Aidan Williams - High Acuity

Sanj and I have spent the last year and a half debating what new computers we should invest in when we next upgraded and it ultimately came down to two choices: Should we go Mac and get 17” Macbook Pros and  Apple Cinema Displays? Or should we go PC, get great LED displays, very powerful desktop computers and buy ourselves separate laptops as well for the same price as the Apple setup?

After a couple of post-meeting visits to the Regent Street Apple store in Soho, and a bit more prodding from me, Sanj started coming round to the idea of switching to Mac. We decided to go ahead with the caveat that if they were hard to use or caused any problems for him, I would never be allowed to make any hardware choices in the company again. Haha – sounds good to me!

We ordered two 17” Macbook Pros, two 24” Cinema Displays, two Wacom Bamboo Tablets, and two Rain Design mStands, as well as a few other extras individually.

The packages arrived from China and were left sitting next to us in our offices upstairs while we focused on finishing two projects. We finally found the time to open them up and get everything set up and installed a few days later and we are both very happy people indeed. As with all Apple products it was fast and simple and, aside from a few questions as he’s getting used to the OS-X way of doing things, Sanj is loving his new Apple experience so far.

We were very dubious about the gloss on the 24” Cinema Displays that under certain light seemed unbearably reflective. We only ordered them after checking with Apple that we could return them within 14 days with no questions asked if we were unhappy with the results. However, the gloss has not been an issue for us so far at all. The performance of the screens is astounding with incredible bright colour reproduction, very high contrast ratios and a fantastic viewing angle. The design is also stunning and with the in-built magsafe connectors we can power our Macbooks straight from the displays and leave our other Macbook power adapters at home. We’ll see what we think after we’ve been using them for a couple of months.

Click here to view the extended version of this post and see some of my old setups.

The iPhone really does seem like the perfect platform for games. With it’s touch screen, accelerometer and built-in internet access, it has more technology in it than most of the current line up of portable gaming devices. Super Monkey Ball was one of the first games released and it’s the perfect game to showcase the iPhone’s abilities; using the accelerometer to move the character around the platform and the graphics are great! But the initial controls were pretty harsh and unforgiving. After a fun first few games, it quickly lost its appeal.

I’ve bought a lot of games on the iPhone since then and that pretty much sums up my experience with them so far. They’re fun and novel for the first few minutes but the excitement wears off quickly and I’ve generally thought of most iPhone games as novelty tech demos…

… Until now.

Sway is a new game for the iPhone which for me rivals the addictive gameplay and replayability of Tetris, along with the innovation and similar graphical style of Little Big Planet.

You control the hands and body of your character and the aim is to ‘sway’ to the end of the level, collecting stars and keys in order to unlock new levels and characters. The graphics are genuinely beautiful and the stunning rag-doll physics is extremely entertaining – you will spend a lot of time just swinging your character in random directions around the level (and probably most often off the screen!) just to watch the way it moves.

While the whole concept of the game sounds like it’s going to be a little complicated to play (and it will take a few minutes to get used to the controls) the interface is brilliantly simple and very intuitive.

I haven’t been surprised by or enjoyed a game on any platform quite as much as this in a long time (with the exception perhaps of Little Big Planet on the PS3!). I’m sure Sway will be a lot like Marmite for many people: You’ll either love it or hate it. But for me I’m glad this developers has managed to harness the power and technology on the iPhone to create a thoroughly enjoyable game.

Sway is well worth the £2.99 price tag and they’re already working on a free update with 10 news levels and 3 more characters to play! Check out the trailer for Sway here. My only issue with the game is that my girlfriend is loving it and won’t give my phone back!

I also recently discovered that many of the games which I initially had some niggles with have had updates and new content via iTunes! The controls of Super Monkey Ball have been significantly improved and it is now far more playable than before!

I’ve always loved 1950s/1960s retro sci-fi design, from those sweet torpedo-styled space ships to the ridiculously square robots. So knowing my sci-fi obsession, my girlfriend picked up a couple of the coolest clocks on the face of this fine earth for Valentine’s Day.

They now take pride of place on my rather sparse desk at work. The best part is that they’re solid metal and rather heavy, so I can beat people with them if they’re not working hard enough.

They instantly reminded me of the video John and Mark created a few years ago for their masters degree in computer animation: ‘Short Lived‘. What’s so amazing about this video? The robot in every one of the shots isn’t real – it’s not based on a real toy (John & Mark designed it themselves and named it ‘Deedar’) and has never been a real physical object. Youtube doesn’t do the video justice but when you see this you understand why they’re now working on so many Hollywood blockbusters.

The use of Internet Explorer 6 has been steadily declining over the last year. Unfortunately most IE6 users have moved onto IE7, but some sensible people have moved over to more secure browsers like Firefox and Safari. Still, the use of IE6 has recently dropped below 20% and I have to say; I will miss the challenge of coding for it when we finally deem it obsolete. Don’t get me wrong, coding for IE6 is a complete pain, but IE6 has such esoteric idiosyncrasies that finding ways to make sure a website displays identically in IE6 just as other the more modern browsers was sometimes a fun challenge.

Still, a website has been created in preparation for the old dinosaur’s demise. So if you’re going to miss the old boy, you can leave your respects here. Some of the comments are NSFW, but most of them are pretty funny.

Twitter has now become so popular that even Google is getting in on the act. Its first ‘tweet’ on 25th February was:

“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″ which can be translated first from binary to decimal ASCII codes to letters and says “I’m feeling lucky.”

Welcome to Twitter, Google! Oh and…

01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101001 01100101 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00101110 00100000 00100000 00100000 00111011 00101001