The Renaissance Continues: Unreal Engine 3 Coming to Mac

Last year, Valve software announced that the company’s Steam framework – an online store for digital game downloads and multiplayer interaction, was coming to the Mac platform.  The move was seen as a major boon to the Mac gaming catalog, long considered the butt of a joke in the realm of PC gaming.  Before Valve’s gesture — which included porting the Source engine to OS X — gaming on the Mac was a futile effort.  Almost no developers had any incentive to make games for such a small market, nor adapt to the Mac’s PowerPC technology.  Moving to Intel processors helped a lot, but Valve’s gesture removed a big hurdle: distribution.  Today, gaming on the Mac is still nowhere near as vibrant as gaming on the PC, but it’s infinitely stronger than it was.

And now it will get stronger.  Epic Games, one of the premiere game developers in the world and makers of the industry leading Unreal Engine, have decide to port said engine to Mac OS X.  It’s a pretty major move for the company, which has long solely supported Microsoft’s Direct3D graphics API.  Apple, of course, uses OpenGL.  Yet here we are.  The Unreal Engine is one of the most popular middleware engines in modern gaming, used in massively popular games like Mass Effect, Bioshock, Gears of War, and Batman Arkham Asylum.  Now, perhaps these games could grace the Mac.  Unreal Engine 3 is a major addition to the technology catalog needed for major games to come to Apple products.

In many ways, this is a long time coming.  Epic released a modified version of their Unreal Engine last year for iOS devices, seeing the opportunity the platform provided for entering the mobile space.  The first Unreal title for iOS, Infinity Blade, was a critical success.  Overall, the combined might of iOS and the growing market share of OS X means that developers can’t overlook Apple anymore.  Epic’s decision is a big step forward.  Now, on to Crytek…..

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RockMelt Partners with Facebook for Beta 3

My continuing coverage of RockMelt, the Chrome-based browser with integrated Facebook and Twitter interaction, continues with a major upgrade today.  RockMelt has long focused on its tight integration with Facebook and it appears Facebook is paying attention.  Beta 3 of RockMelt has seen collaboration with Facebook in order to make its integration tighter and more useful to users.  UI enhancements are some of the most striking changes.  RockMelt’s signature “edges” which aggregate RSS feeds and maintain running lists of your online Facebook friends, have swapped sides on the browser window.  With friends now on the right, the list can be expanded and scrolled to allow faster searches without the older, more intrusive module windows.  This lends to a more streamlined chat system which is cleaner.   The window bar has also integrated Facebook’s standard notifications, allowing for better requests and messaging management.

RockMelt’s collaboration with Facebook has lead to significant reductions in redundancy.  Facebook’s website can now tell when a user is running RockMelt and logged in.  Now notifications and chat windows will only appear in the RockMelt window even if you are also on the website.  Facebook has also lent their more powerful photo app to RockMelt, making viewing photos far easier.  The rapid improvements of RockMelt over the past year has been truly astounding.  The browser has moved from a flawed concept to a pretty polished reality with relative fluidity.  Another Beta will probably drop before this reaches the golden 1.0 release, but I’m pretty excited for this software to continue improving.

Windows 8 (Don’t Pay Attention to the Windows Behind the Curtain)

Microsoft is rarely a company I associate with stylish design and forward-thinking enhancements.  Until Vista gave Windows a bit of a visual pick-me-up, the only adjective I could give to Microsoft’s operating system was “drab”.  I mean XP was ugly, it just wasn’t anything to be proud of.  Yet over the past few years, Microsoft has made some good steps in improving their aesthetic.  Still, even with a new coat of paint, you can always see the old, sometimes dysfunctional, UI paradigms in place.  And then all of a sudden comes “Metro”, this whole new UI design for Windows Phone 7.  It’s classy, minimal, uses space efficiently, and most of all unique.  Metro was this side of Microsoft we had never seen before.  One that could appeal to young, artistic types in the way OS X and iOS have.  Metro has spread into the “oh-yeah-that-thing” Zune and the 360’s latest UI update but I always craved to see Microsoft do a thorough reworking of Windows to make it really cohesive and feel new.

Well, enter Windows 8

What iOS 5 Needs To Win

This year’s WWDC will be all about the software.  OS X Lion will be a major revamp of Apple’s desktop software as the company tries to reunify its two operating systems.  We’ve seen good glimpses of the new OS from several developer previews over the past few months.  While the final pieces of Lion will be provided at WWDC, Apple’s going to have to unveil everything about iOS 5 at the event.  We know nothing about Apple’s fifth iteration of the popular mobile operating system beyond speculation and rumor.  Still, maybe that’s enough.  iOS is a great OS that still needs a lot of work in order to go toe-to-toe with Android.  A more elegant interface and experience cannot hold off its feature deficiency for long against Android’s rapid improvements.  So, here are the features iOS 5 needs in order to bring the fight to Google.

RockMelt Hits Beta 2, Diamond out of the Rough

The RockMelt browser project was of particular interest to me back when it was first announced in 2010.  The notion of browsers with social networking integration is not a new concept, but it looked like RockMelt could be one of the first to really do it well.  The development team, backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen, seems remarkably enthusiastic about their product and has continued to aggressively improve the browser.  Still, over time the novelty of RockMelt was lost as its Chrome underpinnings continue to frustrate me.  Plainly, I have a faulty Flash player that no matter how many times I reinstall has a tendency to crash on all my Chrome browsers.  Firefox and Safari have their fair share of crashes as well, but Chrome seems to fail religiously.  My hope was the some update to the browser would fix it but here we are at Version 11 and things seem to be the same.

Regardless, it’s hard to argue that Chrome 11 and its derivatives are powerhouse browsers when Flash player plays nice.  With 4 browsers on my computer, it gets very hard to decide between them and I am constantly juggling Safari 5, Firefox 4 (plagued by slow downs over extended use), Chrome 11, and now RockMelt Beta 2.  Beta 2 was released about a month ago but I completely missed the announcement.  Since Chrome 11’s release a few days ago, it seemed pertinent to see if RockMelt has had any major improvements with the refreshed underpinnings.  Boy oh boy, it sure has.

The RockMelt team has worked extensively to hammer out stability issues and performance flaws through numerous updates in the first Beta.  Beta 2 is all about fixing their features for the future and it shows.  The “edges” which maintain access to your social media and RSS feeds have become far more powerful.  Each icon is more of an application than simple feed aggregator.  The Twitter icon is now a full blown Twitter client, allowing you to Tweet, retweet, look at messages and @mentions all from the same window.  The chat infrastructure has also improved to handle multiple conversations better (a greatly appreciated improvement over the old, frustrating system).  There is also a full-blown Youtube and Tumblr app that lets you watch videos and post updates right from the Edge.  RockMelt has worked very hard to make the Edges powerful additions for applications, which plays great into Google’s attempt at pushing the Chrome App store.  One last great feature is View Later.  When browsing Tweets, Facebook updates or any article from your RSS, you can click View Later and pin that content to an icon at the top to look at that content later on.  It’s a fantastic thing for a guy like me who is often too busy to go through several hundreds of RSS posts in a day.

RockMelt also has an iPhone app.  A spatter of secondary browsers for the iPhone have emerged over the years like Opera Mobile and SkyFire but RockMelt seems like the first really interesting alternative.  Upon launching the app for the first time, it will ask for your Facebook account and then sync with any feeds you have on a desktop client.  The sync is fast and constant, meaning reading an update on the iPhone instantly marks it as read on my computer browser.  The iPhone app also supports View Later and quick posts to Facebook and Twitter, so it makes for decent Facebook and Twitter client in the same app.  You can automatically tweet or share any webpage you are on from the browser bar, another nice touch.  However, RockMelt’s utility on an app phone is kind of diminished when there are dedicated clients available for all these features with a bit more polish.  Also, RockMelt has some browsing issues.  The app defaults to desktop versions of some websites where there are mobile versions of the site.  You can’t access the URL either once you load a page either, instead you have to go back to the home screen.  The browser also defaults to search in the URL bar, you have to hit a tab to put in a specific address, and the keyboard lacks the useful “.com” button.  Autofill by browsing history is missing too.  Finally, there’s no JavaScript engine from what I can tell, so browsing is a bit slower than the Nitro equipped Safari.

For a first release though, the RockMelt app is pretty nice and can get much better pretty rapidly.  The team is doing a great job in improving both applications, which are both still free and pretty strong for Betas.  Glad to see this promising software series continue to get stronger.

The Digital Gravitas Guide to Browsers: 2011

It is hard for me to think of a software war that sees more action than the browser wars.  Today the browser is probably the single most important program on one’s computer.  We live in a world where not having a computer connected to the Internet is unthinkable (kinda makes me wonder how I survived my first 5 years with a computer, huh mom and dad?)  Yes, the browser is that indispensable window to the world that makes up most of our lives.  Name one other program in your arsenal that sends as much time running as the browser.

At anytime I have about 3 browsers on my computer, and I’m constantly cycling through them as my tastes change.  If I find a deficiency in one, I move to another for a time until something else arises.  However, on the whole I juggle my time between Safari 5 and Chrome 10 (mostly because Safari is needed for launching my school’s VPN).  RockMelt is used from time to time, though my love of the browser has waned overtime.  Firefox has long been absent from my arsenal because version 3.6 is pretty slow.

So today, with the release of the much-awaited Firefox 4 that vastly improves Mozilla’s offering, I’ve decided to compile a guide to browsers.  Hopefully you can all make some better-educated decisions about which programs you’ll allow on your computer.  Each has their pluses and minuses that I hope to weigh in on, from UI design and utility, performance and stability, and real world convenience of design.  As well, I will be running a few benchmarks to give you some quantifiable differences.  Pretty graphs and everything!  But don’t just look at the data, make sure to browse on and see my opinions on the real feel with each browser.

The test bed includes three benchmarks: the Webkit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, the Acid3 test and Google’s V8 Benchmark as an alternative for JavaScript execution.  Each test was run three times on each browser (save for Acid3, which is unnecessary) and an average was compiled from the scores.  All tests are run on a mid-2010 15-inch MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Core i5 with 4GB DDR3 RAM and the discrete graphics card on.  In order to be eligible the browser must be compliant with all modern standards and be relatively popular (sorry Opera!)  RockMelt is an exception because I want to give an idea what some specialized browsers can offer.  Our tested browsers include Safari 5, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, RockMelt 0.9.49 and Internet Explorer 9.

Briefly: Windows Phone 7 Improvements

The mobile scene has been on fire in the past week or so, and all of this has culminated at the Mobile World Congress going on now in Barcelona.  Today, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer presented the latest updates to the Windows Phone 7 operating system, coming in March.  Much like Apple finally implemented, WP7 now has 3rd party multitasking – via a card system very much like webOS – and copy/paste.  Why these features weren’t there in the first place is beyond me, but at least it didn’t take three (or four) iterations to include these features…. Apple.  Along for the ride as well is a new browser using the much faster and more modern IE9 underpinnings (allowing for hardware acceleration), Twitter integration and finally support for CDMA (Verizon and Sprint customers).

It’s good to see Microsoft being pretty quick with updates.  I said from the beginning that the only way Microsoft could be successful was by issuing updates often, showing that they are constantly improving the platform.  These updates should placate those who felt WP7 was lacking a bit.

The Resurrection of WebOS

2009 was the gambit year for Palm.  Failing with Palm OS, a legacy mobile OS that had become absolutely ancient, the company needed fresh blood.  So early 2009 introduced us to the Palm Pre and webOS: a brand-spanking new mobile phone and a completely new mobile OS.  They were absolutely fantastic.  The Pre was stylish and powerful, sporting features like inductive charging way before the competition even thought of it.  webOS was (and is) a multitasking monster with Synergy, an extremely expansive cloud syncing system.  It seemed like Palm had risen like a phoenix, out of the ashes of Palm OS to become a company that could even take on Apple out of the gate. At least, that was the thought back when the phone and OS were announced.  Palm sat on their asses until June for launch, around the time the equally powerful iPhone 3GS debuted.  By that time the fervor had cooled off, plus the phone launched on Sprint and had the worst advertising this side of Sony’s 2006 PS3 ads.

Palm died in 2010.  I earnestly believed they could make a comeback but that never came to pass.  Instead, HP bought Palm and vowed to keep WebOS alive in their new mobile devices division.  I was glad to see webOS get another chance.  It was a mobile OS that I felt deserved to exist.  So with HP at the helm, I figured things would be on the up for webOS.  But for all of 2010: nothing, at least for us US customers.  In Europe, consumers had access to the Pre 2 with a faster 1Ghz processor and webOS 2, which brought better multitasking, stronger universal search and Flash support.  Still, we never got it and HP never made a big deal of it.  Until now.  Today HP unveiled 3 new devices that will change the way we think of webOS forever.  Today, webOS gets a new lease of life and I’m extremely excited.  webOS is now a viable player in the mobile space, and if HP woos developers to the platform, webOS could be an enduring monolith able to challenge iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 in short time.

Mac App Store Released

Well Apple wasn’t kidding.  Back in October at their “Back to the Mac” event, the electronics company announced that Snow Leopard users would get early access to one of 10.7 Lion’s new features: the Mac App Store.  And here it is, ready for access along with the 10.6.6 update.  Apple is trying to capitalize on the runaway success of the App Store on iOS by bringing the same infrastructure to the Macintosh platform.  While the Mac App Store carries the same restrictions as the App Store (namely requiring approval), it is not the only pathway to applications on your computer.  Apple hopes that this will create a more visible ecosystem that developers can use to sell their apps, hopefully showing the Mac as a more robust platform.  So how is it?

Familiar is the first word that comes to mind.  It looks a lot like the iPad app store, which is surely intentional as 10.7 is going to take a lot of UI cues from iOS.  That said, the UI is simple but also limited.  Apps are displayed in a grid showing their name, icon and price (if any) and not much else.  It seems awfully cluttered and doesn’t maximize the larger screens of Macs.  UI changes can occur and probably will before the final version in Lion.  Over all though, the App store shows promise, mostly because its utility is already apparent to me.  In the 15 minutes I spent navigating the store, I already found a couple of utilities and free applications that were useful.  And with 1000 apps already in the store, I’m sure I will find more.  So already, developers should rejoice because I think the Mac App store will work as a way to better show off their wares.  Games developers should really take advantage of the Mac App Store like they have in iOS.  Angry Birds has already been ported with multi-touch support.

The Mac App Store also takes care of a lot of technical issues for developers.  The store provides a centralized location for updates and additional content, which means developers won’t have to build update scanners into their apps.  It also quickly and easily installs your apps directly into the applications folder, no longer leave you with a .dmg and disk image to deal with.  It’s little things like that, giving you the streamlined feeling and simplicity of the iOS App store, that can be appreciated.  Really though, the Mac App store is something to neither love nor hate.  It’s simply another venue that you should look into for new applications.  You’ll find all the old Apple standbys on the store, application suites like iLife can be bought in individual parts, and you can discover some interesting hidden gems along the way.

Briefly: Handbrake Updates to 0.9.5

I’ve mentioned Handbrake a couple of times over the year as an excellent, free video encoding and DVD ripping program.  I often use Handbrake not just to get movies onto my computer and for cross-encoding, but it also makes a great real world benchmark for a computer’s CPU performance.  When I first got my Macbook Pro, I used Handbrake as an indication of the tangible performance advantage I had over my old iMac G5.  I wasn’t disappointed.

What is so wonderful about Handbrake is its open source roots.  The entire software is based on the efforts of volunteer software designers and an active community of contributors.  It’s great to see a vibrant, volunteer-based effort like this yield such a great product.  But it has its downsides.  First off, despite being in development for over 5 years, the software has yet to reach 1.0 status, so it is technically still in beta.  As well, releases are very slow.  The previous version – 0.9.4 – was released a year after its predecessor and the newest release was about 13 months after that.  That’s why the release of 0.9.5 is so exciting for me: because it shows progress continues on.  After a year with nary a peep from the developers, I would fear that the project was dead.  This appears to not be the case.

The most important updates to the software come in the form of new “presets”.  Handbrake makes converting to iTunes and iPod-friendly video a snap with multiple configurations to maximize quality or file size depending on needs.  The newest version takes into account advancements in Apple’s hardware – namely the introduction of the iPhone 4 and iPad, with their support for 720p video and high resolutions.  These new settings are great for me, as they essentially use the same settings as the custom preset I built for my DVD rips and cross-encodings.

Download Handbrake today at their website: Handbrake.fr.  Versions exist for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and OSX, even Linux and a Command Line Interface version.  Make sure to download the latest version of VLC player too if you want to rip DVDs (contains some libraries that Handbrake needs to access DVDs).