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General Software Discussion / Re: software to write gamebooks ?
« on: September 25, 2011, 02:17 PM »
I tried Twine, and found it interesting but ultimately I abandoned it. (Example.) It isn't being actively developed, and not being being any kind of a coder, I found that to be limiting. It has some basic commands and formats all set up to use, but anything beyond that requires tooling around under the hood. I just want to write the story, not also have to code it or debug it. Initially, I also found that the story I wrote seemed to work differently between various browsers, and couldn't ever figure out why. Yet today my example seems to work okay in IE8, IE9, and Firefox. (Can't speak for Safari or Opera or Chrome.) There is still a Google group for its support, but the owner has confessed to not having time for it, and nothing much is posted there anymore. It's too bad, because I thought it was a great concept, and if someone put time into it, and provided more UI "canned" features, it could really work well.

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heh. Been there, done that!

Had I checked in here a month ago, I'd have found this thread sooner, and I could've given you my disks for Leopard. My Mac bit the dust just after I bought the OS upgrade, and I would've been HAPPY to package my set of Leopard disks and send it to you at no charge. Really! It's brand new and has never been opened. If you like, I can offer to send them to you anyway.

I never cottoned to my old Mac mini, and when it finally died, frankly I was relieved. The only thing I will say in its favor is that iMovie is pretty awesome. If you do anything at all with videos, you'll appreciate how easy it is to use, and how it makes a very nice looking video. For a "simple" product it has some surprisingly sophisticated tools. Just be prepared to have to hunt around for external format converters if you want to share videos with your PC pals. Even those, however, are available, and are more polished than their PC counterparts.

GarageBand is a lot of fun, too. I thought iPhoto was overblown and way more than I needed. Whenever I tried to use it, I found it to be quite counter-intuitive and confusing, and after a while just avoided it. I found other means for working with my photos -- like using my PC instead. All of these are part of the iLife family, but rather surprisingly, none of their user interfaces have much commonality.

Like you, I discovered that the Mac's greatest proficiency is extracting money from my pocketbook. And I don't mean solely because it's expensive to buy one, but because almost anything you need to do to it is going to cost you, and often the only way out when you have trouble with it is to buy your way out.

Still, I believe I'm a better person for having wrangled with one for 3 years. Now I know for a fact that those Mac fanboys have no idea what they're talking about. Having tasted the other side, I know that Windows is the OS for me.

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Finished Programs / SOLVED: Freecell Request
« on: December 04, 2010, 09:42 AM »
Gosh, I don't know where to put this request, so I'll start here, and you guys can send me to where it should go, even if it's off this site completely. So...here goes nothing:

The ONE single thing that keeps me from upgrading to the newest Firefox versions is that my absolute favorite add-on has lost its developer. That is the add-on called Cards, which includes among other things, free-cell. The reason that I liked this add-on so much is that in the portable version I could play it at work where free-cell was not installed on our computers (yeah, I know it's wrong to play it, but what are you going to do while you're on hold, or waiting for an application to crunch out a result, or while you're on a boring conference call, etc.). It also allowed me to play free-cell on a Mac. Besides, that, I just liked how the game functioned better than the Microsoft Windows one.

So, my question is, how can I get the actual game extracted out of the extension? (I have the Cards .jar file and the .xpi file, and for a while I toyed with the idea of trying to do this myself, but I simply don't know where to start.)  Ideally, I'd like to get the game to be an add-on to the new version of Firefox, but I don't know that this is a fair request to make here, so I'd settle for just getting the game as a stand-alone application which doesn't rely on being installed (so it can be played from a jump drive).
I'm a real addict to this little game and in the spirit of this site, I'd gladly make a sizable donation here -- Hey! I'm not above incentivizing this effort! ;) Plus, I'd like to be able to move on to the latest version of Firefox.

If there is already such an application out in the wild, I would love to know about it -- although I've looked around and haven't been able to find one that fits the bill. If this is the wrong sort of request to make here, then can someone point me in the right direction or give me some tips on how I might go about getting this done myself.

Thanks for everybody's patience in reading this.

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A couple of movies that blew me away are The Fall and The Brothers Bloom.

The Fall is about a movie stunt man recuperating from a failed stunt, and a little girl, who's also in the hospital while healing from a broken arm.  She is ambulatory, he is bed ridden.  He starts telling her a story, and pretty soon we begin to see the story as it grows in her mind.  The movie shows us everything from the little girl's point of view while allowing us, with our adult perspective, to recognize the deeper things that are really going on.  The story grows in meaning and depth, until we realize that the fantasy and the real world events are intertwined.  The director traveled to the ends of the world to bring indelible images to the screen -- nothing here is done with CGI.  It is the most beautiful, eye-catching movie I've seen in a very long time.  Despite one of the main characters being a little girl, the story is for adults, and by the time the story ends you'll have examined themes of life and death.   I might add that don't let the deep themes fool you, it is also a very entertaining movie, with an especially colorful story-within-a-story.  

The Brothers Bloom is a story about two con men who have grown rich at their game, but now one of them has grown tired of the games and wants to leave.  So the other devises one last con, to fool a rich girl out of some money.  All goes well, until one of them falls for her.  Ah, but it turns out that this, too, was planned for.  The movie is full of interesting, quirky characters, charmingly offbeat locations (Prague, Montenegro, New Jersey), and is told with a dark, dry wit.  It's like a Wes Anderson movie, only deeper, and by the time the movie ends, you'll realize that it's been about love and loyalty all along.

For fans of dark humor, I can also recommend a few more choices:

In The Loop is a dark comedy about politics.  It's based on the British series The Thick Of It, and is told in a fast-paced faux documentary style, and you have to pay real close attention to figure out what's really going on.  The premise is that politics is all about spin and PR, and the story takes place as the US and the UK are about to drift into a war.  If the story resembles real life, I'm sure that it is on purpose.  The characters are all scheming for political advantage while simultaneously preening for the press. (Careful, there's a lot of foul language, which I found funny, but is not for the faint of heart.)  I liked this so much that I troubled myself to hunt up the British series, and watched it in complete fascination, not the least because of the artistic heights that the use of foul language reaches.

You Kill Me, starring Tea Leoni and Ben Kingsley, is a dryly funny movie about a Buffalo hitman who's sent by his family to the west coast to dry out.  He takes up work in a morgue, and meets a beautiful but sharp tongued woman.  IMO, the idea of making a living in Buffalo as a hitman, or going to the west coast to dry out and THEN getting a job in a morgue should give you an inkling of the type of movie this is.  (If you don't see the inherent humor in this sort of incongruity, you might want to give this movie a miss.  It's humor is very dry.)

If really dry and really dark comedies are what strikes your fancy, take a look at A Film With Me In It.  It's a black farce starring Dylan Moran (Black Books, Run Fat Boy Run, Shaun of the Dead) who's the best friend of a hapless actor played by Mark Doherty (no, I don't know what else he's been in, either) who cannot get a job.  The film has only six major characters, who enter and and then accidentally die with alarming frequency.  I know that doesn't sound funny, but yet it is. I don't like farces, or comedies that are this black, but this movie held my attention at the sheer nerve of creating a story this bleak, while so deeply funny.  (Er, I caught this on pay-per-view, and I see it's not out yet on DVD.  I see no ETA for it, either.  Sorry to get your hopes up.)


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Heh.  Several years ago I got suckered by all the Mac hype, and bought one - a Mac mini.  I quickly came to regret it, and now, despite all the raves and hoopla over iPhones and iPads, I just cannot bring myself to even consider getting any Apple product ever again.  (Oh, and I positively LOATHE iTunes.)

I can't make any recommendations for what you, or anyone in your shoes, should do.  It seems to me that your choice is extremely personal, and depends on what your daily activities are, and what you expect from these devices.  I love my Asus eeePC, and you'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands before I'll give it up -- even though, yes, the screen is small and the processor is underpowered.  It boots up faster than my other PCs, and it does whatever I need for it to do.  But then, I don't game, and I don't do graphics intensive work.  Whenever I'm on the road, the netbook is with me, and I have used it at friends/ and relatives' houses to kill time.  I use a pay-as-you-go mobile broadband plan, which limits my monthly data expenses, and which I believe is not an option with the iPad.  I like it for blogging, for writing projects, for surfing, and as a convenient way to dump my pictures from my camera.  I also use it a lot for doing work related stuff while on the road, which involves MS Office (fortunately, we're still stuck back on Office 2002, so it doesn't especially overtax my netbook.)  Since I touch-type, A regular QWERTY keyboard is also a must.  Even if I wanted to buy an iPad, it just couldn't do these particular things well, and that's a deal breaker for me.  

I am also in the process of moving from a Palm T|X to a Blackberry.  This isn't by choice, but is being dictated by work.  I must say that although the old Palm was long in the tooth, I am shocked to discover the paucity of apps for the Blackberry.  It's been around for a long time, yet there doesn't seem to be much variety among available applications.   Although the Blackberry is better at the "internet-y" stuff (twittering, surfing, instant messaging), it's much worse at the things that I loved about my old Palm: note taking, memo's, database, and profession-specific applications.  (Where's the resistor color code app? The steam tables app? and how come I can only find one scientific calculator?)  I was also surprised that the old Palm provided me a better user experience with its native email, contacts, and calendar apps.  Really, the "crackberry" has been somewhat of a letdown.  (Google Mobile Apps, however, are awesome.)

Since my day job dictates that I have a netbook and a Blackberry, and between them I get most of my portable electronic needs met, something like the iPad would only add more weight to my bag without any noticeable benefit.  Although I've been intrigued by the thought of a portable tablet, I'm not convinced that one can take the place of both a laptop and a phone.   If I were in your shoes, and had an extra $700 to spend on something, I think I'd get myself a Wii and, with that stupid ol' Mac of mine finally biting the dust, a small form-factor desktop (Win7, thank you) to act as a media server.
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