The way it worked in FFXI when I played was that pressing Ctrl-R just prepopulated the chat field with "/tell (Name)". Pressing Ctrl-R again cycled through the people who had either sent tells to/received tells from you. So while it was possible to send a tell to the wrong person, it was usually fairly easy to check to make sure that name was right before typing the message.
Ctrl-R works the same way in FFXIV, except that due to the bugs, exactly who it defaults to is kind of screwy. I'm fairly sure it's just "people you've sent tells to" but I'm not 100% sure.
Again, this was something that worked in FFXI, I have no idea how they screwed it up for FFXIV.
I am in-game playing right now, and my sent is 29 ms while my receive is around 90 ms on average while fighting monsters.
Since I've played the game, I can tell you the figures you're quoting are not ping times. They're the amount of data being sent in "who knows per whatever." It's fairly obvious that those can't be ping times - my ping from Massachusetts to my website that's hosted in California is 100ms, which is actually a pretty good ping time for coast-to-coast. Throw in an ocean, and the lowest you can expect is around 200ms.
Your claim that nobody wants to play with folks outside their region makes you sound like a racist
Actually the claim is based on the fact that A) no one wants to play with people who don't speak their language (and the autotranslator is nearly useless) and B) even ignoring that, people in different regions play at different times. So for the most part, there is no mix of players between regions because people play at different times.
A better but more convoluted way to put it would be "players would rather have good ping times than international servers." But the bottom line is that almost no one cares about being able to play with people from other regions - it's not a useful feature.
Not without retyping the entire name. The silly thing is that the feature is already there - Control-R brings up a tell to what I think is the last person you sent a tell to. (It might be even buggier than that, I just know that it does work after you've started a conversation.)
Note that they haven't taken this to next logical step and allowed you to click on people's names in chat to pull up character info/send tells to.
And as a reminder for anyone who hasn't played, characters have both a first and last name in FFXIV, so you're typing a fairly long name to respond to a tell.
The really dumb thing is that Final Fantasy XI had this since at least the US launch, so it's not like it's a new idea to the developers. How they managed to miss fixing it before beta is, well... another on a long list of reasons they shouldn't have released.
Have you not read the thread? Placing the servers in Japan means the game just makes an already slow paced game even slower. That's the issue, the game already requires tons of roundtrips from the server to do anything, meaning that every millisecond of lag really adds up while you're playing.
Yes, lag is a real issue, and one that they should solve. No one wants to play with players outside their region anyway, making the whole international thing useless.
Just Cause 2 was published by them, it was made by Avalanche Studios and Eidos (according to the Wikipedia).
Square Enix has this weird publisher/developer mix thing going for them. I think they realize that as a developer they're sinking, so they're moving into publishing instead.
Because they stubbornly refused to fix it in FFXI, and have stated that they consider it to be a selling point.
This isn't their first MMO, all we need to do is look at their previous one and extrapolate. Which means that the UI will never be fixed, and we'll never get local servers.
Both - it now defaults to the "display" resolution and the "world" resolution (I forget what they call it) being the same thing. And you can set the "world" resolution to be any standard resolution.
But it still does that weird "scale up" thing if you tell it to.
FFXIV isn't being released on the Xbox 360. It's a PS3/PC "exclusive."
So, yeah - given how horrible the Windows version is, that might explain why there's no Xbox 360 version. They simply have no one who knows how to write code for the Xbox 360 or Windows.
Everything in the UI requires a round trip from the server. You equip and item, the UI locks up until the server says "OK." You equip a skill, the UI locks up until the server says "OK." You talk to an NPC, the UI locks up until the server agrees that you're done talking with them.
Visiting a shop? UI locks up until the server tells you what the vendor is selling.
All of this is just bad design, but throw in the fact that the servers are halfway across the world and what's presumably an unnoticeable delay to the developers becomes a giant issue to the players.
But this is an issue that will never be fixed, because Square Enix considers "international servers" to be a feature - never mind the fact that no one wants that feature.
If it's not a bug, then Square Enix is hopeless. It's that simple.
If Square Enix doesn't think that Alt-Tab crashing the game is a critical bug that must be fixed by the next release, then, well, there's no hope for them, because they'll never get to the other glaring "this is a PC and not a console" issues.
Plus, here's a challenge: explain how crashing on Alt-Tab prevents cheating. The simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't, and even if it did, people were able to release programs that windowed FFXI, thereby making the whole "Alt-Tab" issue moot.
The real reason Alt-Tab crashes the game is because the PC engine is amateur hour. Handling Alt-Tab in Direct3D is annoying, because it basically means that you have to reload everything into the GPU. The easy solution is to say "screw that" and just crash. It's fairly obvious which route Square Enix went.
If Square Enix wanted to fix the game engine, they should just throw the entire thing out and license Unreal or another game engine. Their current engine is hopeless. But it's the whole "not invented here" thing taking over, so we'll never see a capable PC game from them.
I was hoping that their experience in FFXI would have taught them some lessons on how to make a PC game, but it's obvious that it hasn't even taught them lessons on how to run an MMO.
I'd love to see them make a competent Final Fantasy-based MMO, but their current offerings show that they're incapable of doing so. It's kind of sad - Final Fantasy XI showed that there is potential in a Final Fantasy MMO, but it along with Final Fantasy XIV have proven that Square Enix will never be able to realize that potential.
They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly.
The funny thing is that, yes you can. It's bugged as hell. Control-R currently pulls up a tell to the last person you sent a tell to, not who sent a tell to you. So basically, they're listing a bug fix as a feature.
(While they're at it they should make message size limits something slightly larger then a twitter message.)
The going theory is that the limit was designed for Japanese text. Because it's fairly clear that Square Enix never has and never will listen to feedback from outside of Japan. (Even this is them responding to complaints from Japan.)
(target, pick a spell, then... target again? For real? Who thought this up?)
You can skip the first "target" step, technically, although you wouldn't want to. It also makes sense when you learn that when targeting the second time, you have the option to toggle AOE on or off, so it's more of a "confirm your attack" thing. I forget the keyboard shortcut to do it, but you can click on the button.
They explain the AOE system in the... no, wait, who am I kidding, of course they didn't! I found it by trial and error.
Yeah, and that patch is basically full of bug fixes and things that should never have missed beta. Like being able to sort your inventory or reply to tells.
Also note that "late November" is just long enough for the extended free trial to have run out.
You're kidding about the missing AH not being an issue, right? The entire crafting system in the game is set up to have higher level crafters creating materials for lower level crafters to use, along with crafts requiring materials from different crafting classes to create things. With no auction house, and a completely nonfunctional marketplace system that they have no intention of fixing, this makes crafting basically impossible.
Throw in the fact that basically all new gear comes from crafting, and you've got an incredibly broken system: crafters can't get the materials they need, noncrafters can't buy the gear that they want from crafters. An AH is essential to the game they set up, I have no idea why they decided to leave it out.
What I wanted from FFXIV was an updated FFXI for modern systems. I was hoping for a version of FFXI that learned the lessons that WoW taught the industry.
What we got was a game that didn't even learn the lessons Square Enix learned from FFXI. Most of the "new features" being added are things that FFXI already did.
Why they released the game this early I have no idea, but my best guess is that they simply don't care about PC users. This is a PS3 game first and foremost, and their "real" audience is Japanese PS3 owners. So they have a paid beta to get the system ready for the March PS3 release.
That being said, even if you're using a PS3-style controller to play the game, the UI is still incredibly clunky and unusable. So, uh, yeah.
Is it possible to reshape the game into something good? I have no clue, honestly: the game has a few good ideas hidden in it. The guildleve system would be a good idea if the concept were to limit the amount of gil generated over time. The problem is that there's nothing else to do other than grind guildleve quests - they needed to combine it with other content.
Likewise the crafting system could be good, if it were backed with a functioning auction house. But it isn't and there is no plan to add one.
So we're left with a game where even the good ideas become bad ideas. And while it's nice to hear that they'll address some of the UI issues, they seem to have completely ignored the elephant in the room: there's nothing to do in the game even if the interface were to be fixed.
There are degrees to backstory, though. When playing World of Warcraft, at some point, I stopped reading the majority of quest stories because it basically all came down to one thing:
"Hi, I'm a random NPC whose story is completely self contained and unchanging. I need you to kill these monsters and collect the things they drop for an arbitrary and meaningless reason. Once you've succeeded, the only change you'll see is that I will no longer have an exclamation point over my head."
Me: Whatever. Kill things!
I'm told the end game content had a more coherent story, but after a while, I just stopped caring about every little meaningless detail when essentially the entire quest's story is a lame excuse to kill things.
Can you do Skype video chat with the Move's camera?
Because that could be a killer app over the Wii right there. Get a Blu-Ray player, game console, and a way to video chat with the grandparents, all in one package!
Right now, though, it looks like you're stuck with video chat to other PSN users, which makes that feature entirely useless. Which is strange, because the PSP comes with a Skype client, so it's not like it would be something entirely new to them.
And, hey, this isn't a new idea at all, tons of people would like to see it, but Sony has already answered that question: "Fuck you." Thanks, Sony.
Go ahead. Explain to someone that in order to watch a video full screen they will need to either:
1. Context-click the video and choose the "Full Screen" option, assuming there is one. This only works when using the browser's built-in video controls, I think.
2. Click on the "expand" button to expand the video to take up the entire tab, and then use your browser's Full Screen feature, which is probably F11 except when it's something else. Or if you're using Safari, you're screwed.
Users want a nice little Full Screen button they can click on and be done with. Even if there's a work around, they're not going to be happy.
Besides, it's yet another reason to just stick with Flash: it provides this support already. So why use something else, especially when you need to encode twice to support all browsers?
Ultimately, it's a useless restriction. Sure, make it a white-list only feature, but why the hell forbid it entirely?
Hopefully something like FlashBlock will be possible. It should be easy for canvas and video because if they're not part of the DOM, there's nothing to display.
Audio, sadly, appears to have a JavaScript object-only model, making it harder to create a FlashBlock like extension.
But, of course, you shouldn't need an extension!
You can block image loading in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome via preferences/options. But not video loading. Unless blocking images also blocks videos, which would make sense, but you can't just block video via the UI. At least, I haven't found something to block just video in any of those browsers.
Opera at least allows you to disable sound, but I again didn't find anything for disabling videos.
Which is annoying - open video standards on the web is a good thing, but easily abuseable. Sadly the only thing in the spec which is forbidden is allowing a web app to full screen a video. Nothing about providing UI to disable videos entirely.
It kind of makes you wonder why they didn't think to add "disable videos" when "disable images" has been there from the beginning.
That's not possible in the current spec. The browser has no idea that a canvas is even being used for animation, let alone when an animation has completed. Well, OK, a simple heuristic of "if this canvas is being repeatedly updated, it's an animation" is possible. But the problem is you still don't know when an animation has looped once.
The best thing that can be done is to refuse to update a canvas after it's been updated once.
So then people start removing and replacing the canvas element... Or use video instead... Or start using the audio APIs...
Really, a lot of the new APIs are really cool from a web developer "whiz-bang" point of view, but the HTML5 spec authors don't seem to give a damn about actually providing control to the user. Rather it's the whole "it's MY content, you MUST view it MY WAY!!!" stance yet again.
On the other hand, there's the thing where you can't full screen video in HTML5 because evil web page authors might some how trick people into typing their password into a video. Yet you can full screen Flash - they seem to have come up with a solution (the "press ESC to exit full screen" banner) so it's not like there's absolutely no way to protect users.
So who knows what the HTML5 developers are thinking, because the inability to full screen HTML5 video makes it a complete non-starter versus Flash video. Especially if you want to share HD video.
Yeah, I know, after submitting I realized I wrote that poorly and that it reads like I thought this happened in the US. (I swear, there's something different about Preview that makes you miss minor things like that.)
I considered immediately replying to try and correct that, but I thought most people would be able to figure out that I didn't mean that; the point is that a US citizen calling the President a prick would be a complete non-event (see Fox News). Anyone should be allowed to call US politicians names, regardless of country, and without being banned from entering.
I still find it hard to believe that this kid said anything worth a ban, no matter what was in the email. Sure, I'll believe the email contained death threats, but I find it hard to believe that this kid is in any way a credible threat to the President.
Bullshit. This is the United States of America, one of the core principles is that you should be allowed to call your elected representatives pricks. Especially when they are, like this administration is proving to be. It takes quite a bit to be even more secretive than the Bush administration, but damn it, they're succeeding.
There had better be more to this story, because simply calling the president a prick is just - well, boring. Hell, it's downright kind compared to other things he's been called by the press in the US. About the only thing I could see that would warrant a ban from the US over an email is making death threats against the President with a clear intention of carrying them out. And I'd bet that if we were able to get details from the FBI, we'd find that the former is in fact true. But without the latter, it should be treated as just "boys will be boys" - people say stupid things all the time, especially when teenagers, and especially when drunk.
If it's not an actual imminent threat, it should just be ignored.
I'm not a Mac guy (he says, typing on a MacBook). Well, not really. Yeah, you're right, it's a PowerMac or whatever. I know it's a PowerPC G5, and that it's from whatever the Pro line was called before it was a MacPro since it's the same huge honking case. (It's a second-hand work computer, and was at hand at the time.)
I still experience the same CPU usage increase on Intel chips even when displaying a non-animated Flash app, it's just not as drastic. (From about 20% to 35% - but this is under Firefox 4 Beta 5, which hates Flash under Mac OS X. It keeps on declaring it "crashed.")
One other correction from my previous post - I had written "tab open" when I really meant "tab visible." Right now I still have the Lexulous tab open, and Firefox's CPU usage is down to what it would be without the tab open. Whenever Flash is visible, the CPU usage shoots up. I assume it has something to do with the rendering engine animating non-animated things. I dunno. I just know that it happens and is easily reproducible. Then again, I still am not sure why Firefox burns CPU time doing nothing either, but it does, so it's not limited to Flash.
Apparently. Firefox CPU utilization without Lexulous (a non-animated Flash-based Facebook game - shut up, my Mom likes to play it with us) is about 8%-10%. (This is with Twitter and Facebook open which presumably are doing AJAX polling in the background.)
Throw open Lexulous, and I discover that I'm losing again (bah), and the CPU usage shoots up to 90% as long as that tab is open. With a Flash app that is literally sitting there doing nothing. No animation, no AJAX polling, just showing a Scrabble board.
So, joke or not, yes, it would appear that somewhere Flash has found the equivalent of suck_battery_life() and has a rather liberal usage policy for it.
Disclaimer: the computer I'm trying this on is an old Mac Pro G5, so I'd hope modern computers wouldn't be quite as bad, but still, that's pretty horrible.
I'm pretty sure this is coincidental. I'm fairly sure that Apple still wants Adobe to, well, fuck off, but that they hit too many apps as collateral damage with their policies that were designed to prevent Flash-based apps from being ported to the iPhone.
So they've relaxed the rules a bit, which happens to allow auto-ported Flash apps. But Flash still isn't supported in Mobile Safari and there's no sign that this will change.
Plus, this means that they've reopened the door for auto-ported apps from Android, so maybe this is a shot at Android, but not in the way you think.
Bottom line is that the flood gates are still firmly closed, they've just opened a sluice gate which allows some Flash to trickle through.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked, that just updated the JRE - the only way to update the JDK was to pull a complete new copy.
Nope, sorry, Xenoveritas on Phoenix. (And Sabe Xenoveritas on Besaid, if I ever decide to start playing again.)
"Xeno" is a ridiculously common name, but I wasn't very creative when I chose it.
The way it worked in FFXI when I played was that pressing Ctrl-R just prepopulated the chat field with "/tell (Name)". Pressing Ctrl-R again cycled through the people who had either sent tells to/received tells from you. So while it was possible to send a tell to the wrong person, it was usually fairly easy to check to make sure that name was right before typing the message.
Ctrl-R works the same way in FFXIV, except that due to the bugs, exactly who it defaults to is kind of screwy. I'm fairly sure it's just "people you've sent tells to" but I'm not 100% sure.
Again, this was something that worked in FFXI, I have no idea how they screwed it up for FFXIV.
I am in-game playing right now, and my sent is 29 ms while my receive is around 90 ms on average while fighting monsters.
Since I've played the game, I can tell you the figures you're quoting are not ping times. They're the amount of data being sent in "who knows per whatever." It's fairly obvious that those can't be ping times - my ping from Massachusetts to my website that's hosted in California is 100ms, which is actually a pretty good ping time for coast-to-coast. Throw in an ocean, and the lowest you can expect is around 200ms.
Your claim that nobody wants to play with folks outside their region makes you sound like a racist
Actually the claim is based on the fact that A) no one wants to play with people who don't speak their language (and the autotranslator is nearly useless) and B) even ignoring that, people in different regions play at different times. So for the most part, there is no mix of players between regions because people play at different times.
A better but more convoluted way to put it would be "players would rather have good ping times than international servers." But the bottom line is that almost no one cares about being able to play with people from other regions - it's not a useful feature.
Not without retyping the entire name. The silly thing is that the feature is already there - Control-R brings up a tell to what I think is the last person you sent a tell to. (It might be even buggier than that, I just know that it does work after you've started a conversation.)
Note that they haven't taken this to next logical step and allowed you to click on people's names in chat to pull up character info/send tells to.
And as a reminder for anyone who hasn't played, characters have both a first and last name in FFXIV, so you're typing a fairly long name to respond to a tell.
The really dumb thing is that Final Fantasy XI had this since at least the US launch, so it's not like it's a new idea to the developers. How they managed to miss fixing it before beta is, well... another on a long list of reasons they shouldn't have released.
Have you not read the thread? Placing the servers in Japan means the game just makes an already slow paced game even slower. That's the issue, the game already requires tons of roundtrips from the server to do anything, meaning that every millisecond of lag really adds up while you're playing.
Yes, lag is a real issue, and one that they should solve. No one wants to play with players outside their region anyway, making the whole international thing useless.
Just Cause 2 was published by them, it was made by Avalanche Studios and Eidos (according to the Wikipedia).
Square Enix has this weird publisher/developer mix thing going for them. I think they realize that as a developer they're sinking, so they're moving into publishing instead.
Because they stubbornly refused to fix it in FFXI, and have stated that they consider it to be a selling point.
This isn't their first MMO, all we need to do is look at their previous one and extrapolate. Which means that the UI will never be fixed, and we'll never get local servers.
Both - it now defaults to the "display" resolution and the "world" resolution (I forget what they call it) being the same thing. And you can set the "world" resolution to be any standard resolution.
But it still does that weird "scale up" thing if you tell it to.
FFXIV isn't being released on the Xbox 360. It's a PS3/PC "exclusive."
So, yeah - given how horrible the Windows version is, that might explain why there's no Xbox 360 version. They simply have no one who knows how to write code for the Xbox 360 or Windows.
Everything in the UI requires a round trip from the server. You equip and item, the UI locks up until the server says "OK." You equip a skill, the UI locks up until the server says "OK." You talk to an NPC, the UI locks up until the server agrees that you're done talking with them.
Visiting a shop? UI locks up until the server tells you what the vendor is selling.
All of this is just bad design, but throw in the fact that the servers are halfway across the world and what's presumably an unnoticeable delay to the developers becomes a giant issue to the players.
But this is an issue that will never be fixed, because Square Enix considers "international servers" to be a feature - never mind the fact that no one wants that feature.
If it's not a bug, then Square Enix is hopeless. It's that simple.
If Square Enix doesn't think that Alt-Tab crashing the game is a critical bug that must be fixed by the next release, then, well, there's no hope for them, because they'll never get to the other glaring "this is a PC and not a console" issues.
Plus, here's a challenge: explain how crashing on Alt-Tab prevents cheating. The simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't, and even if it did, people were able to release programs that windowed FFXI, thereby making the whole "Alt-Tab" issue moot.
The real reason Alt-Tab crashes the game is because the PC engine is amateur hour. Handling Alt-Tab in Direct3D is annoying, because it basically means that you have to reload everything into the GPU. The easy solution is to say "screw that" and just crash. It's fairly obvious which route Square Enix went.
If Square Enix wanted to fix the game engine, they should just throw the entire thing out and license Unreal or another game engine. Their current engine is hopeless. But it's the whole "not invented here" thing taking over, so we'll never see a capable PC game from them.
I was hoping that their experience in FFXI would have taught them some lessons on how to make a PC game, but it's obvious that it hasn't even taught them lessons on how to run an MMO.
I'd love to see them make a competent Final Fantasy-based MMO, but their current offerings show that they're incapable of doing so. It's kind of sad - Final Fantasy XI showed that there is potential in a Final Fantasy MMO, but it along with Final Fantasy XIV have proven that Square Enix will never be able to realize that potential.
They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly.
The funny thing is that, yes you can. It's bugged as hell. Control-R currently pulls up a tell to the last person you sent a tell to, not who sent a tell to you. So basically, they're listing a bug fix as a feature.
(While they're at it they should make message size limits something slightly larger then a twitter message.)
The going theory is that the limit was designed for Japanese text. Because it's fairly clear that Square Enix never has and never will listen to feedback from outside of Japan. (Even this is them responding to complaints from Japan.)
(target, pick a spell, then... target again? For real? Who thought this up?)
You can skip the first "target" step, technically, although you wouldn't want to. It also makes sense when you learn that when targeting the second time, you have the option to toggle AOE on or off, so it's more of a "confirm your attack" thing. I forget the keyboard shortcut to do it, but you can click on the button.
They explain the AOE system in the ... no, wait, who am I kidding, of course they didn't! I found it by trial and error.
Yeah, and that patch is basically full of bug fixes and things that should never have missed beta. Like being able to sort your inventory or reply to tells.
Also note that "late November" is just long enough for the extended free trial to have run out.
You're kidding about the missing AH not being an issue, right? The entire crafting system in the game is set up to have higher level crafters creating materials for lower level crafters to use, along with crafts requiring materials from different crafting classes to create things. With no auction house, and a completely nonfunctional marketplace system that they have no intention of fixing, this makes crafting basically impossible.
Throw in the fact that basically all new gear comes from crafting, and you've got an incredibly broken system: crafters can't get the materials they need, noncrafters can't buy the gear that they want from crafters. An AH is essential to the game they set up, I have no idea why they decided to leave it out.
What I wanted from FFXIV was an updated FFXI for modern systems. I was hoping for a version of FFXI that learned the lessons that WoW taught the industry.
What we got was a game that didn't even learn the lessons Square Enix learned from FFXI. Most of the "new features" being added are things that FFXI already did.
Why they released the game this early I have no idea, but my best guess is that they simply don't care about PC users. This is a PS3 game first and foremost, and their "real" audience is Japanese PS3 owners. So they have a paid beta to get the system ready for the March PS3 release.
That being said, even if you're using a PS3-style controller to play the game, the UI is still incredibly clunky and unusable. So, uh, yeah.
Is it possible to reshape the game into something good? I have no clue, honestly: the game has a few good ideas hidden in it. The guildleve system would be a good idea if the concept were to limit the amount of gil generated over time. The problem is that there's nothing else to do other than grind guildleve quests - they needed to combine it with other content.
Likewise the crafting system could be good, if it were backed with a functioning auction house. But it isn't and there is no plan to add one.
So we're left with a game where even the good ideas become bad ideas. And while it's nice to hear that they'll address some of the UI issues, they seem to have completely ignored the elephant in the room: there's nothing to do in the game even if the interface were to be fixed.
There are degrees to backstory, though. When playing World of Warcraft, at some point, I stopped reading the majority of quest stories because it basically all came down to one thing:
"Hi, I'm a random NPC whose story is completely self contained and unchanging. I need you to kill these monsters and collect the things they drop for an arbitrary and meaningless reason. Once you've succeeded, the only change you'll see is that I will no longer have an exclamation point over my head."
Me: Whatever. Kill things!
I'm told the end game content had a more coherent story, but after a while, I just stopped caring about every little meaningless detail when essentially the entire quest's story is a lame excuse to kill things.
Can you do Skype video chat with the Move's camera?
Because that could be a killer app over the Wii right there. Get a Blu-Ray player, game console, and a way to video chat with the grandparents, all in one package!
Right now, though, it looks like you're stuck with video chat to other PSN users, which makes that feature entirely useless. Which is strange, because the PSP comes with a Skype client, so it's not like it would be something entirely new to them.
And, hey, this isn't a new idea at all, tons of people would like to see it, but Sony has already answered that question: "Fuck you." Thanks, Sony.
You've never dealt with actual users, have you?
Go ahead. Explain to someone that in order to watch a video full screen they will need to either:
1. Context-click the video and choose the "Full Screen" option, assuming there is one. This only works when using the browser's built-in video controls, I think.
2. Click on the "expand" button to expand the video to take up the entire tab, and then use your browser's Full Screen feature, which is probably F11 except when it's something else. Or if you're using Safari, you're screwed.
Users want a nice little Full Screen button they can click on and be done with. Even if there's a work around, they're not going to be happy.
Besides, it's yet another reason to just stick with Flash: it provides this support already. So why use something else, especially when you need to encode twice to support all browsers?
Ultimately, it's a useless restriction. Sure, make it a white-list only feature, but why the hell forbid it entirely?
Hopefully something like FlashBlock will be possible. It should be easy for canvas and video because if they're not part of the DOM, there's nothing to display.
Audio, sadly, appears to have a JavaScript object-only model, making it harder to create a FlashBlock like extension.
But, of course, you shouldn't need an extension!
You can block image loading in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome via preferences/options. But not video loading. Unless blocking images also blocks videos, which would make sense, but you can't just block video via the UI. At least, I haven't found something to block just video in any of those browsers.
Opera at least allows you to disable sound, but I again didn't find anything for disabling videos.
Which is annoying - open video standards on the web is a good thing, but easily abuseable. Sadly the only thing in the spec which is forbidden is allowing a web app to full screen a video. Nothing about providing UI to disable videos entirely.
It kind of makes you wonder why they didn't think to add "disable videos" when "disable images" has been there from the beginning.
That's not possible in the current spec. The browser has no idea that a canvas is even being used for animation, let alone when an animation has completed. Well, OK, a simple heuristic of "if this canvas is being repeatedly updated, it's an animation" is possible. But the problem is you still don't know when an animation has looped once.
The best thing that can be done is to refuse to update a canvas after it's been updated once.
So then people start removing and replacing the canvas element... Or use video instead... Or start using the audio APIs...
Really, a lot of the new APIs are really cool from a web developer "whiz-bang" point of view, but the HTML5 spec authors don't seem to give a damn about actually providing control to the user. Rather it's the whole "it's MY content, you MUST view it MY WAY!!! " stance yet again.
On the other hand, there's the thing where you can't full screen video in HTML5 because evil web page authors might some how trick people into typing their password into a video. Yet you can full screen Flash - they seem to have come up with a solution (the "press ESC to exit full screen" banner) so it's not like there's absolutely no way to protect users.
So who knows what the HTML5 developers are thinking, because the inability to full screen HTML5 video makes it a complete non-starter versus Flash video. Especially if you want to share HD video.
Yeah, I know, after submitting I realized I wrote that poorly and that it reads like I thought this happened in the US. (I swear, there's something different about Preview that makes you miss minor things like that.)
I considered immediately replying to try and correct that, but I thought most people would be able to figure out that I didn't mean that; the point is that a US citizen calling the President a prick would be a complete non-event (see Fox News). Anyone should be allowed to call US politicians names, regardless of country, and without being banned from entering.
I still find it hard to believe that this kid said anything worth a ban, no matter what was in the email. Sure, I'll believe the email contained death threats, but I find it hard to believe that this kid is in any way a credible threat to the President.
Bullshit. This is the United States of America, one of the core principles is that you should be allowed to call your elected representatives pricks. Especially when they are, like this administration is proving to be. It takes quite a bit to be even more secretive than the Bush administration, but damn it, they're succeeding.
There had better be more to this story, because simply calling the president a prick is just - well, boring. Hell, it's downright kind compared to other things he's been called by the press in the US. About the only thing I could see that would warrant a ban from the US over an email is making death threats against the President with a clear intention of carrying them out. And I'd bet that if we were able to get details from the FBI, we'd find that the former is in fact true. But without the latter, it should be treated as just "boys will be boys" - people say stupid things all the time, especially when teenagers, and especially when drunk.
If it's not an actual imminent threat, it should just be ignored.
There is no such thing as a Mac Pro G5.
I'm not a Mac guy (he says, typing on a MacBook). Well, not really. Yeah, you're right, it's a PowerMac or whatever. I know it's a PowerPC G5, and that it's from whatever the Pro line was called before it was a MacPro since it's the same huge honking case. (It's a second-hand work computer, and was at hand at the time.)
I still experience the same CPU usage increase on Intel chips even when displaying a non-animated Flash app, it's just not as drastic. (From about 20% to 35% - but this is under Firefox 4 Beta 5, which hates Flash under Mac OS X. It keeps on declaring it "crashed.")
One other correction from my previous post - I had written "tab open" when I really meant "tab visible." Right now I still have the Lexulous tab open, and Firefox's CPU usage is down to what it would be without the tab open. Whenever Flash is visible, the CPU usage shoots up. I assume it has something to do with the rendering engine animating non-animated things. I dunno. I just know that it happens and is easily reproducible. Then again, I still am not sure why Firefox burns CPU time doing nothing either, but it does, so it's not limited to Flash.
Apparently. Firefox CPU utilization without Lexulous (a non-animated Flash-based Facebook game - shut up, my Mom likes to play it with us) is about 8%-10%. (This is with Twitter and Facebook open which presumably are doing AJAX polling in the background.)
Throw open Lexulous, and I discover that I'm losing again (bah), and the CPU usage shoots up to 90% as long as that tab is open. With a Flash app that is literally sitting there doing nothing. No animation, no AJAX polling, just showing a Scrabble board.
So, joke or not, yes, it would appear that somewhere Flash has found the equivalent of suck_battery_life() and has a rather liberal usage policy for it.
Disclaimer: the computer I'm trying this on is an old Mac Pro G5, so I'd hope modern computers wouldn't be quite as bad, but still, that's pretty horrible.
I'm pretty sure this is coincidental. I'm fairly sure that Apple still wants Adobe to, well, fuck off, but that they hit too many apps as collateral damage with their policies that were designed to prevent Flash-based apps from being ported to the iPhone.
So they've relaxed the rules a bit, which happens to allow auto-ported Flash apps. But Flash still isn't supported in Mobile Safari and there's no sign that this will change.
Plus, this means that they've reopened the door for auto-ported apps from Android, so maybe this is a shot at Android, but not in the way you think.
Bottom line is that the flood gates are still firmly closed, they've just opened a sluice gate which allows some Flash to trickle through.