Works wonders for one’s productivity.

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I’m not usually one for collector’s editions, but Blizzard definitely knows how to make a nice one. The 176-page hardcover art book is impressive.

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Added two new shortcodes: futpostcount shows the number of posts set to publish in the future, and draftpostcount the number of drafts. Refer to the list for all available codes.

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It’s almost laughable the way people hold on to rumble as the holy grail of haptic feedback. We’ve gone so far past anything that can be done with rumble, or that kind of restrictive thing you have to hold. It’s been creatively liberating to work on this stuff.

I completely disagree with this statement, as do many other enthusiast gamers. My main complaint with full-body motion control is its inherently imprecise nature. The fact that traditional input devices have been described as “complex” isn’t a drawback in my book. “Complex” controllers have analog sticks, pressure-sensitive buttons and force feedback/rumble and are therefor offering precise control and haptic feedback – with a device like Kinect, the former cannot be achieved because it isn’t possible to distinguish between slight but intended motions and unintended motions. When a game requires me to flail my arms around like an idiot, I feel it’s imprecise. Conversely if a game were to be very precise when reading motions, I’d cry foul every time it registered a motion I didn’t mean to perform.

Name me an FPS, driving game or sports games where I’d be more effective using Kinect that a “restrictive thing you have to hold”.

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An excellent post on waffle entertaining the idea that Apple is working on a new language to complement Objective-C. Charles Ying from satine.org thinks that a language close to JavaScript would be a good fit, due in part to extensive use of the language in iOS, iAd & iTunes.

It’s a strong theory – and one that I would like to se a reality, given the popularity of C-style syntax and garbage-collected environments. I not a big fan of low-level languages, but crying out for one that is more abstracted than Objective-C is met with a kind of resistance I’ve never really quite understood – a resistance that an Ars Technica article discussing the future of Apple’s languages and APIs explains perfectly:

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.

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