Parental Wiiport
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 22nd April, 2007 @ 23:48
I can't believe how fast this year's gone by. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was with my mum and brother for Christmas. And as that was the last time I'd seen them, I thought it was about time I went for East for the weekend to sunny Great Yarmouth. It was also a convenient excuse to show off my new Wii and add various family members to my collection of Miis!
And to my surprise Mum was really keen to have a go! It may have helped that it was 1.30am and we'd just got back from the pub, and because I was driving it had allowed Mum to have a few drinks. And so we played tennis and golf, and it only took her about 5 minutes to get used to the controls. And she really enjoyed it! I think that's a great testament to the broad appeal of games that are truly fun rather than just shiny and shooty. And it demonstrates the usability of the Wii Remote. It also went down great with my brother and his family, so I suspect there'll be another Wii purchase in the family soon! While I was there I picked up a tip for bowling from my young nephew.... LOB IT! (the key being that one must shout the term whilst enacting it)
More parental technology shock the next day when something I would never have predicted happened, I took my mum laptop shopping! And so now she can surf away in the comfort of the sofa, which she's very happy to do. And I thought it was strange when my parents started texting!
Windows Vista turned out to be something of a disappointment though. I thought it'd at least be XP-level usable, but sadly it's slower than Sinclair C5 on an autobahn. And this is on a laptop with a dual core CPU and 1Gb of RAM. Mum seems happy though, and that's the main thing. Might attempt a 'downgrade' to XP next time I'm down to speed things up a bit. Or if I can convince her I might be able to slip the latest Ubuntu on there.
And yet more techno-parental surprise this weekend when my Dad was quite open to me installing Ubuntu on his PC so he'd not have to deal with the constant whining of the anti-virus and Windows update! So soon as he's got broadband connected (I'd forgotten how slow dialup was), I'll be installing Ubuntu besides Windows and making it the default boot option. I can't wait to get some feedback from him once he's used it for a while.
Joosty Wiiness
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 12th April, 2007 @ 23:04
After waiting a few months I've finally been accepted into the Joost beta program and have got it setup on my iMac. So far I'm pretty impressed. It certainly shows off just what you can build with XUL, the foundation XML user interface technology from the Mozilla project.
Said interface is really rather slick, which nice transparencies over the playing video and smooth transitional effects. You can certainly get the impression they're aiming to provide an experience much closer to conventional television than your usual TV over the Internet sites. My only gripe is that it's not quite as responsive to my clicks as I'd like, but hopefully that'll improve as the formal release approaches.
On to the content. First off, it's was usefully fast at kicking off playing the many videos they've made available, I'm on 10Mbit broadband but looking at the download speeds, in practice 1-2Mb would probably be just fine. Which leads naturally to the quality... it's moderate for something that's playing 'mostly' fullscreen. In keeping with their TV not PC model, you'll probably want to be sitting a few feet back if you don't want to see too much of the blocky JPEGidness of it. Fast movements didn't survive too well. Hopefully an increased bitrate will also appear later on.
The range of content isn't too bad considering the early stages of the project. A variety of indie short films, some sports and documentaries, a manga channel, Fifth Gear gets it's own channel and a fair range of music related stuff. It's a good initial showing though more will definitely be required to make it something I'd want to use every day.
The business model seems to be just like normal network television, ad supported. At the moment these ads are pretty unobtrusive. Saying that, most of the content is shorts, how it will affect longer programming remains to be seen.
Overall, a good start, the software is refined and pleasurable to use for the most part, and the content is a promising initial showing. Watch this space. Or rather their space.
On another subject, I've got a Wii! But I'll leave that for another time, after I've tried it on my mum :-)
