Not to defend the Bay Transformer franchise, but unfortunately that detail is rather true to the series. When I watched the original series as a kid, I hated Spike and his family, because they were always stealing camera time away from... just about anybody more interesting. There were so many robots in the Transformers line, so many opportunities, but it had to open with Bumblebee rolling in to the garage and chumming with his human pals.
I've always found it a bit insulting, even as I grew up, that these kids' shows about non-human things (Smurfs, Transformers, etc.) have to have an "ambassador" to their world, in the form of a young human that the viewers can identify with. It's as if the producers believe that little kids would have absolutely no frame of reference and be completely unable to comprehend the themes surrounding a bunch of non-human yet highly anthropomorphized characters.
To make things worse, in G+ I see ways of muting individual posts and outright blocking a user (which does more than just mute their posts and in my opinion is more of a nuke you'd use on stalkers and during painful breakups.) Typically if a user on Facebook got too spammy I'd just hide their future posts and they could natter on all they like. A quick solution would be to remove them from your general stream, but there seems to be no way to do that without removing them completely from your circles. The only way to retain them in a circle yet filter out their posts is to make a "pariah" circle, drop that user in the circle and only that circle, and then individually browse all non-pariah streams by circle, which is a heck of a lot less convenient than the "hide" drop-down in Facebook. Blocking the user is a bit too harsh, as I may still want them to see my posts, but if they start playing games that update me on the welfare of their pet baby seal every hour or so, removing them from all my circles may be my only recourse!
I used it. It was fairly functional and effective for its day, but the problem was the Brazilians. When you tried to start up an interest group, even if you specified English as the language, it was more often than not overrun with posts in Portuguese, many of them stating not much more than "Hey, who else out there is Brazilian!?!!" I've got nothing against Brazilians -- it could just have easily been the Vietnamese or the Indians. I think no small number of English speakers felt alienated by an increasing number of semi- or fully-nude torsos trivializing their pages with banter they couldn't understand. A lot of these alienated users jumped ship early to a more comforting platform and didn't return. Perhaps the site has much better controls now -- maybe it's better than Facebook even, but every time I think about Orkut, those images of tan, funloving Brazilians clogging up my pages leer back at me.
I remember that much about him as well. However, in the movie, his expended power manifests itself in several different ways -- from awesome energy shockwaves to power pellets he can deploy to flicks of a finger loaded with kinetic energy. I expected more of the latter -- that is, punches and other strikes disproportionately loaded with energy. I'm not complaining, but I just didn't have a very good feel for his power's mechanics.
I thought that Kevin Bacon, while not really resembling Shaw very well, still made a captivating villain. I especially enjoyed his brief depiction as a Nazi scientist at the very beginning of the movie. The latest Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me has a small but enjoyable interview with him regarding, among other things, his role as Shaw.:) And I can totally see see him with muttonchops!
I read a lot of old school X-Men comic books growing up, and while there were plenty of inconsistencies both when measured against the X-Men canon and even internally, I found that the overall excellent writing and clever use of mutant powers won me over. This movie was a lot more subtle than its predecessors, from the 60's touches to the stronger focus on the characters, and I appreciated that.
They made some weird choices for characters. I don't know if Darwin even has a precedent (probably not, given his character's treatment), but who was the guy who blew the tornadoes? Azazel was also an odd choice. He doesn't really belong in the Hellfire club, from what I can tell, though he does set up Nightcrawler fairly well.
Spoiler (and an example of internal inconsistency) -- what the devil happened to all of that energy Shaw sucked out of the submarine? I felt his powers were somewhat poorly defined to begin with, but when you suck a nuclear submarine's batteries dry, doesn't that energy go *somewhere*? I suppose it could be explained away in one way or another, but it would have made a lot more sense if there were an explosion or some other kind of awesome manifestation of the power he ate.
Ah, I wasn't decrying the end of physical media as we know it. I was referring to media married to a particular format and marketed as such. There may be a fantastic new 3-D storage sugarcube drive in the future, but I don't see movies being specifically released on this format. I don't think we'll see proclamations like "Now on DVD and Blu-Ray" after ads, because it will need to be "Now on DVD, Blu-Ray, Hulu, Netflix, Itunes, Verizon, XBox Live, etc."
I think your mention of Netflix is more of a reason why the uptake for Blu-Ray is so slow, and it's the same reason why Blockbuster has gone down in flames -- physical media just isn't as lucrative as it used to be. Before fast Internet speeds, DVDs had no real media competitor besides dwindling VHS players with their obvious disadvantages. Blu-Ray came out in the age of streaming media and portable storage small enough to fit on your keychain. I haven't bought anything on physical media for years now, with the exception of a few good books. I think this is the end of the line: I doubt there will ever be a successor to Blu-Ray as a physical format -- instead, its successor, if you could call it that, will be an algorithm like.mkv or.avi++ or some sort of fabulous content distribution infrastructure built off the cloud.
Manybooks.net (which for some reason isn't working at the time of this writing!)
There are quite a few others, but many of these sites share 90% of the same content anyhow. I've got a Kindle and greatly enjoy it, but like many of the other readers here, I balk at the ridiculous prices for ebooks (wow, a dollar off the electronic edition!!). There's a great backlog of classics out there that are freely available, so I'm not really wanting for leisure reading content. I guess I'll just have to wait for Going Rogue to go public domain!
Wow, I was complaining about this very thing to my friends as well. Clouds and lightning? Vehicles that burn rubber and leave marks on the grid? I was a bit disappointed that they didn't carry cyberspace physics further, rather than trying to match them to a real-world experience. In the cyberspace, you can break all the laws you want -- no gravity, no momentum... you could even play with time, though I don't think I'd recommend going down that path. The older Tron seemed to have a more pure vision of cyberspace, though perhaps that's just because their rendering computers lacked the processing power to show a Recognizer wobbling as it landed or to put pretty clouds in the sky.
Not just that, but Quorra did make it through -- does she have internal organs? Does her antivirus software recognize chicken pox? Somehow I can conceptualize the idea of a brain being translated into cyberspace more than I can understand how programs existing on a computer can be fully fleshed-out to exist in our world.
I think one reason the flashbacks didn't bother you as much is that the folks behind Tron, perhaps a bit apologetically, conceal the young Flynn more in the real life flashbacks than they did in cyberspace. It took them forever to reveal young Flynn at the beginning, as most of the shots were in shadow and from behind. When they did flash his face, it wasn't for long, and he was soon out the door.
I noticed his computerized plastic surgery in both forms, and it bugged me. I wish the uncanny valley effect were intentional, but I'm pretty sure that if they could have made a more realistic face, they would have done it.
I tried to use that same reasoning on myself, because CLU does look really weird (the mouth, especially). It certainly does add to his creepiness.
Your assertion might hold, but unfortunately they do show a few shots of the "young" Jeff Bridges in real life, and he's had the same CGI makeover as CLU in the computer system.:^( I think it would have been cool if, as the Legacy title suggests, he really is lacking the sophistication of higher programs, visual or otherwise. Bring back the MCP!
I tend to agree that it was the best so far, but I also think SGU had so much untapped potential that became entangled with the trappings of soap-opera caliber relationships and irritatingly pointless antics where they returned to Earth via the stones. I don't care about what's happening on Earth. I don't care that the HR lady's lesbian relationship is strained being 20 kabillion miles from her lover. I'm in this more for the science and the vast promise of the entire universe.
I did think a few things were quite well-done:
I greatly enjoyed the universe. Instead of landing in yet another deciduous midwestern forest like every stargate seemed to point to, the planets in SGU had radically different terrain. Ice planets, deserts, wastelands, jungles... very few of which had even signs of civilization. Space in SGU was much emptier, mysterious, perilous, and realistic.
Along with that, I enjoyed the music (not the crooning pop montage at the end of the episodes). It... really felt "spacey" to me.:)
I thought the aliens were very well-done in this series -- especially the little guys on the seed ship. They were truly alien and unknown, unlike the Wraith, who stomped about in their dingy scary ship wearing scary makeup and scary clothes and hissing scarily at the camera for the umpteenth scary time. The scariness of the wraith was so exaggerated that they simply became ludicrous caricatures of antagonists.
I'm not going to shed tears at its departure, because while it had potential, I got the feeling the writers would never really get around to harness it, being instead trapped with a middle school mentality amidst the intrigues of the crew. It's a shame, though, because they did get many things right.
I'm a bad beta tester. I only played the beta a couple of times -- my friends and I got a few keys at Comic-Con. Perhaps they've improved things in the past couple of months that have elapsed since I abandoned the game, but I have to concur that the chat system was terribly restrictive. At the time I played, I couldn't even say people's names, like "how are you today, Nancy?" The word "wife" was banned, so I had to refer to my friend's significant other as "girl friend" (a concatenated girlfriend was also too naughty). We couldn't even complain that "This chat sucks." We entertained ourselves briefly by speaking like cavemen, which really was about the only language you could speak. For a massively multiplayer online game, it felt like we were robbed of one of the primary features of a purportedly social game.
Perhaps it's gotten better, though. I know for a while, even question marks weren't legal.
Wow, I was pretty pleased with myself when I was going to mention the hapless residents who lived on Butt Hole Road, but you've definitely stolen any thunder I might have had.
In answer to your question, the problem they are trying to solve is the fact that most forum threads in the WoW deteriorate into petty insults and gainsaying before the end of the first page of posts. Or at least, that's the published reason for doing this.
I sympathize with Blizzard's desire to want to make the forums a more constructive and friendly environment, but I can certainly envision scenarios where players carry their RPG rage into real life. I also noted that a few women wrote in response to the new post, and they were disturbed that their gender might become an issue.
The new system also seems to allow people to rate posts, and I wish Blizzard had first taken this step of moderating before it went whole hog and published the poster's identity.
I worked at a video store when I was in high school, and every once and a while some customer would lose a copy of their new release. When we finally caught up to them, a month or two down the road, we would inform them that they owed us $90 for the actual video. Sometimes we'd be selling the same movies on our shelves for $35, since we had since bought more to sell to customers at a reasonable price point. The copy *they* lost was the $90 "new release" video, however. The logical arguments that ensued from this disparity were ugly, I tell you!
I actually really liked Tron 2.0. It had its issues, like the fact that you broke your neck if you fell more than 7 feet, an odd weapon balance, and some annoying Super Mario Bros. jumping sequences. However, the aesthetics were gorgeous, the gameplay was fun, and the character customization was interesting.
Beyond the environment, I'm sure many folks would argue it wasn't a spectacular game, but it didn't suck.:)
They do support native PDF, but the text doesn't scale as it does in some of the other formats. If you have a 10-page PDF file you want to look at, you are forced to view each page in its entirety on your teensy Kindle screen. I was really disappointed to discover this. You can get somewhat larger text by rotating the reader, but it feels awkward and I found it still too small for my taste.
.AMZ and Mobi files were designed to be viewed by readers. PDFs were designed to be viewed/printed page-by-page, so technically it's more difficult to shoehorn the format into a reader. Still, the Kindle implementation of PDFs seems rather lazy and even deceiving. I love my Kindle, but I roll my eyes whenever I see Kindle bragging about "native PDF support."
I haven't watched any of his commentary except for the last 30 seconds of part 6 of this video (it was pointed out in another blog), but he directly addresses the lightsaber battle on the molten planet, with a hilarious quote from Lucas at the end.
If you haven't watched that bit yet, check it out -- the irony behind Lucas' words is beyond farcical.
There are times when it's interesting to see the reaction of the populace, but I'm looking for insightful commentary, not trite catch phrases and indignant attempts at cleverness. To make things worse, most of the newscasts that use social media as part of their show will pose their question and pick two respondents as follows:
Do you agree with Proposition 782?
Obammunism392: No, it stinks!
QTinTexas_97: Yes, it's what America needs!
I appreciate that news outlets want to show all sides of the debate, but typically they display two polarized responses, which basically cancel out any sort of rational discourse. It seems to be there only so that you can agree with A/B and shout "Damn right!" at your TV.
I'm red-green colorblind, and for the most part, I don't have much of a problem distinguishing between the red and green. There are some times, however, where I have to think a bit harder to discern the two colors -- I'm not sure if it's the lights themselves or the ambient lighting (bright sunlight hitting the signal, cloudy weather, what have you), but from time to time the colors look awfully similar. In those situations I don't think about the alignment of the lights (i.e. if the top one is lit I should assume it's red) -- I either look "harder" or observe the other drivers. The alignment of the lights rarely play a part in my discernment of the signals.
I'd certainly appreciate green lights with more blue in them. I've noticed "bluish" green lights before, but I always figured it was just a given manufacturer that made the lights a bit more blue. In traffic intersections where mistakes can cost lives, I'd much rather rely on color than alignment. I know that if alignment were the only queue, I'd adapt, but there's something more primitive, direct and powerful about using color.
I felt that looked a bit constraining as well. It would be nice of them to provide two modes -- one where the applications are all aligned in the track as demonstrated in the video, and one where you unlock the interface to organize/clutter your applications as you see fit. I've performed plenty of tasks where I've stacked a window on top, or kept a calculator tucked down into a corner. If this kind of interface catches on, the creators would be wise to allow for user-designed add-ons that allow for the expansion of the base interface.
Well, that's a bit more tricky than you'd think -- they'd have to adjust the rate based upon the speed of the processor as well. It wouldn't be fair for a quad-core user to pay the same rate as a dual-core! Something's got to be done!
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Not to defend the Bay Transformer franchise, but unfortunately that detail is rather true to the series. When I watched the original series as a kid, I hated Spike and his family, because they were always stealing camera time away from... just about anybody more interesting. There were so many robots in the Transformers line, so many opportunities, but it had to open with Bumblebee rolling in to the garage and chumming with his human pals.
I've always found it a bit insulting, even as I grew up, that these kids' shows about non-human things (Smurfs, Transformers, etc.) have to have an "ambassador" to their world, in the form of a young human that the viewers can identify with. It's as if the producers believe that little kids would have absolutely no frame of reference and be completely unable to comprehend the themes surrounding a bunch of non-human yet highly anthropomorphized characters.
To make things worse, in G+ I see ways of muting individual posts and outright blocking a user (which does more than just mute their posts and in my opinion is more of a nuke you'd use on stalkers and during painful breakups.) Typically if a user on Facebook got too spammy I'd just hide their future posts and they could natter on all they like. A quick solution would be to remove them from your general stream, but there seems to be no way to do that without removing them completely from your circles. The only way to retain them in a circle yet filter out their posts is to make a "pariah" circle, drop that user in the circle and only that circle, and then individually browse all non-pariah streams by circle, which is a heck of a lot less convenient than the "hide" drop-down in Facebook. Blocking the user is a bit too harsh, as I may still want them to see my posts, but if they start playing games that update me on the welfare of their pet baby seal every hour or so, removing them from all my circles may be my only recourse!
I used it. It was fairly functional and effective for its day, but the problem was the Brazilians. When you tried to start up an interest group, even if you specified English as the language, it was more often than not overrun with posts in Portuguese, many of them stating not much more than "Hey, who else out there is Brazilian!?!!" I've got nothing against Brazilians -- it could just have easily been the Vietnamese or the Indians. I think no small number of English speakers felt alienated by an increasing number of semi- or fully-nude torsos trivializing their pages with banter they couldn't understand. A lot of these alienated users jumped ship early to a more comforting platform and didn't return. Perhaps the site has much better controls now -- maybe it's better than Facebook even, but every time I think about Orkut, those images of tan, funloving Brazilians clogging up my pages leer back at me.
I remember that much about him as well. However, in the movie, his expended power manifests itself in several different ways -- from awesome energy shockwaves to power pellets he can deploy to flicks of a finger loaded with kinetic energy. I expected more of the latter -- that is, punches and other strikes disproportionately loaded with energy. I'm not complaining, but I just didn't have a very good feel for his power's mechanics.
:) And I can totally see see him with muttonchops!
I thought that Kevin Bacon, while not really resembling Shaw very well, still made a captivating villain. I especially enjoyed his brief depiction as a Nazi scientist at the very beginning of the movie. The latest Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me has a small but enjoyable interview with him regarding, among other things, his role as Shaw.
I read a lot of old school X-Men comic books growing up, and while there were plenty of inconsistencies both when measured against the X-Men canon and even internally, I found that the overall excellent writing and clever use of mutant powers won me over. This movie was a lot more subtle than its predecessors, from the 60's touches to the stronger focus on the characters, and I appreciated that.
They made some weird choices for characters. I don't know if Darwin even has a precedent (probably not, given his character's treatment), but who was the guy who blew the tornadoes? Azazel was also an odd choice. He doesn't really belong in the Hellfire club, from what I can tell, though he does set up Nightcrawler fairly well.
Spoiler (and an example of internal inconsistency) -- what the devil happened to all of that energy Shaw sucked out of the submarine? I felt his powers were somewhat poorly defined to begin with, but when you suck a nuclear submarine's batteries dry, doesn't that energy go *somewhere*? I suppose it could be explained away in one way or another, but it would have made a lot more sense if there were an explosion or some other kind of awesome manifestation of the power he ate.
Ah, I wasn't decrying the end of physical media as we know it. I was referring to media married to a particular format and marketed as such. There may be a fantastic new 3-D storage sugarcube drive in the future, but I don't see movies being specifically released on this format. I don't think we'll see proclamations like "Now on DVD and Blu-Ray" after ads, because it will need to be "Now on DVD, Blu-Ray, Hulu, Netflix, Itunes, Verizon, XBox Live, etc."
I think your mention of Netflix is more of a reason why the uptake for Blu-Ray is so slow, and it's the same reason why Blockbuster has gone down in flames -- physical media just isn't as lucrative as it used to be. Before fast Internet speeds, DVDs had no real media competitor besides dwindling VHS players with their obvious disadvantages. Blu-Ray came out in the age of streaming media and portable storage small enough to fit on your keychain. I haven't bought anything on physical media for years now, with the exception of a few good books. I think this is the end of the line: I doubt there will ever be a successor to Blu-Ray as a physical format -- instead, its successor, if you could call it that, will be an algorithm like .mkv or .avi++ or some sort of fabulous content distribution infrastructure built off the cloud.
A couple of good places to get free ebooks are:
There are quite a few others, but many of these sites share 90% of the same content anyhow. I've got a Kindle and greatly enjoy it, but like many of the other readers here, I balk at the ridiculous prices for ebooks (wow, a dollar off the electronic edition!!). There's a great backlog of classics out there that are freely available, so I'm not really wanting for leisure reading content. I guess I'll just have to wait for Going Rogue to go public domain!
Wow, I was complaining about this very thing to my friends as well. Clouds and lightning? Vehicles that burn rubber and leave marks on the grid? I was a bit disappointed that they didn't carry cyberspace physics further, rather than trying to match them to a real-world experience. In the cyberspace, you can break all the laws you want -- no gravity, no momentum... you could even play with time, though I don't think I'd recommend going down that path. The older Tron seemed to have a more pure vision of cyberspace, though perhaps that's just because their rendering computers lacked the processing power to show a Recognizer wobbling as it landed or to put pretty clouds in the sky.
(spoiler)
Not just that, but Quorra did make it through -- does she have internal organs? Does her antivirus software recognize chicken pox? Somehow I can conceptualize the idea of a brain being translated into cyberspace more than I can understand how programs existing on a computer can be fully fleshed-out to exist in our world.
I think one reason the flashbacks didn't bother you as much is that the folks behind Tron, perhaps a bit apologetically, conceal the young Flynn more in the real life flashbacks than they did in cyberspace. It took them forever to reveal young Flynn at the beginning, as most of the shots were in shadow and from behind. When they did flash his face, it wasn't for long, and he was soon out the door.
I noticed his computerized plastic surgery in both forms, and it bugged me. I wish the uncanny valley effect were intentional, but I'm pretty sure that if they could have made a more realistic face, they would have done it.
I tried to use that same reasoning on myself, because CLU does look really weird (the mouth, especially). It certainly does add to his creepiness.
Your assertion might hold, but unfortunately they do show a few shots of the "young" Jeff Bridges in real life, and he's had the same CGI makeover as CLU in the computer system. :^( I think it would have been cool if, as the Legacy title suggests, he really is lacking the sophistication of higher programs, visual or otherwise. Bring back the MCP!
I tend to agree that it was the best so far, but I also think SGU had so much untapped potential that became entangled with the trappings of soap-opera caliber relationships and irritatingly pointless antics where they returned to Earth via the stones. I don't care about what's happening on Earth. I don't care that the HR lady's lesbian relationship is strained being 20 kabillion miles from her lover. I'm in this more for the science and the vast promise of the entire universe.
I did think a few things were quite well-done:
I'm not going to shed tears at its departure, because while it had potential, I got the feeling the writers would never really get around to harness it, being instead trapped with a middle school mentality amidst the intrigues of the crew. It's a shame, though, because they did get many things right.
I'm a bad beta tester. I only played the beta a couple of times -- my friends and I got a few keys at Comic-Con. Perhaps they've improved things in the past couple of months that have elapsed since I abandoned the game, but I have to concur that the chat system was terribly restrictive. At the time I played, I couldn't even say people's names, like "how are you today, Nancy?" The word "wife" was banned, so I had to refer to my friend's significant other as "girl friend" (a concatenated girlfriend was also too naughty). We couldn't even complain that "This chat sucks." We entertained ourselves briefly by speaking like cavemen, which really was about the only language you could speak. For a massively multiplayer online game, it felt like we were robbed of one of the primary features of a purportedly social game.
Perhaps it's gotten better, though. I know for a while, even question marks weren't legal.
Wow, I was pretty pleased with myself when I was going to mention the hapless residents who lived on Butt Hole Road, but you've definitely stolen any thunder I might have had.
In answer to your question, the problem they are trying to solve is the fact that most forum threads in the WoW deteriorate into petty insults and gainsaying before the end of the first page of posts. Or at least, that's the published reason for doing this.
I sympathize with Blizzard's desire to want to make the forums a more constructive and friendly environment, but I can certainly envision scenarios where players carry their RPG rage into real life. I also noted that a few women wrote in response to the new post, and they were disturbed that their gender might become an issue.
The new system also seems to allow people to rate posts, and I wish Blizzard had first taken this step of moderating before it went whole hog and published the poster's identity.
I worked at a video store when I was in high school, and every once and a while some customer would lose a copy of their new release. When we finally caught up to them, a month or two down the road, we would inform them that they owed us $90 for the actual video. Sometimes we'd be selling the same movies on our shelves for $35, since we had since bought more to sell to customers at a reasonable price point. The copy *they* lost was the $90 "new release" video, however. The logical arguments that ensued from this disparity were ugly, I tell you!
B-but, you'll never get to see The Wizard of Oz the way it was intended to be unless you watch it in its original Blu-Ray format!
I actually really liked Tron 2.0. It had its issues, like the fact that you broke your neck if you fell more than 7 feet, an odd weapon balance, and some annoying Super Mario Bros. jumping sequences. However, the aesthetics were gorgeous, the gameplay was fun, and the character customization was interesting.
:)
Beyond the environment, I'm sure many folks would argue it wasn't a spectacular game, but it didn't suck.
They do support native PDF, but the text doesn't scale as it does in some of the other formats. If you have a 10-page PDF file you want to look at, you are forced to view each page in its entirety on your teensy Kindle screen. I was really disappointed to discover this. You can get somewhat larger text by rotating the reader, but it feels awkward and I found it still too small for my taste.
I haven't watched any of his commentary except for the last 30 seconds of part 6 of this video (it was pointed out in another blog), but he directly addresses the lightsaber battle on the molten planet, with a hilarious quote from Lucas at the end.
If you haven't watched that bit yet, check it out -- the irony behind Lucas' words is beyond farcical.
There are times when it's interesting to see the reaction of the populace, but I'm looking for insightful commentary, not trite catch phrases and indignant attempts at cleverness. To make things worse, most of the newscasts that use social media as part of their show will pose their question and pick two respondents as follows:
Do you agree with Proposition 782?
I appreciate that news outlets want to show all sides of the debate, but typically they display two polarized responses, which basically cancel out any sort of rational discourse. It seems to be there only so that you can agree with A/B and shout "Damn right!" at your TV.
I'm red-green colorblind, and for the most part, I don't have much of a problem distinguishing between the red and green. There are some times, however, where I have to think a bit harder to discern the two colors -- I'm not sure if it's the lights themselves or the ambient lighting (bright sunlight hitting the signal, cloudy weather, what have you), but from time to time the colors look awfully similar. In those situations I don't think about the alignment of the lights (i.e. if the top one is lit I should assume it's red) -- I either look "harder" or observe the other drivers. The alignment of the lights rarely play a part in my discernment of the signals.
I'd certainly appreciate green lights with more blue in them. I've noticed "bluish" green lights before, but I always figured it was just a given manufacturer that made the lights a bit more blue. In traffic intersections where mistakes can cost lives, I'd much rather rely on color than alignment. I know that if alignment were the only queue, I'd adapt, but there's something more primitive, direct and powerful about using color.
I felt that looked a bit constraining as well. It would be nice of them to provide two modes -- one where the applications are all aligned in the track as demonstrated in the video, and one where you unlock the interface to organize/clutter your applications as you see fit. I've performed plenty of tasks where I've stacked a window on top, or kept a calculator tucked down into a corner. If this kind of interface catches on, the creators would be wise to allow for user-designed add-ons that allow for the expansion of the base interface.
Well, that's a bit more tricky than you'd think -- they'd have to adjust the rate based upon the speed of the processor as well. It wouldn't be fair for a quad-core user to pay the same rate as a dual-core! Something's got to be done!