticed that:

1. I am not creative, and although I insist on making a "million dollar" app, I don't have the imagination to think it up
2. I really appreciate having access to the webOS code via the webOS Doctor jar, as it proved extremely helpful when looking for examples
3. The API on developer.palm.com is very disappointing (lack of information)
4. The framework is seriously tied down by silly restrictions

To go into #4 in more detail, I'll have to explain my application. One of the foremost complaints of the Pre so far has been the dismal battery life. I won't try to sugar coat that fact, it's pretty bad. So I thought it would be a great application to write an application that tracked and calculated battery performance. This would be useful to track metrics on application configurations, or complete operating system version and see qualitatively if there are changes in battery life.

This should be easy, I thought. Especially with the help of this excellent crash course on webOS development. So being a full-time programmer, I decided to go to the programmer's main resource - the API documentation. This is where my first problem was. Although the API does a nice job of showing the possible web-controls (widgets) you can use, it doesn't give any really nitty-gritty information (i.e. how to get battery levels).

So after being immediately defeated, I decided to try and crack open the my VirtualBox emulator image to read the code that accomplishes this in the status bar. Failing to do that, I found success by extracting the webOSDoctor and searching for bar-assistant.js. This had all the code I needed! Great find, I thought. However there was one more problem...

I copied the code I saw in bar-assistant.js to get the battery info as close as I could without taking in the excess fat. When I launched, I expected it to fail, as programs usually do on their first run, but the error I was getting was claiming that the method I was calling didn't exist. Strange, I thought, I'm pretty sure I copied it correctly. Nevertheless, I tried again... and again... and again. Still, every time the functions did not exist.

By this point, I was pretty frustrated. I had spent hours writing and rewriting the same code trying to look for the smallest of typos. Then I read somewhere that palm locked out part of their functions based on vendor of the software. Bingo! So I changed my app.json information to be a com.palm and vendor=palm and... well whad'ya know - it works!

For those of you who don't find the irony in this yet, there was a little bit of a scuffle between apple and palm about syncing to itunes. The jist of it was that apple didn't want the pre to sync to their software, so they locked out any product without an apple vendor id from itunes. Palm's solution to this? Spoof Apple's vendor id! After doing this, palm took the initiative to complain to the USB forum about locking out devices based on vendor IDs in compliance with open standards... or something like that. However, to get the functionality I wanted, I had to spoof my application as a palm app!

It's funny how things work out.

Anyway, I'm currently waiting for developer access to post my app on precentral.net so keep an eye out and start managing your battery life better!