Actually, this is the kind of start of revolution you’ve been seeing in every computer generation at the beginning, this is just a repeating pattern. Just remember how the PC started around 1992/1993 with their first 3D games and mobile phones started a few years ago, too.

How long will it take until we’ve something like ScummVM ported to a browser? Or Another World? Or think about the Sierra Classics.

They’re having articles from the following magazines: Amiga Computer, Amiga Power, Amiga Format, CU, Amiga Joker, Zero and Zzap! Currently they host more than 3000 reviews of nearly 2000 games. Awesome!

This also happened to me the other day with a web-based newsletter application I was using. The application had opened a popup with a textarea which got updated every time there was something to report, like invalid email addresses. Every time the textarea got updated, the popup window received focus.

Guess what? I was happily surfing in FF the other time and closing some tabs with CTRL-W when out of a sudden the newsletter application grabbed the focus and, you guessed it, I was closing the popup which sends the newsletter out. Oh, did I mention that having this popup open was vital for sending the newsletter, i.e. closing the popup would stop sending the newsletter?

I complained immediately to the software company which admitted the problem but was unable to fix this because “that’s the way internet explorer works, try FF”. Ok, so I’m stupid, right, because I didn’t use FF? Learned another lesson, man.

Application developers should taken away the right to grab focus and bring out a window to the front which automatically grabs keyboard actions. It’s ridiculous.

Btw, I updated my blogs’ theme. Why is it so … spare? a) because most people today use some kind of RSS reader software anywhere and since I publish my articles as a whole there’s no need to visit the page and b) because I’m no designer, I don’t like the existing designs and don’t want to be just another copy of a theme. It’s basically a rip-off of Asa Dotzlers blog at the moment; sorry for that :-)

Which means that for example I can’t press the M key, because it is actually 0, which means jumping on the numeric one.

I crawled the ini files but didn’t find anything hinting that this behaviour can be disabled. I don’t understand what developers sometimes have at their mind. I sincerly hope that they  issue a patch either removing this horrible thing or at least provide an ini setting for it.

This seems to become a very promising future about fan made games.

Download King’s Quest III

If you think the hard part is to see the world, think again. It’s quite hard to follow the rapid 3D movement and even playing just a few minutes can give quite a headache. Anyway, quite interesting experience.

I’m currently running the MS Visio 2003 Trial version, limited to 60 days. Visio is really great at visualizing things quickly. I haven’t yet found anything else which can be used with that ease. If anyone has some suggestions about alternatives, let me know.

To really get to know to a product you need to be able to utilize it and learning using keyboard shortcuts is a part of it.

For Visio, the first thing I wanted to is: how can I switch to the Pointer Tool? This is essential, whenever you use the Connector Tool at some point you need to go back to the Pointer Tool. I was hovering over the Pointer Tool in the toolbar. Nice, it was telling me it’s name. But it doesn’t give a hint about its keyboard shortcut. Maybe it has none?

So I searching through all the menus. I couldn’t find the Pointer Tool there. Why did I search the menus? Usually in the menus the name and the keyboard shortcut is written.

Asking the Help Assistant for keyboard shortcut luckily revealed the page for the first hit. The help page started out to be small but this is just because it has quite some categories which can be expanded/collapsed which are all collapsed initially. From this state I was searching for Pointer Tool but didn’t find anything because all categories where collapes. I had to expand all and then search again. Finally I found it. It’s CTRL+1.

I’m wondering why the keyboard shortcut can’t be next to it’s hover popup?

Flash in terms of graphical capabilities is lightyears away from what browsers can do in certain places, but why is it still that I hate flash and would love direct support in the browser instead? Maybe it’s the infection of ads coming from flash. Or that it is a closed binary format (maybe this is not true anymore, someone correct me). Or is it that it’s development environment is not open source and you basically depend on it?

On the other hand, wouldn’t it make much more sense to use SVG for games? The canvas element is bitmapped, thus it has a fixed size in pixels which isn’t very adequat for multi-resolution clients like the users desktop. SVG would fit better because it can scale.

It’s very exciting to whatch the current evolution of browsers, not only in terms of game capability, but also Ajax and stuff. The paradigm is shifting, and it’s shifting fast.

• Civilization walkthrough – guide
• CIV FAQ

One funny note from the CIV FAQ:

… Build lots of phalanxes, chariots, legions, catapults, ships, settlers, and
diplomats. Let me clarify that: by “lots of …”, I mean “infinite numbers
of them”. A dozen ships might be enough, but you can never have too many
chariots…