Apr

14

2010

Spirit v1.1 update

A little while back I posted about Spirit, a new game for the iPhone and iPod Touch created by Marco Mazzoli and you all rushed out (well, tapped your way to the Appstore) and bought it. Right? You did, right? It’s still only $0.99/£0.59p, a bargain for such a great game. Of course you did – you’d need to be some kind of freakishly drab ne’er-do-well, tighter than a duck’s chuff whose mere existence is a blight on all creation not to have snapped such a slick and entertaining game up at that price.

And now you have even fewer reasons to hold off purchasing this top title as just the other week Marco released version v1.1 of Spirit, introducing the much anticipated OpenFeint integration, adding a new ‘Extreme’ difficulty mode, tweaking gameplay and smoothing out some kinks under the hood.

The OpenFeint feature adds online leaderboards meaning, if you’re like me, you can now quantify how horrifically bad at the game you truly are. If however you’re vaguely competent, you’ll enjoy measuring up against all your friends (you did get your friends to buy the game too, right?) and rubbing their faces in your sheer excellence.

The Extreme difficulty mode kicks off right from 1-1 with a full board of busy enemies who appear to have been hitting the Red Bull all night. Everything is quicker and more aggressive and again, if you’re like me, your ass will get handed to you in very short order. But, if you like a challenge and want to prove your legendary gaming prowess, getting to the top of the Extreme leaderboard would certainly go some way towards doing so.

The update is of course free so everyone smart enough to have snapped the game up already can enjoy these new features simply by visiting the Appstore again. Everyone else, buy the game. Now!

Feb

25

2010

Firefox tab position redux

I heart Firefox. It’s quick, has a slew of add-ons that make my browsing a breeze and I’ve got it set-up just how I like it. But those crazy developer types think they know better and in the last 3.6 update, they decided that new tabs opened from a link should appear directly to the right of the parent tab instead of at the end of the list as in the past. Pretty logical but grumpy old me can’t get on with this change.

For a start, it’s not consistent. Opening a previous or next page in a new tab (by middle-clicking on the back or forward buttons) doesn’t follow the new to-the-right pattern but instead opens the new tab in the old place, right at the end of your current tab list. Also, if you open a child tab, click to view it and then close it, you’ll now be viewing the page to the right of the parent tab rather than the parent itself. It’s a small annoyance but one that doesn’t gel with my ‘how it should work’ world view. So rather than put up with these (admittedly tiny) niggles, I figured I’d just switch back to the old system.

After a little searching, I found the fix. Open a new tab and put this in the address bar…

about:config

…and tap <return>. Click past the “I promise not to go in like a bull in a china shop!” warning and you’ll be presented with a loonnngggg list of settings. This is basically all the stuff you can tweak in Firefox but the devs would rather you didn’t in case you bugger something up. Simply scroll down the list until you spot…

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

It’ll be set to ‘true’. Right click the entry and select toggle so it reads ‘false’. You can close that tab and now, when you open a new child tab, Firefox will respond as it used to. Of course, if you get sick of trawling to the end of your tabs for new pages then simply open the config again and toggle it back.

And… if you’re still using that ramshackle stack of bugs commonly known as Internet Explorer, then please (insert stream of insults veiled as a recommendation to switch to another browser, here).

Feb

16

2010

Spirit for iPhone and iPod Touch

A few days ago a friend of mine, Marco Mazzoli, released his first iPhone/iPod Touch game called ‘Spirit‘.

It really is a great game, one which I thoroughly recommend and I’m not just saying that because Marco will find out where I live, and beat me to death with a sock full of batteries while I sleep if I don’t… is a friend but because it looks great, it’s very slick and the gameplay is incredibly more-ish.

Previously, you’d have to go along to the iTune Store page and stare vacantly at the screenshots presented there, trying to imagine what those lovely images would look like if only they moved… as if by magic! Well, not any more as Marco has put together a video of the gameplay and made it available on YouTube.

Now, in theory, I should be able to embed it on this post…

Phew!

So, as you can see, an excellent game and definitely one you should rush off and purchase right now! Especially since it’s still available for the low, low price of  $0.99 / £0.59!

Tags / apple / Gaming / iphone / ipod touch / mobile / spirit / trailer / youtube /

Feb

12

2010

PNG me?

I mentioned updating my theme in my last post and while lack of time is a pretty big hurdle for building a new front-end for Skoardy.com, another problem is an iffy design choice I made when I first created the site.

Originally, I wanted the images I used in posts to blend smoothly with the background. GIFs give a simple level of transparency but it’s an on/off deal – hardly what I was looking for. PNGs are the other option but when the format first appeared they were barely supported and even when they became more widespread, a few dopey hold-outs still handled them badly. So I created images with the background colour blended into them. Looked good, nice small file… but an absolute pain in the chuff to re-do any time you moved to a theme with a different background colour.

Hopefully, these days, browsers have come a little further and the chance of encountering some backward, hill-billy software that can’t handle a simple PNG image correctly should be pretty slim. By converting images on the site over time to PNGs, I at least remove that stumbling block for when I do have some time for a proper shuffle.

The images will be bigger, unfortunately, but that’s okay, right? You’re all on beefy bandwidth connections, yeah? No? Oh well, sucks to be you.

Feb

9

2010

Twitter buh-bye!

Mmmmm. Okay, so on reflection I’m not particularly happy with just blatting my Twitter updates straight into my site’s feed. Don’t get me wrong – more content on here, no matter how puerile and flimsy is always going to be the goal but the problem was that my current theme isn’t particularly conducive to small scribbles of info as whole posts. The date and category boxes demand just a touch more meat on each bone and frankly, having the first 30 characters of the tweet as the title of the post looked downright naff (and damn hard to orchestrate into something meaningful when trying to already condense your thoughts into 140 characters). So for now it’s tata Twitter.

I did try out a number of different Twitter widgets which, I must say, on a different theme would be great but mine just tends to either break them or look remarkably wonky. If I had more than five minutes here and there free on such a problem, this might have pushed me over then edge and caused a whole new theme revision. But as it stands, I’ve simply not enough time so I’ve stripped out the plug-ins altogether.

One day I’ll revisit the whole situation but for now, if you want my Twitter-shaped bullets of bullshit, you’ll just have to get them from the source.

Feb

3

2010

The snow has been coming down …

The snow has been coming down again and it’s busy settling. Visions of sub-zero temperatures and more burst pipes… arggh! Do Not Want!

Jan

28

2010

And here’s the obligatory test…

And here’s the obligatory test post checking to see if my Twitter -> Wordpress shenanigans is still working after I set the plug-in going.

Jan

28

2010

Twitter Amalgamation – Super Special Bonus Banality!

For a while now I’ve been wondering how I could possibly make my site even more tediously inconsequential while still giving it the façade of a throbbing hive of activity. It was quite a head scratcher. Luckily, and as is usually the case, the intaweb was there to steal from inspire me! Twitter, of course!

A few months ago I laid claim to my very own Twitter account, protecting the ‘Skoardy‘ brand on yet another digital frontier, and had been dropping 140 character lumps of wisdom on a (very small) circle of people far too kind to unfollow me.

But it’s time to further utilise that stream of sh… um, conciousness and feed it directly to this site. You might have spotted two remarkably short posts directly below this one, already. Yeah, that’s the new plug-in (Twitter Tools by Alex King) hard at work. The short nature of the posts highlighted a couple of flaws in my year-or-so old theme but they’ve already been fudged fixed.

So look forward to a bright future full of 140 character long posts detailing things you probably never even knew you didn’t want to know until you came here. Right… how do I funnel my Facebook crap onto the site…?

Jan

24

2010

One of those days – opened a b…

One of those days – opened a box of matches upside down and then proceeded to try and strike up the wrong end of the match… a ‘few’ times.

Jan

17

2010

Slept funny last night and rea…

Slept funny last night and really want to sneeze. Each time I get to the explosive conclusion, my back twinges and puts me off. Infuriating!