Of course, that's what I said about the 'Gameboy DS' - and I was completely wrong about that.
And yet my favorite games on NintendoDS are still Castlevania, MarioKart, Mario64 and NewSuperMarioBros, all of which make little to no use of the touchscreen (a little menu and map, nothing that couldn't be done on a normal non-touchscreen handheld).
I hope for the best with the Wii, but from what I have seen so far I have still quite a bit of doubt if the Wiimote will actually work as a generic game input device, for some it might be great (first person stuff), for other probally not so much (third person stuff). Will be interesting to see if Wiimote actually works out or if developers go back to the classic controller, which SmashBrothers will do as far as I heard.
if with the wave of your hand the screw driver would leap up an remove that pesky screw on its own, wouldn't you want to do that?
How do I tell if the screw needs tightening at all? How does the computer figure out if I want it to go in or out? How does the computer tell me how tight it is? How to I pick a screw? If I just pick that screwdriver and start working all that information is easily available. Of course an automatic screwdriver might work better then a manual one and even with mouse and keyboard at hand there might be siutaions where voice commando or gesture would help. Voice and gesture however have their limits, so they simply don't work for all situtations. Just look at StarTrek, even with all that hightech around, they still have consoles that are operated via hand input;)
I don't like working that way personally, and I suspect the reason we've moved away from that model is because most people don't. Remember the early Windows versions?
I think the throuble with tiling is that it simply doesn't work that well as a generic concept, there are simply to much applications around that are just to small to make sense in a tiled workspace, ie. a small calculator should overlap, not tile, since else he can't be seen in full and wastes a lot of screenspace. However in Blender or Emacs tiling works great, much better then MDI solution which present windows in a window, this is probally because Blender and Emacs deal with one kind of data only and don't have to work with hundreds of different applications which made have wastly variing requirements.
However, while tiling has a fair share of problems, our way to manage windows is also far from optimal, there is a lot of time wasted with moving windows around and aranging the screen in such a way that it is actually usable Apples Expose helps a bit, but real solution is probally to move to a fully zoomable desktop, so that one isn't restrited by screen borders, but can simply zoom out when more space is needed. This also helps a lot with orientation, since you can simply place everything side by side and still reach it and don't have to lower/raise yourself through a stack of windows.
It's not reasonable to expect such mnemonics, input through an alphanumeric keyboard, to work any other way -- unless you can think of a better one where alphanumeric input is both easy to remember and language-independent. Good luck.
How about an LCD Keyboard that actually displays those shortcuts so that you don't have to type them blindly in the first place? Might of course still take a while those are actually available and affortable, but the problem with shortcuts is certainly solvable in a better way.
I remember when some word processors and the like included a "smooth scrolling" option. No one used it. It turned out that most people wanted the screen to scroll quickly instead.
That isn't because smooth scrolling is a bad idea, but because it simply was badly implemented. Now I don't necesarily blame the developers for that, because some things simply can't be implemented well with todays hardware, ie. when I press down I don't want the screen to scroll automatically for half a second, thats just not really a good way of doing it. However I also don't want the screen to just jump around, since that is extremly disorientating. So what could the solution be? How about a pressure sensitive scroll button, the harder I press the faster it scrolls and scrolling both starts instantly when I press and stops when I depress. Or how about a scroll wheel that actually scrolls smoothly instead of just sending up/down events on every click?
At least not to common consumer devices. I cannot even count the number of remote controls, microwaves, cellphones, dishwashers, ATMs, and other devices which are seem to be designed completely without thought for the human who will need to use them.
One doesn't even need to look at all thoes high tech products to find bad user interface design, even something as simple as a door can be done extremly bad. Ever tried to push one that you needed to pull thanks to the fact that both side actually look the same? And faucets are not much better either, things like having seperate nobs for warm and cold water are still very common, they are not hard to understand, they however make it nearly impossible to actually get water out of the faucets with a desired temperature, since it all turns into a mixing game. Or hobs whose controls make it very non-obvious which control maps to which burner and such, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman has a ton more example of simple things that are designed horribly.
In the long term, we'll be communicating with computers the same way we communicate with our pets, kids, and coworkers - with a combination of body language, voice, gestures, etc.
I am not so sure about that, for some things of course voice and gestures are great, but the computer isn't just a dog or a coworker, its also a tool and I neither talk or gesticulate to my screwdriver, instead I pick it up and get the job done with it myself, since thats simply a lot faster then trying to explain what and how something should be done. And if I try to explain something to a coworker a simple pen and a quick sketch can also do wonders compared to just talk and gestures. So I don't expect the keyboard or mouse to disapear anytime soon, they might get improved and enhanced, but I don't think they will ever completly disapeare, unless of course we get a direct-to-brain-interface that actually works.
One simple thing I expect to happen in the near future would be mice that supports rotations, optical mice already have all the data they need to detect it, so it would be relativly easy to add and could provide some instant benefits, ie. instead of just grabing an item to move it, you could also rotate it without toggling the drag-mode first, simply rotate the mouse and be done with it. This might also get important with zooming interfaces, Expose and the new XGL stuff already has pleny of zooming build-in so the next step to provide a fully zoomable desktop isn't that far away. Since zooming requires yet another axis, mouse rotation might be used for that, since its an easy way to do it in a way that doesn't require even more buttons on the mouse.
...introducing the double tap! Oh wait, this feature has been avalible on macs and any laptop with a touchpad for well over a decade.
Have you actually ever played with ScummVM-DS? I did and last time I checked there wasn't a double tab, changing mouse modes worked by Digi-Pad and nothing else, which was ok, but really not that great. If things have improved, then thats good, if not, then well, not.
I think homebrew stuff is kewl. I love it. However, I don't like how you have 10 things hanging off a DS for it to work:)
With something like SuperKey and a SuperCard lite, which uses MicroSD, you won't have anything hanging out of a NintendoDS lite, it as the same size as a normal NDS Module and does no longer require to plug an original module in, like a PassMe does and it doesn't require flashing the NintendoDS either.
I'm going to buy a DS specifically for ScummVM. A little touchscreen would be way easier to use than a mouse for those games.
No, it wouldn't. The problem with touchscreen is that it only can do left-clicks, no right clicks. While right-click isn't needed to master any of the LucasArts games, I find it quite important for fluid gameplay, since it removes a lot of unneeded clicking. And another very fundamental problem is that a touchscreen can't do "hover", either you click somewhere or the device has no idea where your pointer is, which means you can't hover and move around like with your mouse to find out which objects you could interact with. ScummVM solves this by letting you toggle via Dpad between over, left and right click, but it really doesn't feel all that good. Last not least there is of course also a resolution problem, LucasArts games are VGA 320x200, DS only has 256x192, not that critical, but yet another annoyancy to add to the list.
ScummVMDS is still a great little tool, but the NintendoDS is really not a very good device for LucasArts games.
i want fresh ideas as much as everybody else, but molyneux has failed at least once too often.
He certainly has overhyped his games a lot, but failed? Fable scores 85% at gamerankings, Black&White 89%, The Movies gets a 79% and Black&White2 still got a 76%. Ok, the last two ones are not that great, but still good, 85% and 89% on the other side is certainly a very good score. The only real throuble I see with Molyneux is the hype, he talks and talks about features and stuff and the final games simply don't delieve much of that, that doesn't mean that the games are failures, it however means that many people will be disapointed simply because they expected far so much more, that however doesn't mean that the games are actually bad.
Molyneux should simply talk a little less and polish his games a little more and pretty much all problems would be solved.
According to this link, the score is 17 american vs 4 russian deaths. Ok, ok... 14 americans have died in just two accidents. But, either way, it's two russian accidents vs 3.
That list only lists astronauts and cosmonauts, there have been a bunch of other accidents in space exploration killing quite a bunch of ground crew, for example while fueling a
russian Vostok-2M rocket it exploded and killed 50 people and there have been some other accidents.
In the end the death count in both russian and american space exploration is however still pretty low compared to all the advances it provided and the money that was spend.
And graphics? I think they're sort of demonized too often, because good graphics really immerse you into the game.
Graphics are important, however their true importance is far overrated by todays industry. The important thing about graphics is simply that they don't distract, not that they look good by whatever todays standards are. For most part that simply means to provide a steady framerate, a good viewing distance and enough polyons, but thats already all. Once the graphics are good enough by that standard they will simply fade away after 15-30min of game play, since then the player will actually be busy playing the game, not carrying about if that polygon over there is shaded with ShaderModel3.0 or not. Even Doom1 or ResidentEvil1 can still be scarry and fun, once you get used to the fact that the graphics simply aren't up to todays standard. Some old games such as StarFox even look good today, because their graphic style actually works together with the limitations of the hardware, not against it. Sometimes it takes a while longer to get into a game when the graphics suffer to much from technical limitations, but once one is over that hurdle they simply fade away like all graphics do, no matter if good or bad.
While I enjoyed the games in question quite a lot, and would probabaly enjoy a re-vamping of these games, I see a disturbing similarity to the movie industry of late. It seems that there have been less and less really innovative, creative, and original movies being released.
A single re-vamped Molyneux game still provides more originality then a dozen of todays regular games combined. While it might not be something entirly new, it at least is something that hasn't been done in quite a while. The last Syndicate game was 10 years ago and the rest isn't really much newer either, so seeing some of those games again could be really a good thing, since a lot of those had ideas that havn't been done to death like so many others have (finger pointing at WWII shooter...).
Obviously it also has the features of an IM client, but that's nothing new
Well, yes, PCs had IM for years, but on the DS for example Nintendo intentionally didn't provide any online chatting, so all you get is random match making and nothing else, which is really kind of annoying. There are also tons of DS games around that have multiplayer, but aren't online enabled. So while the online support for DS is better then nothing, its still very basic. If Wii doesn't do better I don't think that XBoxLive has to fear anything. On the other side Wii will have as far as I have heard a build in Opera browser, so there is some hope that Wii's Online will go bejoint what DS currently provides.
As opposed to the games people are looking forward to on the other consoles, such as Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy 12, Halo 3, God of War 2, Gran Turismo Whatever, etc?
I am not impressed with the other consoles either. The thing with the Wii however is that it actually could offer some completly new game experiences, but in large part it simply doesn't seem to do that. I miss that one exceptional game which makes me go 'wow', like Mario64 did on the N64. Nintendo designed that cool new controller and now all they offer is sequels and stuff that would have worked just fine with a normal one. WiiSports so far seems the only thing that is truly build for the new controller, but then a tennis game in which I can't even move the player seems kind of limited.
Just because it's part of an old series doesn't mean it has the same gameplay mechanics.
Very true, however all those Wii games seem to actualy feature almost the exact same gameplay mechanics like their predecesor. With Mario64 it was a gigantic jump, a jump from 2D to 3D, completly new game mechanics, new controls, everything complete new, only the setting was familiar, same with the jump from Zelda3 to OoT, or Super Metroid to Metroid Prime. The Wii-Zelda on the other side looks just like OoT with more polished graphics and I couldn't really spot anything fundamentally new in Mario Galaxy either and with the new MetroidPrime its hard to tell that you are not playing one of the predecessors without looking closely. Sure, the controls are adapted for the new controller, but thats relally not all that exciting, even with the Wiimote.
Sounds like a solid start, but I am not really impressive, Zelda is a port af a Gamecube game, MetroidPrime is the successor of Gamecube game with some new controls, so are Need for Speed, Metal Slug, Madden, MonkeyBall, FF:Chronicals and plenty of others. That list reads like a "been there, done that". What I still miss for the Wii is something as awesome as Mario64 was for the N64. This all feels like Nintendo has designed this cool new controller and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, so we get ports, successors and stuff. So far WiiSports and Trauma Center seem to be only game that actually require the new controller, while the rest could have been done with a regular controller with only little changes. So while I hope for the best, I also fear for the worst. Wii so far is interesting, but not exciting.
You can already do that with applications like GraphicConverter almost as quickly.
Can that run Gimp filters? Imagemagick filters? Photoshop filters? My custom created filter? No? Well, see the problem? Of course I can hack together a monolithic app that solves some of my problems, that is however neither effective nor flexible. I want a tool/OS that allows me solves all my computing problems in a way that is as easy and efficent as possible and that is simply not possible by a single application, but only by combining functions of all applications.
But having every possible image manipulation command in a contextual menu isn't "a bit cluttered", it would make finding anything in there impossible.
In addition to "Open with..." you have an entry "Apply function...", I fail to see how a single additional entry makes finding anything impossible. Anyway, back to start, this is not about how to access all the function, but about making them available in the first place, todays OSs simply don't do that (well, MacOSX does to a small extent). They don't allow me to get the job done, end of story. Even the most crude hackish ugly way to make applications functions available would be *FAR* superiour to that.
Well, the good news, is that the Nintendo Wii Dev Kit will cost somewhere around $1700.
The bad news however is that at this point you simply can't buy it, no matter how much it would cost. Nintendo only gives away devkits to larger publishers, not indies and if that will ever change, we will see. Beside that $1700 is still quite a bit of money and even if you colud get your hands at a devkit, you still don't have a way to actually publish your game, which really is the important part in the end. XBox360 development at $99 a year, doesn't sound perfect, but already extremly attractive and if Nintendo can compete with that, I kind of doubt given Nintendos history.
I could have sworn that about five years ago I stumbled across a Linux project like this, but I didn't download it or bookmark it, and I never found it again.
Now you have a contextual menu that's 450 items long... how have you improved anything or made anybody more effective?
The improvment is that you now actually can do a task that was completly impossible before, sounds like enough of improvement to justify a context menu that is a little clobbered. However the main point is that all functions that an applications offers must be accessible to other application and by the user interface and not just by the application itself as today. Sticking them into a context menu is just one way to deal with the situation, other alternatives would be to simply make them available to the standard command line, as today for example done by KDE with dcop to some extend or by providing a command line build into the file browser, similar to what Rox-Filer offers, yet another way is the services menu of NeXTSTEP. Anyway, even if you stick it into your standard context menu clobbering is really almost no issue, I mean, how do you reach the function today in Gimp? Via the menu. If you make the same functions available via context menu you would still reach them via menu, all just the same, menu simply happens to be in a different locations and probally a little bit deeper, but nothing that dramatic.
Of course the real issue goes much deeper and doesn't end with making functions available across applications, but starts with getting rid of applications in the first place. The thing that today comes closed is probally Emacs, which really isn't just a text editor, but more like a Lisp based operating system with its own share of applications like a webbrowser, mail client, tetris game and stuff. In Emacs however there aren't really hard boundaries between applications, everything happens in the same context and can access the very same functions, so if there is some function to manipulate text, its instantly accessible in the mailreader as well as the webbrowser with no extra work. Now Emacs isn't what tomorrows GUIs should look like, since it only focuses on text and provides almost no graphical interface tools, buts its definitvly hinting in an interesting direction.
How many orders of magnitude is a current PC faster then a NeXTStation from anno 1992? I don't know, but I bet a fucking lot. Objective-C with which NeXTSTEP was written, was already pretty fast back in that day, so I very much doubt that it would be a problem today. In fact I believe that when done properly it would be quite a bit faster than todays OSs, since code duplication, memory waste and other issues that naturally arise from todays way to write application would disappear.
So why hasn't programming by flowchart become the norm?
Because most flowchart stuff isn't any more high level then a piece of C code, just replacing text with fluffy graphics doesn't fix a thing, it simply replaces one flawed representation with another one that is even worse. That doesn't mean that graphical representations aren't usefull, doing GUI design in Glade or other application is easier, more powerfull and flexible then anything that hard coded GUIs in C can ever do, but one has of cause to be carefull to not throw colorfull icons at all problems that one ever encounters.
A GUI is intended to provide simplicity by limiting choice to only those
options relevant within a given context.
There is nothing wrong with that, in fact a proper command line completion script for bash will do exactly the same and limit tab completion to what makes sense in the current context (complete only to files matching *.mp3 when using a mp3 tool, complete to options when cursor is at a '--', etc.). But why does a GUI actually limit the amount of action it can perform? Not just in the "don't clutter the screen with it" sense, but in the "don't provide them at all" sense? If I want to rotate a bunch of images, why can't the GUI offer me a way to accomplish that? I have a file manager there that lets me select the files, I have a graphical tool there that can open them and actions to rotate them, but combining those is a no-go, just doesn't work. Now it migth be questionable if image filters should go into the right click menu or accessible via a sidebar or a command line (not the classic XTerm/Bash, but something that I can call from within the filemanager itself), I have see absolutly no reason why a GUI shouldn't offer that functionality. If an application offers a function, it should be available everywhere where I work with items that, that function supports and there is no reason why that should be limited.
The Humane Interface from Jef Raskins provides a lot of more details into what is wrong today and how it could be fixed, but *both* making the system easier to learn as well as far more powerfull.
You're so right! You want to know what else pisses me off? Cars. Cars still use the dated "Steering wheel/Accelerator/Brake" paradigm.
There are actually some experimental cars with joysticks and a autopilot for cars is also already quite doable, at least on some roads.
The throuble with GUIs is however very different, the reason why GUIs need improvements isn't because of originality, but because they simply don't work the way they are now. There are tons of tasks that you can do very easily CLI, but not at all via GUI, even so all the functionality is available in the GUI. Simple example would be batch conversion of images, in command line its simply, I have a tool to do the conversion and bash has looping constructs, I combine both and job is done. On the GUI side I have Gimp and no looping constructs, end of story, I have to click myself a thousand times through the load/save dialogs to get the job done.
The solution that todays GUI application offer is that each application that might be used in batch jobs comes with their very own tools to do a batch job, very non-generic, very inflexible and many application simply don't come with one to begin with. Chaining multiple batch jobs together is also impossible when that job would cross application boundaries. Why can't I simply use the file dialog, mark the files and apply the actions from there? It would be simple, easy to use and very powerfull, it however would require applications to actually export their functionality and that is something that many applications simply don't even try and the OSs don't really help them accomplishing that either, so everything stays monolitic, interaction between applications in GUI is almost non existant.
CLI on the other side is build on the very principle that one tool should do one job and do that well, complete oposite of todays GUI, where one tool tries to reimplement half an OS. The flexibility and ease of use arrises from the reuse of the same tools for different jobs. A 'sort' programm can sort whatever I feed into it, 'gawk' gives me access to data organised in columns and so on. Now CLIs are far from perfect, unstructured text data is good for some things, but completly unsuitable for others, complete lack of graphics doesn't make it very easy to do a lot of things, mouse support is primitive or non-existant, learning it is much harder then necessary and launching a new process for each command can waste a lot of resources and many other problems, but thats kind of the point. CLIs aren't perfect, but neither are GUIs, both however provide many of concept that are very good and successfull and there is nothing that would stop you from combining the power of the two to get something far better then what we have now.
Looking at those 20 year old GUIs always makes me sad, since it shows how basically nothing has changed since then. We got more colors, higher resolutions and a few more mouse buttons, but the basic user interaction is still very much the same as back then and still flawed in many ways. For example no mainstream GUI today manages to properly merge the power of the command line with the ease of use of a mouse driven interface, instead both act side by side, where the most 'integration' you get is lausy copy&paste support of filenames from GUI to CLI, however not the other way around. But thats really just the tip of the iceberg, computer interfaces could do so much more, but most of them don't even try. Don't get me wrong, some transparency, drop shadows and other effects can help, but they are really just polishing of something that is broken at a much deeper level.
As another drastic example of the lack of GUI progress one can look at this NeXTSTEP presentation from 1992, even today that video still shows plenty of features which a normal Linux or Windows still can't compete with and with MacOSX it doesn't really look that much better, while it is actually based on NeXTSTEP, it has allocated a whole bunch of cruft from old MacOS, which doesn't really make the overall experince all that good.
Companies like Amazon can keep track of what you like, etc., without really knowing who you are.
As the recent AOL release of search queries has shown, anonymizing the user name to an random id doesn't really help a thing to keep the user identity anonymous, given a reasonable large amount of data, you can track the user based on its submitted queries.
The only real solution I see would be to forbit storage of personal data on server side and thus forcing Amazon and Co. to store it on the client side instead, so that the user is in control over what the other end knows about him and Amazon and Co. can't simply just store whatever the user submitted. This is the only way I see how the user could both stay anonymous (just delete client side data) as well as allow Amazon and Co. implement features based on users past actions.
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And yet my favorite games on NintendoDS are still Castlevania, MarioKart, Mario64 and NewSuperMarioBros, all of which make little to no use of the touchscreen (a little menu and map, nothing that couldn't be done on a normal non-touchscreen handheld).
I hope for the best with the Wii, but from what I have seen so far I have still quite a bit of doubt if the Wiimote will actually work as a generic game input device, for some it might be great (first person stuff), for other probally not so much (third person stuff). Will be interesting to see if Wiimote actually works out or if developers go back to the classic controller, which SmashBrothers will do as far as I heard.
How do I tell if the screw needs tightening at all? How does the computer figure out if I want it to go in or out? How does the computer tell me how tight it is? How to I pick a screw? If I just pick that screwdriver and start working all that information is easily available. Of course an automatic screwdriver might work better then a manual one and even with mouse and keyboard at hand there might be siutaions where voice commando or gesture would help. Voice and gesture however have their limits, so they simply don't work for all situtations. Just look at StarTrek, even with all that hightech around, they still have consoles that are operated via hand input ;)
I think the throuble with tiling is that it simply doesn't work that well as a generic concept, there are simply to much applications around that are just to small to make sense in a tiled workspace, ie. a small calculator should overlap, not tile, since else he can't be seen in full and wastes a lot of screenspace. However in Blender or Emacs tiling works great, much better then MDI solution which present windows in a window, this is probally because Blender and Emacs deal with one kind of data only and don't have to work with hundreds of different applications which made have wastly variing requirements.
However, while tiling has a fair share of problems, our way to manage windows is also far from optimal, there is a lot of time wasted with moving windows around and aranging the screen in such a way that it is actually usable Apples Expose helps a bit, but real solution is probally to move to a fully zoomable desktop, so that one isn't restrited by screen borders, but can simply zoom out when more space is needed. This also helps a lot with orientation, since you can simply place everything side by side and still reach it and don't have to lower/raise yourself through a stack of windows.
How about an LCD Keyboard that actually displays those shortcuts so that you don't have to type them blindly in the first place? Might of course still take a while those are actually available and affortable, but the problem with shortcuts is certainly solvable in a better way.
That isn't because smooth scrolling is a bad idea, but because it simply was badly implemented. Now I don't necesarily blame the developers for that, because some things simply can't be implemented well with todays hardware, ie. when I press down I don't want the screen to scroll automatically for half a second, thats just not really a good way of doing it. However I also don't want the screen to just jump around, since that is extremly disorientating. So what could the solution be? How about a pressure sensitive scroll button, the harder I press the faster it scrolls and scrolling both starts instantly when I press and stops when I depress. Or how about a scroll wheel that actually scrolls smoothly instead of just sending up/down events on every click?
One doesn't even need to look at all thoes high tech products to find bad user interface design, even something as simple as a door can be done extremly bad. Ever tried to push one that you needed to pull thanks to the fact that both side actually look the same? And faucets are not much better either, things like having seperate nobs for warm and cold water are still very common, they are not hard to understand, they however make it nearly impossible to actually get water out of the faucets with a desired temperature, since it all turns into a mixing game. Or hobs whose controls make it very non-obvious which control maps to which burner and such, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman has a ton more example of simple things that are designed horribly.
I am not so sure about that, for some things of course voice and gestures are great, but the computer isn't just a dog or a coworker, its also a tool and I neither talk or gesticulate to my screwdriver, instead I pick it up and get the job done with it myself, since thats simply a lot faster then trying to explain what and how something should be done. And if I try to explain something to a coworker a simple pen and a quick sketch can also do wonders compared to just talk and gestures. So I don't expect the keyboard or mouse to disapear anytime soon, they might get improved and enhanced, but I don't think they will ever completly disapeare, unless of course we get a direct-to-brain-interface that actually works.
One simple thing I expect to happen in the near future would be mice that supports rotations, optical mice already have all the data they need to detect it, so it would be relativly easy to add and could provide some instant benefits, ie. instead of just grabing an item to move it, you could also rotate it without toggling the drag-mode first, simply rotate the mouse and be done with it. This might also get important with zooming interfaces, Expose and the new XGL stuff already has pleny of zooming build-in so the next step to provide a fully zoomable desktop isn't that far away. Since zooming requires yet another axis, mouse rotation might be used for that, since its an easy way to do it in a way that doesn't require even more buttons on the mouse.
Have you actually ever played with ScummVM-DS? I did and last time I checked there wasn't a double tab, changing mouse modes worked by Digi-Pad and nothing else, which was ok, but really not that great. If things have improved, then thats good, if not, then well, not.
With something like SuperKey and a SuperCard lite, which uses MicroSD, you won't have anything hanging out of a NintendoDS lite, it as the same size as a normal NDS Module and does no longer require to plug an original module in, like a PassMe does and it doesn't require flashing the NintendoDS either.
No, it wouldn't. The problem with touchscreen is that it only can do left-clicks, no right clicks. While right-click isn't needed to master any of the LucasArts games, I find it quite important for fluid gameplay, since it removes a lot of unneeded clicking. And another very fundamental problem is that a touchscreen can't do "hover", either you click somewhere or the device has no idea where your pointer is, which means you can't hover and move around like with your mouse to find out which objects you could interact with. ScummVM solves this by letting you toggle via Dpad between over, left and right click, but it really doesn't feel all that good. Last not least there is of course also a resolution problem, LucasArts games are VGA 320x200, DS only has 256x192, not that critical, but yet another annoyancy to add to the list.
ScummVMDS is still a great little tool, but the NintendoDS is really not a very good device for LucasArts games.
He certainly has overhyped his games a lot, but failed? Fable scores 85% at gamerankings, Black&White 89%, The Movies gets a 79% and Black&White2 still got a 76%. Ok, the last two ones are not that great, but still good, 85% and 89% on the other side is certainly a very good score. The only real throuble I see with Molyneux is the hype, he talks and talks about features and stuff and the final games simply don't delieve much of that, that doesn't mean that the games are failures, it however means that many people will be disapointed simply because they expected far so much more, that however doesn't mean that the games are actually bad.
Molyneux should simply talk a little less and polish his games a little more and pretty much all problems would be solved.
That list only lists astronauts and cosmonauts, there have been a bunch of other accidents in space exploration killing quite a bunch of ground crew, for example while fueling a russian Vostok-2M rocket it exploded and killed 50 people and there have been some other accidents.
In the end the death count in both russian and american space exploration is however still pretty low compared to all the advances it provided and the money that was spend.
Graphics are important, however their true importance is far overrated by todays industry. The important thing about graphics is simply that they don't distract, not that they look good by whatever todays standards are. For most part that simply means to provide a steady framerate, a good viewing distance and enough polyons, but thats already all. Once the graphics are good enough by that standard they will simply fade away after 15-30min of game play, since then the player will actually be busy playing the game, not carrying about if that polygon over there is shaded with ShaderModel3.0 or not. Even Doom1 or ResidentEvil1 can still be scarry and fun, once you get used to the fact that the graphics simply aren't up to todays standard. Some old games such as StarFox even look good today, because their graphic style actually works together with the limitations of the hardware, not against it. Sometimes it takes a while longer to get into a game when the graphics suffer to much from technical limitations, but once one is over that hurdle they simply fade away like all graphics do, no matter if good or bad.
A single re-vamped Molyneux game still provides more originality then a dozen of todays regular games combined. While it might not be something entirly new, it at least is something that hasn't been done in quite a while. The last Syndicate game was 10 years ago and the rest isn't really much newer either, so seeing some of those games again could be really a good thing, since a lot of those had ideas that havn't been done to death like so many others have (finger pointing at WWII shooter...).
Well, yes, PCs had IM for years, but on the DS for example Nintendo intentionally didn't provide any online chatting, so all you get is random match making and nothing else, which is really kind of annoying. There are also tons of DS games around that have multiplayer, but aren't online enabled. So while the online support for DS is better then nothing, its still very basic. If Wii doesn't do better I don't think that XBoxLive has to fear anything. On the other side Wii will have as far as I have heard a build in Opera browser, so there is some hope that Wii's Online will go bejoint what DS currently provides.
I am not impressed with the other consoles either. The thing with the Wii however is that it actually could offer some completly new game experiences, but in large part it simply doesn't seem to do that. I miss that one exceptional game which makes me go 'wow', like Mario64 did on the N64. Nintendo designed that cool new controller and now all they offer is sequels and stuff that would have worked just fine with a normal one. WiiSports so far seems the only thing that is truly build for the new controller, but then a tennis game in which I can't even move the player seems kind of limited.
Very true, however all those Wii games seem to actualy feature almost the exact same gameplay mechanics like their predecesor. With Mario64 it was a gigantic jump, a jump from 2D to 3D, completly new game mechanics, new controls, everything complete new, only the setting was familiar, same with the jump from Zelda3 to OoT, or Super Metroid to Metroid Prime. The Wii-Zelda on the other side looks just like OoT with more polished graphics and I couldn't really spot anything fundamentally new in Mario Galaxy either and with the new MetroidPrime its hard to tell that you are not playing one of the predecessors without looking closely. Sure, the controls are adapted for the new controller, but thats relally not all that exciting, even with the Wiimote.
Sounds like a solid start, but I am not really impressive, Zelda is a port af a Gamecube game, MetroidPrime is the successor of Gamecube game with some new controls, so are Need for Speed, Metal Slug, Madden, MonkeyBall, FF:Chronicals and plenty of others. That list reads like a "been there, done that". What I still miss for the Wii is something as awesome as Mario64 was for the N64. This all feels like Nintendo has designed this cool new controller and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, so we get ports, successors and stuff. So far WiiSports and Trauma Center seem to be only game that actually require the new controller, while the rest could have been done with a regular controller with only little changes. So while I hope for the best, I also fear for the worst. Wii so far is interesting, but not exciting.
Can that run Gimp filters? Imagemagick filters? Photoshop filters? My custom created filter? No? Well, see the problem? Of course I can hack together a monolithic app that solves some of my problems, that is however neither effective nor flexible. I want a tool/OS that allows me solves all my computing problems in a way that is as easy and efficent as possible and that is simply not possible by a single application, but only by combining functions of all applications.
In addition to "Open with..." you have an entry "Apply function...", I fail to see how a single additional entry makes finding anything impossible. Anyway, back to start, this is not about how to access all the function, but about making them available in the first place, todays OSs simply don't do that (well, MacOSX does to a small extent). They don't allow me to get the job done, end of story. Even the most crude hackish ugly way to make applications functions available would be *FAR* superiour to that.
The bad news however is that at this point you simply can't buy it, no matter how much it would cost. Nintendo only gives away devkits to larger publishers, not indies and if that will ever change, we will see. Beside that $1700 is still quite a bit of money and even if you colud get your hands at a devkit, you still don't have a way to actually publish your game, which really is the important part in the end. XBox360 development at $99 a year, doesn't sound perfect, but already extremly attractive and if Nintendo can compete with that, I kind of doubt given Nintendos history.
I think you are searching for XMLTerm.
The improvment is that you now actually can do a task that was completly impossible before, sounds like enough of improvement to justify a context menu that is a little clobbered. However the main point is that all functions that an applications offers must be accessible to other application and by the user interface and not just by the application itself as today. Sticking them into a context menu is just one way to deal with the situation, other alternatives would be to simply make them available to the standard command line, as today for example done by KDE with dcop to some extend or by providing a command line build into the file browser, similar to what Rox-Filer offers, yet another way is the services menu of NeXTSTEP. Anyway, even if you stick it into your standard context menu clobbering is really almost no issue, I mean, how do you reach the function today in Gimp? Via the menu. If you make the same functions available via context menu you would still reach them via menu, all just the same, menu simply happens to be in a different locations and probally a little bit deeper, but nothing that dramatic.
Of course the real issue goes much deeper and doesn't end with making functions available across applications, but starts with getting rid of applications in the first place. The thing that today comes closed is probally Emacs, which really isn't just a text editor, but more like a Lisp based operating system with its own share of applications like a webbrowser, mail client, tetris game and stuff. In Emacs however there aren't really hard boundaries between applications, everything happens in the same context and can access the very same functions, so if there is some function to manipulate text, its instantly accessible in the mailreader as well as the webbrowser with no extra work. Now Emacs isn't what tomorrows GUIs should look like, since it only focuses on text and provides almost no graphical interface tools, buts its definitvly hinting in an interesting direction.
There is nothing wrong with that, in fact a proper command line completion script for bash will do exactly the same and limit tab completion to what makes sense in the current context (complete only to files matching *.mp3 when using a mp3 tool, complete to options when cursor is at a '--', etc.). But why does a GUI actually limit the amount of action it can perform? Not just in the "don't clutter the screen with it" sense, but in the "don't provide them at all" sense? If I want to rotate a bunch of images, why can't the GUI offer me a way to accomplish that? I have a file manager there that lets me select the files, I have a graphical tool there that can open them and actions to rotate them, but combining those is a no-go, just doesn't work. Now it migth be questionable if image filters should go into the right click menu or accessible via a sidebar or a command line (not the classic XTerm/Bash, but something that I can call from within the filemanager itself), I have see absolutly no reason why a GUI shouldn't offer that functionality. If an application offers a function, it should be available everywhere where I work with items that, that function supports and there is no reason why that should be limited.
The Humane Interface from Jef Raskins provides a lot of more details into what is wrong today and how it could be fixed, but *both* making the system easier to learn as well as far more powerfull.
There are actually some experimental cars with joysticks and a autopilot for cars is also already quite doable, at least on some roads.
The throuble with GUIs is however very different, the reason why GUIs need improvements isn't because of originality, but because they simply don't work the way they are now. There are tons of tasks that you can do very easily CLI, but not at all via GUI, even so all the functionality is available in the GUI. Simple example would be batch conversion of images, in command line its simply, I have a tool to do the conversion and bash has looping constructs, I combine both and job is done. On the GUI side I have Gimp and no looping constructs, end of story, I have to click myself a thousand times through the load/save dialogs to get the job done.
The solution that todays GUI application offer is that each application that might be used in batch jobs comes with their very own tools to do a batch job, very non-generic, very inflexible and many application simply don't come with one to begin with. Chaining multiple batch jobs together is also impossible when that job would cross application boundaries. Why can't I simply use the file dialog, mark the files and apply the actions from there? It would be simple, easy to use and very powerfull, it however would require applications to actually export their functionality and that is something that many applications simply don't even try and the OSs don't really help them accomplishing that either, so everything stays monolitic, interaction between applications in GUI is almost non existant.
CLI on the other side is build on the very principle that one tool should do one job and do that well, complete oposite of todays GUI, where one tool tries to reimplement half an OS. The flexibility and ease of use arrises from the reuse of the same tools for different jobs. A 'sort' programm can sort whatever I feed into it, 'gawk' gives me access to data organised in columns and so on. Now CLIs are far from perfect, unstructured text data is good for some things, but completly unsuitable for others, complete lack of graphics doesn't make it very easy to do a lot of things, mouse support is primitive or non-existant, learning it is much harder then necessary and launching a new process for each command can waste a lot of resources and many other problems, but thats kind of the point. CLIs aren't perfect, but neither are GUIs, both however provide many of concept that are very good and successfull and there is nothing that would stop you from combining the power of the two to get something far better then what we have now.
Looking at those 20 year old GUIs always makes me sad, since it shows how basically nothing has changed since then. We got more colors, higher resolutions and a few more mouse buttons, but the basic user interaction is still very much the same as back then and still flawed in many ways. For example no mainstream GUI today manages to properly merge the power of the command line with the ease of use of a mouse driven interface, instead both act side by side, where the most 'integration' you get is lausy copy&paste support of filenames from GUI to CLI, however not the other way around. But thats really just the tip of the iceberg, computer interfaces could do so much more, but most of them don't even try. Don't get me wrong, some transparency, drop shadows and other effects can help, but they are really just polishing of something that is broken at a much deeper level.
As another drastic example of the lack of GUI progress one can look at this NeXTSTEP presentation from 1992, even today that video still shows plenty of features which a normal Linux or Windows still can't compete with and with MacOSX it doesn't really look that much better, while it is actually based on NeXTSTEP, it has allocated a whole bunch of cruft from old MacOS, which doesn't really make the overall experince all that good.
As the recent AOL release of search queries has shown, anonymizing the user name to an random id doesn't really help a thing to keep the user identity anonymous, given a reasonable large amount of data, you can track the user based on its submitted queries.
The only real solution I see would be to forbit storage of personal data on server side and thus forcing Amazon and Co. to store it on the client side instead, so that the user is in control over what the other end knows about him and Amazon and Co. can't simply just store whatever the user submitted. This is the only way I see how the user could both stay anonymous (just delete client side data) as well as allow Amazon and Co. implement features based on users past actions.