Duncan Geere

Last minute bug supposedly found

Remember that date we told you to mark on your calendar? The date when the Motorola Droid would be getting its update to Android 2.1? Well, we hope you didn't use a permanent marker or anything, because it's been postponed indefinitely.

Mobile leaks site Boy Genius Report is reporting that the update is now marked as "TBD" - meaning that a date of release hasn't been determined. Rumour has it that a last-minute bug was found in the update, meaning that the whole thing has had to be delayed and started over.

Of course, this is the downside of custom UIs on Android - every operator has to roll out their own patches, rather than global patches getting rolled out to all Android devices at once. HTC has repeatedly delayed any update for the HTC Hero's software, and there's still no firm date set for its introduction.

Although it doesn't seem like a major issue, the splintering of the Android ecosystem could really prove to be a slowing factor in the takeup of Google's mobile platform.

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Tags: Phones Mobile phones Motorola Droid Motorola Droid Motorola Milestone Software updates Android 2.1 Rumours

Droid update gets delayed originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:58:23 +0000

To share info about events as they're occurring

Apple has filed an interesting patent which describes a mobile phone application that allows groups of people to share information about a live event as it's occurring. It's called iGroups.

It ties in with MobileMe and uses a very sophisticated cryptographic key generation system to make sure that your data stays private among the people you want to share it with. The patent also adds that if your handset lacks GPS capabilities, it can use MobileMe to provide virtual GPS capabilities - presumably depending on your IP address.

What's more, the app could automatically build groups of people based on who's in close proximity to each other at any time - your crowded commuter train could suddenly get its own chatroom, based on Bluetooth. You'd be able to opt-out of such situations too, however.

It's an interesting idea, but one that presumably relies on vast numbers of people owning Apple's gadgets, or the company building apps for other platforms. Somehow we can't see Cupertino rushing to build an Android app, especially after recent lawsuits...

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Tags: Software iPhone apps Apple iGroups Social networking Patents

Apple planning iGroups social app originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:25:17 +0000

130% average increase across Europe

Web browser Opera has revealed a rather impressive ballot bounce. The company shared figures with Pocket-lint that show that it's received 85% more downloads than normal in Britain following the introduction of the EU browser ballot screen.

The offering up of a brand new version of the browser, with a dramatic visual overhaul, no doubt helped matters too. The statistics follow early results which suggested an increase, but those have now been quantified with an average jump of 130% across the whole of Europe, and figures as high as 328% in Poland.

The company also revealed what proportion of its downloads came directly from the ballot screen. The figure was 53% across the entirety of Europe, and went as low as 35% (in Hungary) and 77% (in Poland, again). The numbers were collected over 3 days between 12 and 14 March.

Hakon Wium Lie, Opera's CTO, told Pocket-lint: "This confirms that when users are given a real choice on how they choose the most important piece of software on their computer, the browser, they will try out alternatives. A multitude of browsers will make the Web more standardized and easier to browse".

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Tags: Software Browsers Opera Statistics

Opera downloads up 85% in UK since browser ballot originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:58:55 +0000

A year ahead of schedule

Technology giant Toshiba has announced that it's entirely ceasing production of incandescent lightbulbs - a product that it's been making for more than 120 years.

Production of lightbulbs in Japan was started in 1890 by Ichisuke Fujioka, one of the leading engineers at the time. He established Hakunetsu-sha & Co, which eventually merged into Toshiba, as Japan’s first manufacturer of incandescent lamp bulbs. He started making just 10 bulbs a day, but that ramped up to 78 million a year at its peak, and in 2008 stood at 20 million.

The company had originally planned to phase out the production in 2011, as part of a move to concentrating on environmentally-friendly LED alternatives, but has brought the date forward a year. The company estimates that this forward step will save the equivalent of 430,000 tons of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere as a result of the inefficiency of incandescent bulbs.

That kills off 103 products that Toshiba sells, though equivalents from the company that offer an LED lighting option are already on the market, and Toshiba will now work to promote those instead. 

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Tags: Eco Home And Kitchen Lighting Lights Toshiba Biz

Toshiba ceases incandescent bulb production originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:01:19 +0000

Government committee calls UK "reasonably well-placed"

According to an EU Home Affairs sub-committee of peers, the UK is "well-placed" to cope with a large-scale cyber-attack.

The lords examined what'd happen if a group of cyber-criminals or a rogue state banded together to attack Britain's telecommunications infrastructure, and found that measures put in place by the surveillance service GCHQ had improved the UK's ability to prevent cyber-attack from disrupting the country too much.

They added that Britain is "leading the way" in terms of cyber-security within the EU. Last year, a simulated failure of the phone network took place, called "Operation White Noise". There are plans to recreate the simulation across the entirety of the EU, but it's been judged that many countries aren't ready for such a test.

However, a similar exercise could occur across the Atlantic. The group's report said: "We believe that the government and the EU should be giving greater attention to how cyber-security could be developed on a global basis".

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Tags: Software Hackers Hacking

Britain could cope with a cyber-attack, claim Lords originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:35:01 +0000

100 automobiles remotely broken into

A whole pile of cars has been remotely disabled in Austin, Texas, by a mischievous hacker who accessed a vehicle-immobilisation system normally used to chase after people who are late with their lay-away payments.

The culprit has been fingered as 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former worker at a car shop who was laid off earlier in the month. Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia told Threat Level: "We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery".

The trouble eventually stopped after the auto centre reset the passwords for the system that controls the remote black box, and shortly afterwards police traced the offender by his IP address. While his account had been disabled after he was fired, he'd been using another employee's account to cause the chaos.

The incident raises plenty of questions about whether such devices should be installed in cars, but proponents say that they allow lower-income households to gain access to automobiles that they may not otherwise be able to be afford. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Tags: Car And GPS Hackers Hacking

Texas cars disabled by hacker originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:13:07 +0000

Set a map of your location as your wallpaper

Google has updated the Android Maps application with a few extra features. There's a completely redesigned search results page, a Latitude widget, and the ability to put a map of your current location as your device's wallpaper.

Version 4.1's search interface now has most of its information on just one page. There's four big buttons that give you the option to see the place on the map, get directions, call it, or see it with Street View, and there's a visual representation of the proportions of star ratings. There's also the ability to swipe left and right between results.

Latitude's been granted a homescreen widget too, allowing you to see which of your friends is closest to you at any given time, but our favourite new feature is the ability to set your live wallpaper on an Android 2.0+ device to be a map of your local area. It'll probably kill your battery over a little while, along with your data usage, but who cares - you'll never be lost again.

The app is a free download for any Android 1.6+ phone. Search for Google Maps in the Android market.

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Tags: Software Android apps Google Google Maps Android Car And GPS

Google Maps updated on Android originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:40:21 +0000

See the edges of roads in the fog

US car manufacturer General Motors is working on adding augmented reality systems to car windscreens, helping drivers pay attention to particular objects on the road.

The "enhanced vision system", as it's called, is based on a combination of sensors both inside and outside of the car. It can track the position of the car, of the driver's face and eyes, and of objects outside the car. It could alert drivers to traffic or obstacles, and show where the edges of the roads are in dense fog or darkness. 

However, don't get too excited - the technology is still some way off. Thomas Seder, group lab manager for General Motors research and development, told the New York Times that the new system was currently in the research phase, and that he didn’t expect a technology like this to be in the marketplace until at least 2016 or 2018.

By then, we'll all be jetpack-toting robots.

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Tags: Car And GPS GM Augmented Reality

GM adding augmented reality to cars originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:41:20 +0000

Beta features get stable release

At the start of March, Google quietly updated the beta version of its Chrome browser to include a feature that detects what language a page is written in and offers to auto-translate it for you.

Well, that feature has now been rolled out to the stable Windows channel of the browser, and should roll out to your computer - if you're using Chrome - very shortly. The update also brings a bunch of extra privacy features, including the ability to set how browser cookies, images, pop-ups and even JavaScript and plug-ins are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you might block cookies on some sites but not others.

If you'd like to give either feature a try, but you're still using Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, then head on over to google.com/chrome and hit the big "download" button to get the latest version. If you're running a Mac or Linux, however, you'll have to wait a wee bit longer - as development lags a little behind the Windows edition.

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Tags: Software Browsers Google Chrome

Auto-translation and extra privacy come to Chrome originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:50:57 +0000

Apples in the Amazon

Amazon has announced that its Kindle ebook platform is now available to Mac users. Kindle for Mac allows users of Apple's computers to access the same library of 325,000 books that is accessible on the Kindle, the Kindle DX, the iPhone and Windows PCs.

The software duplicates the functionality of the Windows Kindle app, with a feature set that includes the ability to purchase, download and read books, adjust font size and words-per-line, use Whispersync to synchronise bookmarks and mark pages, view notes and highlights created on the Kindle or iPhone app and read full colour content.

Amazon's Kindle boss, Jay Marine, told Pocket-lint: "For those customers around the world who don’t yet have a Kindle, Kindle for Mac is a great way to instantly access and read the most popular new releases as well as their old favorites".

The company has promised extra features in the "near future", including full text search and the ability to create and edit notes and highlights. If you're happy with the offering as-is, though, then it's a free download from amazon.com/kindleformac.

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Tags: Software Mac software Kindle Amazon eBook readers ebooks Apple

Kindle for Mac platform unveiled originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:16:57 +0000

Modified version of Android used to access web apps

The market for web-enabled televisions is still relatively young. While many manufacturers are beginning to put applications like Skype, Twitter and Facebook on their top-end televisions, most consumers haven't even got a TV with an Ethernet connection, let alone one with web apps.

So Google has partnered with Intel and Sony to try and gain a foothold in the emerging market by fusing its Android platform with set-top boxes and televisions from Sony. It'll mean that Google's platform of web apps will be accessible from your remote, along with a few of the other biggest internet platforms. What's more, it'll be open to third-party developers.

Logitech's also joining the party, and will be providing peripherals for the system, including a remote with a dinky little QWERTY keyboard on it. The project has been ongoing for some months, shrouded in secrecy, but word is now starting to leak out. For the moment, however, spokespeople for Google, Intel and Logitech have refused to comment.

We expect that we'll hear more in time about Google TV. When we do, we'll bring you full details.

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Tags: Home Cinema Google Intel Sony TVs Google TV Logitech

Google, Intel and Sony to build Google TV originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:46:36 +0000

Letters differ depending on your proportions

A designer called Mary Huang has concocted a rather nifty bit of software which allows anyone to create a font unique to them, using the proportions of their face.

It's called Typeface, and uses a webcam and some facial analysis software to determine the distances between different parts of your beautiful visage. It then uses those distances to generate ratios which it applies to font, meaning that your typeface is pretty much unique to you.

Huang says: "The design of typefaces is founded upon principles from the days of metal type, when creating individual fonts was a laborious process and constrained by physical requirements. Most digital type design follows those same conventions, but technology gives us opportunities to make type design more spontaneous and personal".

There's no download for the app just yet, but in a blog post, Huang says it should be ready within a few weeks. Bookmark the site and check back then.

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Tags: Software Fonts Typeface Webcams Video

Typeface generates a font from your face originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:00:47 +0000

Move thought to be a marketing exercise

We're hearing word that Apple is enacting a policy in both its physical and online stores that will see any kind of screen protecting product for the iPhone, iMac, or iPod removed.

That includes any kind of protective film or case that includes a protective film, whether it's for anti-glare, protective, mirrored or just decorative use.

It's an odd move from the company, which no doubt makes considerable piles of dosh from consumers' desire to give their screens some extra protection. One seller of such products speculated that it may be a marketing move from Apple, to try and prove that its screens can stand up to the rigours of whatever you keep in your pocket.

It'll no doubt irritate companies who have sunk development money, time and effort into producing "Made For iPod" and "Made For iPhone" screen protectors. Apple has as yet refused to comment or confirm the move, but if the company makes a statement on the subject, we'll update this post.

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Tags: Phones iPhone Screens Apple Rumours

Apple bans screen protectors from its stores? originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:22:14 +0000

Condemns "bullying" rights holders

Mobile phone and broadband network O2 has jumped into the row over content providers sending out thousands of threatening legal letters, calling the practice "bullying". 

The main target of O2's wrath is ACS:Law, a law firm which specialises in sending out nastygrams to UK consumers, accusing them of downloading copyrighted material and offering a quick settlement out of court for around £500. Many people immediately pay up out of fear and embarrassment, especially as the accusations often involve pornography.

But many have called into question the systems used to identify the targets of these letters. Consumer group Which? says that it had messages from 150 people who claim to have been wrongly accused, and consumer rights group BeingThreatened has produced a handbook of advice for those who receive a letter.

O2 said: "Where we are legally obliged to provide information and the correct paperwork is presented, we will comply with the law. But we prefer the 'win-win' approach of encouraging the development of new business models that offer customers the content they want, how they want it, for a fair price".

Have you received one of these letters? Did you pay up, or have you attempted to fight it? Tell us your story, anonymously if you like, in the comments.

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Tags: Software Online Filesharing O2 Broadband P2P ACS:Law

O2 wades into filesharing row originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:47:29 +0000

Min-Kyu Choi awarded by Anthony Gormley

The young designer behind the folding UK plug, which Pocket-lint was one of the first to bring you news of nearly a year ago, has won a top design award for his creation. It's been named as the overall winner at the Brit Insurance Design Awards.

Min-Kyu Choi, a London student, beat competition from the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen to the prize, which was awarded by artist Anthony Gormley. He described the design as "thought-through, responsive and modest", and said that it "shows intelligent, elegant and inventive design can make a difference to everyone's life".

After being judged as the winner by the likes of Tom Dixon and Janet Street-Porter, the plug will be on exhibition at the London Design Museum until 31 October 2010, and will hopefully then start making its way into some products. It's all very well saying how brilliant it is, but we'd very much like to see it in action. News on that front, for now, is scarce.

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Tags: Gadgets Plugs Awards Min-Kyu Choi Home And Kitchen

Folding plug wins top design award originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:17:51 +0000

2.1 offering designed for computers

Audio manufacturer Altec Lansing has revealed a new set of speakers designed for plugging into your computer or laptop. The VS4621 offers a pair of drivers and a subwoofer that deliver 2.1 audio.

The speakers feature down-firing 3-inch mid-range drivers, which aim soundwaves downward onto a hard surface. Those soundwaves then bounce off evenly before spreading around the room. There's also two 1-inch microdrivers in each channel, which deliver the treble.

On the floor, there's a 6.5-inch side-firing, long-throw woofer providing the bass, and there's the option to fine-tune the bass or the treble, should you so desire. If you have an MP3 player or anything else that can output to a 3.5mm jack, you can also plug that into an auxiliary slot for listening through the speakers.

The Altec Lansing VS4621 will be available from 20 April from a bunch of places, including Amazon, Staples, Play and Maplin. It's yours for £60.

Tags: Audio Altec Lansing Altec Lansing VS4621 Speakers

Altec Lansing announces VS4621 speakers originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:30:16 +0000

To fix anything from hangovers to insomnia

Latest reports from Japan indicate that the country is under the spell of a new craze - mood-altering therapeutic ringtones - which claim to be able to solve a number of life's woes; from motivation problems to improving your skin.

They're the creation of Matsumi Suzuki, the head of the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory, an 8-year-old subsidiary of the Japan Acoustic Laboratory. He's the chap who developed the Mosquito - a high-pitched tone inaudible to anyone above the age of 25 - which has come in quite handy from dissuading teenagers from gathering in public places at night.

While there's almost zero scientific evidence for whether the tones work or not, Index - a mobile content provider that sells the tones - says "the number of downloads suggests the ringtones must be working to a certain extent". There's tones that cure hay fever, tones that scare away crows and tones that either help or prevent you from falling asleep.

The hay fever one claims to work by emitting a series of sounds at different frequencies "so that people can choose the sound that resonates most to their sinus and causes pollen lodged there to fall from the nasal cavity". The idea is that you hold it up to your nose, and the vibrations make the pollen fall out.

We can't see it catching on over here.

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Tags: Phones Ringtones Japan Health

Therapeutic ringtones proving a hit in Japan originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:03:41 +0000

Write on your screen to find contacts

Google has made a brief announcement on its mobile blog which reveals that its Gesture Search app is now compatible with Android 1.6 devices, including the HTC Magic and G1. It still won't, however, work on the HTC Hero, which runs 1.5.

The app, as previously reported, allows you to draw letters on your screen to search through your handset. It can scan your contacts, your installed apps, your bookmarks and your music, and intelligently works out if a glyph is close to another one, offering both of them up on the screen.

Google says: "Gesture Search is now available on devices with Android 1.6 and higher. Additionally, it can be downloaded in all countries where Android Market is available, although it continues to only recognise the English alphabet. The new version also includes some improvements to performance and bug fixes".

If you'd like to download it for your handset, head on over to the Android market, hit the search button, and type in "Gesture Search", then hit the download button. It's free and available now.

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Tags: Software Android apps Gesture Search Google Android Android 1.6

Gesture search comes to Android 1.6 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:35:27 +0000

Mark your calendars for 18 March

Motorola has offered a few more details about the impending 2.1 update for its Droid handset, which is named the Milestone in Europe, and leaked documentation has suggested that it'll be arriving as soon as 18 March, delivered over-the-air.

It'll have a 3D gallery app, the same voice-to-text functionality as on the Nexus One, news and weather widgets, pinch zooming, and "improved" lock screen and live wallpapers. It won't have the Nexus One's 3D app launcher, however. There's a few other miscellaneous bug fixes and performance improvements too.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, the Milestone that's landing in Bulgaria on 20 March will come with Android 2.1. Does that mean that other European users will be getting the update around the same time? It's not clear yet, but we'd hope so. We'll bring you more on that as we get it.

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Tags: Phones Mobile phones Software updates Motorola Motorola Droid Android Android 2.1

Verizon details 2.1 Droid update originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:10:49 +0000

Also tinkering with search results

It appears that engineers at social network Facebook are having a little play around with some new features - including the ability for users to generate their own two-dimensional QR codes, and as-you-type search results in the box at the top of the page.

There are widespread reports that many users are seeing an extra couple of options appear under their profile picture - offering the ability to "View QR Barcode" and "Generate status QR barcode". They're appearing on Fan pages for various brands too. However, it seems that it's just links appearing - they don't actually function yet. Facebook refused to comment.

What the company would comment on, however, is a few tweaks that it's been making to how the search bar works. It's been altered such that when you start typing in a query it'll immediately begin offering suggestions based on the popularity of various results. It'll be customised to you, too - if you're listed as a fan of MGMT, then it'll show up higher in the results than if you weren't. It also offers the option to display the full results list.

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Tags: Software Websites Facebook QR codes

Facebook testing QR code implementation originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:46:55 +0000

But company reveals 320,000 paid subscribers

Daniel Ek, the CEO of many people's favourite streaming music service, Spotify, took to the stage at the SxSW festival in Austin Texas for a keynote speech and admitted that the company still isn't ready for a US launch, amidst rumours that it's having trouble securing the necessary agreements from the major labels.

Ek was evasive about the reasoning, saying: "The most important thing for us when it comes to US launch is that we want to build the best possible product we can and get all ducks in a row, partnerships with next generation of Spotify. Sort out publishing which is a huge task. Here you have to strike deals with almost 5000 publishers. Big thing for us is working on next gen of Spotify and getting that out there".

However, Ek did have some good news. He related that Spotify now has 320,000 paid subscribers. That's only about 4.5% of its userbase, but it's a higher proportion among the company's active users. He also gave a few more numbers - there are 100 million playlists, but that 30% of those just consist of a single album, suggesting that the album format is far from dead.

Lastly, Ek dropped a few hints about the next edition of Spotify, which seems like it's still a while away. He said: "What we've been working on for last 6-8 months is next gen of Spotify. How to make it more connected. Easier sharing and management of music. We’ve realized people spend a lot of time on Spotify and they tend to manage their music with Spotify". He also suggested Spotify may soon become available on set-top boxes and home media players.

But it seems that part of that plan doesn't involve building a social network: "We never want to be a social network ourselves. We'd rather piggyback on their networks to help with discovery".

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Tags: Software Spotify Music Music streaming

Still no date for US Spotify launch originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:18:40 +0000

Microsoft confirms lack of clipboard

Do you love copying? How about pasting? Cutting? If you answered yes to all of the above, you're not going to want to get a Windows Phone 7 Series handset, because Microsoft has confirmed that there will be no copying, pasting or cutting in the next version of its mobile OS.

At a Q and A session at MIX10, a Microsoft spokesperson stated that no clipboard operations will be supported in Windows Phone 7 Series - which is weird, given that Windows Mobile has been the platform that has supported copy/pasting for years. Instead, Microsoft says that there'll be a data-detection service built in that makes phone numbers and addresses clickable.

But is that going to be good enough for users, especially given the furore over the lack of such features on the iPhone. Given we already know that Windows Phone 7 won't be able to multitask, either, Microsoft's strategy here is baffling, especially with the Office applications that most Windows Phone 7 users will be buying their handsets for.

Or is this simplification better for the platform as a whole? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Tags: Software Mobile phones Windows Phone 7 Series Windows Phone 7 Microsoft

Windows Phone 7 has no copy/paste originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:24:32 +0000

Google reveals strong growth for platform

The Android market is growing at a remarkable rate, if figures from MobileCrunch are to be believed. A Google spokesperson confirmed to the mobile blog that there are now approximately 30,000 free and paid apps available to Android devices.

Google said back in December that it had 16,000 apps available, so that's approximately a doubling in 3 months - a very healthy rate of growth for the platform. The latest indications of the ratio between free and paid is 39% paid vs. 61% free, according to third-party developer AndroLib.

What's not clear, though, is how many of those apps are available across all Android devices. Some apps aren't accessible to Android versions below 2.0, and as a result, the App Market is splintering a little as manufacturers seem reluctant to update phones running Android 1.5 or 1.6, like the HTC Hero, to the latest version - 2.1.

In January, Apple stated that it has over 140,000 apps available, so it's clear that the Android App Market, while still between four and five times smaller, is now just about on the same order of magnitude as the iPhone App Store. Things are getting interesting.

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Tags: Software Android apps Mobile phone apps Android Google

Android Market now has 30,000 apps originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:43:05 +0000

Also now shipping to Canada

Google has announced that its Nexus One handset, which is the current king of Android devices, is now compatible with US cellphone provider AT&T's 3G network. While it's been possible to use the device on the network for a while, as it ships unlocked, some carriers use different 3G frequencies that the Nexus One didn't support.

One of those was AT&T, and another was Rogers Wireless in Canada. Google is now offering another version of the Nexus One that'll be able to access the necessary frequencies to allow high-speed data access. That means that the Nexus One will now ship to Canada from Google's webstore.

Over in Britain, you shouldn't have any problems getting the device to recognise the right 3G frequencies, but if you buy it from Google's webstore then you'll need to do a little bit of preparatory work to find out the relevant settings for your network. You can read our full review of the Nexus One for more details.

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Tags: Phones Mobile phones Nexus One AT and T Rogers Canada Google

Nexus One coming to AT&T originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:52:15 +0000

Promotional offer for company's Digital Help service

Richard Branson's team of tech supporters, Virgin Digital Help, has offered 30 minutes of free tech help to anyone who wants it and doesn't have a handy relative who they can call up and ask instead.

While we're sure that our readers need no help whatsoever with their gadgets, you might fancy passing the offer on to your mum, uncle or anyone else in your family who frequently hassles you for technology advice. It consists of half an hour's "straight-forward, jargon-free" phone advice, with the offer of remote desktop support.

To sign up, head on over to virgindigitalhelp.co.uk before 31 March and grab a voucher, which you can then use at any time over the next 6 months. Branson himself stepped out of his hammock on his private island and said: "At Virgin we’re always looking at how we can make people's lives easier. With Virgin Digital Help, we are giving them access to the kind of expert tech support normally reserved for big businesses, at a fraction of the cost".

Tags: Software Hardware Virgin Virgin Digital Help Tech support

Virgin offers 30 minutes of free tech support originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:42:38 +0000

In the same way that there’s an art to taking photographs in the real world, there’s also an art to snapping screenshots that linger in the mind longer than most. Getting a good shot of a vista across a jungle valley in Crysis, or a moonlight night in World of Warcraft, or just a heap of zombie corpses in Left 4 Dead 2, is a real challenge.

Some might sneer, say that the point of videogames is in their interactivity, and that taking a screenshot removes that. But that’s missing the point. Some games are truly beautiful and you might miss that while playing. The pressures of playing a game – the need to find ammo, the need to take cover from enemies, the need to solve a puzzle – can easily distract from the beauty of a scene.

One expert at videogame photography is Duncan Harris, who’s been putting up snapshots of games on Flickr for a while now. He’s covered a massive pile of games – taking a role dependent on the game in hand. He’s a war photographer in Crysis, Half-Life 2 and Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a gig snapper in Rock Band and Guitar Hero, an explorer in Aion and Bioshock, an urban photojournalist in GTA IV and even an abstract artist in Mirror’s Edge Pure.

In each game, he expertly captures the essence of the title, as well as a few things you might not have seen on first look. Whether it’s the occasional humour of Mirror’s Edge, the fantastical settings of Aion, the neon-streaked rain-swept metropolis of Liberty City or the lush foliage of Crysis, it’s all beautifully framed with a real eye for detail. Some shots are flabbergastingly beautiful.

I’ve only really attempted in-game photography in World of Warcraft – a game that does occasionally deliver the odd stunning panorama, impressive building, or curious architecture. Henceforth, though, I’m going to be sure to work out what the screenshot button is before I start playing anything, or install an application that lets me take pictures with a hotkey combination. Then, when I see something pretty, I’ll pause for a second to grab a shot.

If you have any suggestions for good apps to take screenshots with, or any beautiful pictures of games that you’d like to share, then do so in the comments.

Remember Small Worlds - the cute pixel art game that saw you repair your spaceship by gradually expanding your vision through exploration? Well, This Is Infinity, from Cactus Squid and entered into Ludum Dare 16, is another game about exploration, but the polar opposite of Small Worlds in almost every other way.

If Small Worlds was a guided tour through a beautiful city, This Is Infinity is a frantic run at 2am through its nastiest slums, chased by unknown assailants. To sum up the difference in a word, you’d go for “distress” – the player is dumped, with absolutely no guidance, in a flickering, flashing monochrome world. The way out is to explore.

Initially, you won’t find the presentation too jarring. There are trees, cats, and birds, But step into one of the four portals dotted around and you’ll find yourself in an explicable landscape of moving shapes, shifting perspectives and utter confusion. Only by a little exploration and observation will you work out each area’s puzzle, which returns you back to the central point again.

The puzzles aren’t difficult at all. What makes the game very tricky, though, is that they’re masked by a complete lack of pointers. One area, in particular, is hopelessly disorienting, and you’ll need to keep stopping to get your perspective back. Another frustrates you endlessly until you work out the trick. However, you won’t get anywhere with them without a bit of experimentation – you can’t fail, or die, so you just have to keep plugging at it until you ‘get’ the answer.

There’s no time limit within the game, but you might find the graphics a little hard to take for too long without the aid of asprin. Call that a ’soft’ time limit, then. Thankfully it doesn’t last too long – which is an odd thing to say about a game, but the short time you play will speak volumes to you about the value of proper direction in games, and how you can mask the simplest ideas with distracting presentation.

You can download the Windows-only game executable from Cactus Squid’s original blog post about the game, which also comes with a video of it in action. If you’re struggling, there’s a walkthrough which also includes some non-spoilery tips, but this isn’t too tough – if you’re having trouble, just observe for a minute, and try different things. You’ll get it.

(via EGP)

Public introspection is rarely pleasant. The Company Of Myself is a game that opens with the phrase: “If you have a minute, I’d like to tell you a bit about myself. The first thing you need to understand is that I am alone”. Yet impressively, creator Eli Piilonen has managed to wrestle what could have been an unhealthy dose of teen angst into something rather beautiful.

It’s about imaginary friends, in a way. You control a little figure in a rather fetching hat who wants to get to a series of green squares because he wants to be their friend. The problem is that in between you and those green squares are vertiginous drops, towering cliffs and humming forcefields. You can’t do this alone.

So you have to employ echos of your past existence to help you. They retain some corporeality, meaning that you can jump on their heads, and they can jump on yours. Together, any objective is surmountable. The implication being, of course, that you don’t need anyone else to help you in life – enough attempts at something will give you the experience to accomplish anything. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

You’ll run up against forcefields that you can penetrate but that your ghostly doubles can’t, and ones that can be passed by the doubles but not you. As a result, you often find yourself controlling the future, without being able to directly see your actions on-screen. A keen sense of timing is vital, particularly when you come to some of the Braid-inspired switch-puzzles, and you’ll need a reasonable grasp of basic platforming skills too.

The art, work of Luka Marcetic, is simplistic, and functional. It’s a curious match-up of soft focus and pixel art, and occasionally will go grainy to denote a flashback to both painful and happy memories. The music, from David Carney, is similarly functional. It burbles away in the background, happily ignorable, a little too busy to let you relax, but too simplistic and repetitive to be memorable.

All the while, a story plays out in text (italic Arial – there’s got to be better typographical choices than that) overhead, with the main character half-explaining what you have to do on each screen and half-telling the game’s narrative. The mash-up is generally pretty effective, except in the very first few levels where it goes through the controls. Do games really have to explain the arrow keys every single time you play?

The Company Of Myself could have been a terrible visit to the mind of a 16-year-old who never gets picked for the football team. It’s not. It’s a touching journey in the memories of someone who prefers not to seek the company of others. You should go and play it.

One of the biggest cop-outs in game design today is clouds. They’re tricksy little things, difficult to make look realistic because real clouds often have a dramatic, otherworldly appearance that looks fake already.

Think about your favourite games. How many of them are set indoors, or at night, or underground? How many have a perspective that looks down from above, meaning that there’s no need to render anything above ground level? Even those that do depict a daytime scene often just stick a sun in the heavens and leave it at that.

But done right, clouds can add tremendous majesty, presence and realism to a scene. Let’s take a look at a few of the best games of the last decade or so to see exactly how the developers have used clouds and what effect they give to the mood of a screenshot.

Starting with Monkey Island 3. Being a point-and-click adventure game, the backdrops are all hand-drawn and stylized. Clouds feature in almost every scene, from the opening vista with Guybrush in a dodgem car and a huge moon, to the duel on top of the hill overlooking the town and LeChuck’s ship sailing off into the sunset.

Each lends a slightly eerie but fantastic quality to the skies, matching up closely with the tone of the game itself. Despite tropical clouds having almost nothing in common with those shown in the Monkey Island games, they still have an evocative quality that suits the game perfectly.

Next up, is GTA IV. Instead of an artistic approach, GTA IV goes for a much more photorealistic style for the city and everything in it. As a result, the clouds are typical stratocumulus that New York might see at any time of the year. They look good, though – blending in without being too flashy.

You can see exactly what an effect they have by comparing that last image to a shot of GTA: Vice City’s sky. Instead of definable shapes, there’s just a vague whiteness which isn’t remotely convincing and doesn’t match up with the much more defined edges to clouds that you tend to get in the tropics (because they’re more likely to be made of water, not ice).

Another game that goes for a similarly photorealistic approach is Half-Life 2. But City 17’s clouds feel a lot more ominous than GTA’s, hanging low overhead and letting the sun poke in from the horizon, casting long shadows across the ground. This gives an oppressive feel to the game, suiting Valve’s Orwellian city-state excellently and keeping you on your guard.

Imagine if the same scene had blazing sunshine and gave the impression of a warm, sunny day. You’d end up thinking: “Maybe that Doctor Breen isn’t so bad after all. Do we really need to be taking down the citadel?”

Perhaps the ultimate in photorealism is the clouds in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which billow and float in an agreeably physics-generated sorta way. Thanks to the perspectives required, though, Flight Sim’s clouds have to look good – players will be viewing them from any and every angle, and so they have to be convincing to maintain the illusion that you’re really a 747 pilot, flying the red-eye.

Flight Sim is one of the few games that gets that depending on the position of the sun, clouds can be either lighter or darker than the sky around them. The refraction of light around the water droplets in a cloud means that they can dim a bright scene, but they can also light up the dark, especially at dusk. Microsoft’s cloud engineers seem to have done an exceptionally good job on them.

There’s a tonne of other examples I could look at, but let’s leave things there for now. What are some of your favourite clouds in videogames, realistic or not? Take a screenshot and post it in the comments.

Today we have a game of discovery, a game that focuses on nothing but exploring the unknown, a game of entering the darkness and making the unfamiliar familiar. Oh, and it’ll only take you fifteen minutes to play from start to end.

It’s called Small Worlds, and was created earlier in the year by David Shrute for the Casual Gameplay Design Competition #6: Explore. This is a competition run by a flash games site called JayIsGames since 2006 which takes an aspect of game mechanics and asks developers to build a short game around it.

Small Worlds starts you as a tiny pixellated figure surrounded by blocks. Using wsad or the arrow keys, and the space bar,  you explore your surroundings, getting rid of the “fog of war”, or “shroud” so beloved by strategy game. As you uncover more of the environment, you zoom out so you can see things better.

It seems a little ridiculous to avoid spoilers for a game that’s only 15 minutes long, but given that exploration is the whole point of the game, it seems cruel to discuss the environments in too much detail, suffice to say that you’ll want to uncover the entirety of each of the five available maps before progressing.

It’s tightly focused on its goal – it doesn’t have coins, powerups, scores or lives. There’s no way to die, and it seemed impossible to get stuck for long. But what it does do, expertly, is conjure up the magic of beginning a game of Civilization, or Age of Empires – a lone settler in an unknown land.

The concept of that single character starting alone in a dark, featureless expanse of nothing is one that’s unique to videogames. It’s a fantastic feeling – full of promise and possibilities. Will there be a mountain in this direction, or the sea? Ohcrapohcrapohcrap, I’ve stumbled into the enemy base.

It’s something that’s kinda echoed in reality, too. When you move to a new town for the first time, you begin to form mental maps in your head, and although you might know one road like the back of your hand, the next one over could be a complete mystery.

If you have 15 minutes, spend them on Small Worlds. You’ll get a surprising amount of joy from the lovingly created and detailed places that you end up. It’s certainly one of the most pleasant fifteen minutes I’ve spent in some time.

(via Kotaku)

The humble playlist is a powerful force in the world of music. Music geeks obsess over them – spending hours getting their mixtapes just right, a real labour of love. It’s quite a curious phenomenon, and a deeply personal one – for many people, a playlist that has been built by two is a painful compromise.

There are loads of questions for the playlist maker – do you open with a gentle track, to ease the listener in, or smack them right in the face with a pop classic? Do you end on a triumphant note, or should there be a quiet postscript to the proceedings? Each and every decision can and should be read into in enormous depth.

The idea of a playlist likely originated from an amateur musician or an orchestra choosing what a crowd would most like to hear. The concept is a little cruel – ripping apart the context of how the creator wanted his music to be heard, and jamming in your own versions.

Of course, the idea has come a long way since then. Jimmy Saville has a part to play –  he was the first person to combine two turntables and a microphone for continuous play of music without a gap in between, becoming the world’s first DJ.

But the real star of the show was the humble cassette tape, which brought the concept to the masses, allowing them to tape tracks off the radio, or off other cassettes in whatever order they liked, and then play that back at any time. Before the cassette, compilation albums existed, but they weren’t easy, or cheap to create.

Burnable CDs moved things forward once more, as did the USB drive, but today, any digital music system worth its salt has a playlist functionality and YouTube has begun to introduce the idea to short videos on the user-generated-content site.

So, why do playlists not exist in videogames? Given that almost every game going back a long time has a level skip cheat, why not use those to create a patchwork of levels from games that have a common theme running through?

Sure, there are obstacles – finishing one level, you’ll have at least a five minute gap while you shut down that game and start up the next one – but games last longer than songs anyway, so that doesn’t seem to be an artistic obstacle in the way. More problematic is you have to install an entire game to get to the one level you want – a lot of preparation is required.

But those issues aside, here’s three short playlists of games that I feel have a running theme through them. There’s one list of the best Zombie levels in games, one of videogame representations of the D-Day landings, and one of some of my favourite boss fights. I’ve tried to begin and end each list sensibly – starting easy and with a gentle introduction, and then moving onto the more hardcore end of things.

Braaaaiiins…

Half-Life 2: Ravenholm

Call of Duty – World at War: Der Riese

Left 4 Dead 2: Hard Rain

Plants Vs Zombies: Survival mode

Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno

Medal of Honour – Allied Assault: Operation Overlord

Day of Defeat: dod_charlie

Company of Heroes: D-Day

Combat Flight Simulator 3, D-Day 1944 – Invasion Of Europe

Bossa Nova

World of Warcraft: Flame Leviathan (Ulduar)

Legend of Zelda – Ocarina Of Time: Ganon

Wolfenstein 3D: Hitler

Final Fantasy 7 – Sephiroth

Of course, these are just examples. There’s a whole range of different things you could do with videogame playlists, from the pretentious (“six levels about darkness”) to the practical (“five impossible jumps in platformers”) to the ridiculous (“sex in games”). That last list could include Mass Effect, Leisure Suit Larry, the Witcher and some scary Japanese titles.

If you come up with any playlists of levels in games that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them. Post them in the comments below.

Back in 1994, I was 9 years old and my dad bought me my first PC. It had a Pentium 60 processor, 14-inch CRT monitor, and came dual-booting OS/2 Warp and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I loved it, spending hours glued to the screen playing demos of games that came free with computer magazines at the time.

But I didn’t just play demos. I had one game. The incredible Sim City 2000, which perhaps my dad thought would be educational and might prompt me to become a town planner like his brother. That didn’t happen, but it did come with one of the best manuals I’ve ever come across, written – it seems – by one Michael Bremer.

It wasn’t like the other manuals of the time – a brief explanation of the basic functions and a list of troubleshooting tips, then a run-down of the credits and a couple of pages of “notes” – instead it had a detailed description of every single tool in the (large) game. Best of all, though, were the quotes peppered throughout that discussed the “spirit” of a city, and the philosophies involved with urban planning.

Looking back, those quotes – which I obsessively read when my computer wasn’t working because I’d deleted autoexec.bat or command.com or something – probably expanded my pre-Secondary School mind quite considerably. I loved it, and the game, to bits – mainly because it made me think about a city as a thing, rather than a collection of things.

All of my cities in that game were always absolutely utopian. There would be no crime, no traffic, no lack of electricity or water and no budget problems – thanks to my liberal use of cheat codes. After all – in the future, money’s no longer an issue, right?

I whiled away hours and hours on those cities, while sunny afternoons came and went outside. I meticulously constructed railways, high density commercial zones and fusion power plants, while planting as many parks and laying as many rivers as I could get away with.

…

Fast forward to January 2009 and Mirror’s Edge arrives on the scene. Trailers had already taken my breath away thanks to the light, colour and motion that were demonstrated. The game unfortunately didn’t sell as well as EA hoped, but it’s gained a cult following – mainly for its setting.

EA dropped the ball, really, with the protagonist – a 24-year-old girl called Faith who comes with dark hair and tattoos that was perhaps designed to appeal to 16-year-old kids of an “alternative” persuasion. Nothing wrong with that, except that the game dumped those kids into a brightly lit, colourful world of glinting glass windows and soaring skyscrapers.

The sense of place was incredible – I was suddenly on top of the arcologies, monorails and office buildings of the cities I had built in 1994. Being able to explore the interiors and exteriors of those environments was incredibly liberating – particularly in the early levels in the game, before it devolves from the awesome platformer it starts as into the lame FPS it ends up as.

While the environments were ultimately a little on the linear side, it’s still an absolutely incredible, and beautiful experience to hit up the time trial modes that challenge you to run as fast as you can through the levels without the hassle of the police chasing you.

Stripping out the police turns the city from an authoritarian dystopia into the shining, glimmering places that I had meticulously constructed fifteen years before. And while that might be a personal thing, the setting was one of the aspects of the game most praised by reviewers.

Dystopias are overused in videogames. It’s easy to build a plot in a hive of scum and villainy. Let’s see some more paradises, fairylands and Shangri-las, and some creativity in how they’re applied.

This post has a soundtrack. Choose YouTube or Spotify.

On a flight to cold, dark Scandinavia recently, I was thinking about how one of the delights of Peggle – other than its ridiculous addictiveness – was the rich, interesting backdrops that the levels are built around.

They’re used in all of the editions of Peggle – most notably in the free Peggle Extreme that was distributed with the Orange Box by Valve, which had a range of screenshots from the various games included in the bundle. Here’s an example:

It occurred to me that this was odd for two reasons. Firstly, this was a game highlighting its backgrounds, rather than hiding them away in the, er, background. Would Peggle be as great without its insane backdrops? No way.

Secondly, it’s odd because this is a rare example of art purposefully having an effect on the mechanics of the game. Mostly, in game development, the level designers tell the art team what to do. This was the other way around.

So I thought about what would make a good backdrop for a game and, in the same manner as a kid playing “I Spy” picking the car that he’s sat in, decided that a plane window would be the perfect venue for a calming puzzle game.

Perhaps it’d be a game where you had to connect up droplets of water, ice crystals or even clouds to make patterns. Of those, I’m a biggest fan of the second one – the patterns formed by some of those ice crystals can be beautiful.

The tutorial could be a view out onto an airport tarmac, while waiting for the plane to take off, complete with instructions from the captain over the PA system.

“This is your captain speaking… uh… please connect up the crystals so they form a line… uh… and make sure that your seat back and tray table are in an upright position”.

It’d be easy to repurpose the kind of design you find on airplane safety cards into a set of menus and instruction windows, if voice isn’t an option. I’m not convinced that text could convey the awesome distorted sound that an audio recording would.

If you like the idea, and you have the knowhow to create something good, go ahead and make a game out of it. Then send me a link – I’d love to see what you’ve done with it.

Eufloria is an independent real-time strategy game for the PC created by Alex May, Rudolf Kremers and Brian Grainger. The concept behind the game is based on a theory by physicist Freeman Dyson, who suggested that a genetically engineered plant – a Dyson Tree – could colonize a comet and produce a breathable atmosphere.

Players are set the task of colonizing various asteroids with seedlings. When enough seedlings are on the surface, a tree can be planted – shooting a deep root into the interior of the asteroid which lazily curls around the core. That tree then generates new seedlings slowly over time.

Different asteroids are different sizes and the larger the asteroid, the further the seeds are able to travel. Different asteroids can grow different types of seeds, too – some are fast, some are strong, and some are able to take control of hostile asteroids more quickly.

The game’s art style is very distinctive. It takes a minimalist, almost diagrammatic approach to displaying the cosmos that you’re battling in. Your seedlings have a stalk, wings and a body area – and they change in size depending on their strength, speed and energy attributes respectively so you can see at a glance what’s happening. Asteroids are rendered as giant cell-like circles that are penetrated by seedlings when they take control.

The team that created Eufloria say: “The game allows the player to explore a beautifully realized universe rendered in a style that is both unique and compelling. Eufloria’s aesthetics are reminiscent of children’s books like The Little Prince“. That’s certainly visible in the game.

It’s deeply relaxing. The sound direction is superb – all ambient chimes and dings. The music, by Brian Grainger, is similarly ambient, taking cues from Brian Eno, Eric Satie and John Cage to envelop you in a soft, velvety cushion of noise, perfect for headphone play late at night.

The low, low difficulty contributes to the relaxing feeling, too. You’ll likely finish each level first time, and the pace is such that you can alt-tab to a browser window to read websites while waiting for your army to build, and you’re not wasting time. In fact, a very viable strategy is to send all your seedlings to one planet and then just wait and build. You’ll eventually create an army of overwhelming size.

As a result of the minimalist design, you feel very detached from the action. Although your seedlings are waging fierce wars, fighting and dying on the surface of these asteroids, its as if you’re cocooned in a command centre an immense distance away. That recalls the “Death from Above” mission in the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, where you slaughtered hundreds of enemy soldiers from an infrared viewscreen on board an attack helicopter. It was a powerful statement about how soldiers can be conditioned against feeling remorse for taking by distancing them from the action.

But I digress. Eufloria is a great little game. It won’t challenge you – you won’t spend your time cursing and banging your fist on your desk. Instead, it’ll relax, calm and chill you out in a way that is all-too-rare in a world of videogames that try and thrill you at every step.

In the same way that organizing your bank in World of Warcraft can be a great way of calming down after an intense PvP session or a raid, a quick game of Eufloria is a great way of quelling adrenelin from a round of Team Fortress 2 or Modern Warfare 2 so that you can go to bed. Eufloria is a calming, ambient, beautiful title, well worth having in your Steam account.

Eufloria