Big shift of games to mobile platforms

It has happened. The move that many have envisioned has already happened; it was just in the last couple months.

The speed of change is unbelievable. Just half a year ago, the only games you could play on phones where casual games like Robo Defense or Doodle Jump.
Then, in October 2010, first news of real hardcore game on Android came: Dungeon Defenders, the first game on 3D Unreal engine, was announced.

In December, I found The Sims 3 in Android Market. What is interesting, is that price for it was €3.77; for the PC version of The Sims 3 I had to pay 10 times more, and it wasn't 10 times better. Since then, Electronic Arts published mobile versions of such mainstream games as Need for Speed and FIFA 10; you can get them for a few bucks, immediately, without paying for delivery and waiting for DHL guy to show up at your doorstep. Two days ago, I discovered Majesty: Fantasy Kingdom Sim in the Market for just £2; I immediately bought it and was not disappointed - it is almost exactly the same game as I paid £23 for a year ago, just modified for a touch screen and available to play in tram and while walking on the street.

I had Android phones for years, and never saw any game that I would really enjoy for long - just because casual games are not for me. But the change has come. I just found Pro Evolution Soccer 2011, OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and Heroes of Might and Magic 2 to add to non-casual games.

There are few "real" games on Android yet. But since some of them are here, no doubt there will be many more this year. What's next? Civilization, Counter-Strike, Europa Universalis, Fallout?
A full-fledged mobile game, compared to a PC / Console game:

1. Doesn't require delivery (postal or via Steam) 
2. Doesn't take space on your shelves
3. Doesn't force you to spend $200 on desktop operating system
4. Is always with you - when you are in tram, in security line in an airport, or when your desktop is occupied by a family member
5. Impossible to lose - the purchase status is in the cloud
6. Has no DRM problems
7. Auto-updates automatically
8. Costs 5-10 times less

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Change is coming..

Just 1 day left till Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is released.

UPDATE: and now it is out. I've upgraded my main desktop, and though there are no obvious significant changes from 9.10, it is good - the software packages are updated and the boot time is decreased.

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BarCamp CA 2010: How to search

I'm in Almaty now, at BarCamp Central Asia 2010. The first day was great - interesting talks and very interesting people.

As I've promised, here are the slides of my talk "How to search and find" (in Russian). But, as a sad twist, my blog (as all blogspot blogs) is not accessible from Kazakhstan, so to get here people would need to use proxies. :( It's much more difficult to search in the circumstances when some of the sites are blocked, and overall internet access is quite slow.
The same slides should soon be linked from the official site of the BarCamp to be visible directly.

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Help Haiti

Copying help request of Jessica Pfund, Google GIS Specialist:

Hello fellow mappers,

Yesterday, a large 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Several thousands of people may have died, and relief efforts are now
in full action. We have shared Map Maker data for Haiti with the
United Nations in its raw form and continue to make Map Maker data
immediately available through the Google Maps API and this Mapplet.

If you have any local knowledge of Haiti, please help us in improving
the maps of this region. It will assist relief workers in saving
lives. For more information on the earthquake, resources and ways to
donate, see: http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/

Jessica Pfund, GIS Specialist for Google

Here is a link to Haiti in Map Maker. I have also translated this post into Belarusian.

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A bit about cellphone contracts and insult of simlock

Yesterday, Google announced Nexus One. It is truly great phone; I have been using mine for almost a month and I'm more than happy. All other phones, including iPhone 3GS, feel very slow in comparison. Though I won't go into detail about features - I suggest to check out review on TechCrunch.

More interesting for me is that Google is tackling the issue of cellphone contracts. Nexus One is being sold only unlocked; you can get the discount on the phone price if you sign up for 2 year contract, but you will still be free to use you phone wherever you want.

Most cellular operators try to do their best to acquire new customers and tie them to long-term contracts. In US and many Western countries, they found a venue to do this: subsidized phones. The operator buys the phone for $600, sells it to you for $200 - it pays you $400 indirectly - for the pledge that you will pay them $2800 over two years (prices taken from AT&T/iPhone). Sure, it's a great deal for operators, and in many cases good deal for customers (though not with Nexus One). There are two big problems, though.

First: even though you, as a customer, realize that operator will be willing to pay several hundred for you to become their customer, you are severely limited in receiving this bonus; you have to choose among the phones on their shelves. I wonder why; I guess many people would be happy to lock themselves in for 2 years in exchange for hard cash (though I personally would prefer contract freedom). So if you choose the phone which your operator doesn't sell (which in my case was almost always the case during last ~7 years), operator keeps your bonus.

Second: if you are lucky enough to have your phone of choice offered by your operator of choice, you will get it with insult included - simlock. Selling simlocked phones is completely pointless - it doesn't affect the monthly bill, which is to be paid for X years anyway (unless ETF is paid). It is annoying and very limiting for the customer, and can become expensive if he travels (he'll have to pay roaming or buy a new phone abroad). It is insulting, since selling simlocked subsidized phones every 2 years suggests that I can get along with the same phone for 2 years (since it will be quite difficult to sell).

I have never bought simlocked phones. I don't think I've ever used one phone for longer than a year. And before coming to Switzerland, I have just heard something about operators being nasty, but didn't experience it first hand. You know, with all grand difference in economics and market between Switzerland and Belarus there is one area where Belarus is miles ahead - cellphone contracts.

In Belarus, you sign unlimited contract which you can cancel anytime without any ETF. There is minimum monthly payment for the service, but you are free to stop paying whenever you want, and cell operator will just stop the service after some time; and if you resume paying, they resume the service. In fact, I am still under contract on Velcom in Belarus (I visit Belarus for a few days every several months); every time I leave the country, several days/weeks later enough unpaid debt accumulates so they turn off the service for me (and they stop counting, so I don't pay for the time out of service); and when I arrive next time, I pay off the debt and the service resumes immediately.

In Switzerland, the situation is bad. It's in fact even worse than in the US. You can only sign yearly renewing contract; it means, you have to stay with operator for 12 months or you get to pay high ETF. And next year, it automatically renews for 12 more months, unless you cancelled it in writing at most 60 days before first year ends. How nice is it, huh? You still can get your "bonus" in form of simlocked discounted phone, though. Or you can go to prepaid, but there is not a single prepaid plan in Switzerland with data included or affordable. And there is no competition, since all three mobile operators behave the same.

I really hope that Nexus One and subsequent phones will improve things. If data-hungry phones will be sold unlocked, the operators will have the incentive to provide either nice prepaids with data or flexible contracts to lure the customers. And if the best phones will be sold unlocked, it should give incentive to other phone manufacturers to push for "never-to-be-simlocked" models.

And we can dream of the better world (hopefully in a few years), when the phones are never simlocked, you are free to switch cell operators whenever you want, and operators reward you for loyalty instead of paying you for privilege to handcuff you.

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Installing and updating software

UX (User Experience) in software made major leaps since 1990s. Back then computer users needed to be quite tech-savvy, and nowadays pretty much everyone can figure out what to do.

But there is one area where UX deteriorated significantly. It's installing and updating applications. I still remember the time when to "install" something I needed to stick a floppy into FDD and press "Enter" in Norton Commander. But now too often I have to spend 5 to 30 minutes to run a program.

Especially bad it is on Linux, even though some Linux distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have grown to be almost casual desktop systems. There is quite big paradigm difference between Windows and most Linux application installation. On Windows, if you need to install a new app, you are supposed to go to the app's website, download installer executable and install it. In Ubuntu (from now on, I will focus on Ubuntu distro instead of Linux in general since I have more experience with it), you are supposed to use Synaptic or command-line apt-get to get the software from repository. Repository vaguely resembles smartphone application catalogs such as Android Market, where you can find most applications for the platform; the biggest difference, though, is that while on smartphones developers submit their apps and updates to the catalogs, on Ubuntu distribution maintainers take care of new software and updates. Another difference is that while every smartphone platform has one major repository regardless of version of the handset, every version of Ubuntu has its own separate software repository, which in general case only has the software versions that were released prior to that Ubuntu release (and only maintenance updates are getting into older repositories).

The result is horrible - you are either stuck with old version of the application, or have to jump through hoops set up by app developers to get the newer version. Here are some of my worst experiences in the quest for the newest versions.

• Openoffice.org. My work desktop has only OpenOffice.org 2.4 available in repository, so I have to go to the website for the 3.1 version. I click "I want to download" and a big button "Download now!", which gives me 175Mb file OOo_3.1.1_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz. The fact that it is archive rather than normal Ubuntu .deb installer is already suspicious. I double click it and see bunch of files:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I can vaguely guess that "setup" is executable file here, so I should extract this stuff somewhere, go to terminal, change file permissions, and run this script. Probably many other OpenOffice users won't really figure this out.
  I go back to OpenOffice.org website and see that they gave me "OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 for Linux". Folder "RPMs" shows that they didn't pay attention that I use Ubuntu, the system that prefers .deb packages to .rpm; also, they gave me 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I go to "Other versions" and download "Linux 64-bit DEB" package (which they should have given me in the first place). Alas, it's again .tar.gz with myriad of files and "update" (but no "setup") file in the root.
  
  
  
  
• Psi. I've just installed the newest Ubuntu 9.10 at home, and wanted to set up my favorite IM application - Psi. The repository (while being the newest) had only version 0.12, while the website already has version 0.14. But unfortunately, the Psi developers rely so heavily on the repositories maintainers, that they do not even offer Linux binaries for new versions at all. So the only solution is to download sources and compile them, which is complete non-starter for most users. I compiled them and installed, but now the Psi launcher on the task panel has generic icon, because the authors either didn't include the app icon in the sources package, or hid it too well.
  
  
• The crown for the funniest update check goes to VLC media player on Windows. Every time I open a movie to watch, it pops up a question "Do you want to download VLC 1.0.3?". I click "yes" and proceed to watch a movie. After I close VLC, and open a new movie, it asks "Do you want to download VLC 1.0.3?" again! There is no button "Yes and never ask me again". And, funnily, the installed version of VLC is still 0.9.9, and somewhere on my hard drive there is a distributive of 1.0.3.
  
  
• The crown for the most difficult install goes to OpenTTD. While they provide a normal .deb installation file, installing it with a double-click is not enough; to launch the game, you need to download two more separate archives, and spend some time figuring out where to extract the files from them.

These are just the most recent annoying examples. There are much more. E.g. if you happen to use Ubuntu Hardy (the latest LTS release), then you are stuck with Firefox 3.0, while FF 3.5 is available for a long time already, and for the web browser being up-to-date is absolutely crucial. Ratio of Linux software that is distributed in haywire way, making every user to spend 10-30 minutes on figuring out installation, to the software that is installed in one click, is staggering. Windows software has its own problem of updates - most of Windows software never checks for its own updates, and the apps that do check are doing it in the most possibly annoying way (remember Java, Adobe Acrobat and Apple software updates).

I can only be happy that more and more of apps that I use are on the web, where installing and updating are non-issues, and my tool for accessing them, Chrome, is always up to date.

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Flight over Switzerland, part 1

In the last weekend of summer (at least summer as we understand it, that ends on the 31st of August), we flew over Switzerland in a small 4-seater Piper plane. During this trip I filled up 8Gb card with ~600 photos, and since then I am enjoying the process of filtering, cropping and geotagging.

So, here is a little teaser. More photos coming, to the blog and to the Picasa album.

Brugg, AG


Aarau AG, Rohr AG, Rombach AG and Aare river


Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant


Sempachersee, Sempach LU, Sursee LU


Zugersee, Cham ZG, Rotkreuz ZG, Zug ZG

It seems that plane photo trips became my summer tradition - in 2008, I also took a few photos of Alps from above.

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