PSP round 1

Happy first week Sony PSP.
A list of hack roundups is on Engadget today. None of them are a must-do except for using PSP Video 9 to get your vids onto your memory stick.

You must of course know that the PSP has a glorious screen, I don’t need to tell you that. I’ve got 5 games so far: Lumines, Tony Hawk, Wipeout Pure, Need For Speed Underground Rivals, and Untold Legends.

The game you must purchase with your PSP is Lumines. You should already know this but as a public service announcement I just want to make sure you don’t get a PSP without it. They really should have bundled it with the PSP. If you are around someone with a PSP just play Lumines for 10 minutes and you’ll get it.

As far as the others I haven’t gotten deep enough to fully recommend them. It’s probably best to skip Need for Speed even if you loved the console versions. They simply couldn’t keep the framerate up. It’s kind of a sorry port. Wait for GT4 Mobile instead or get Ridge Racer.

If you want high speed racing, go for Wipeout pure… You don’t get custom cars, but you did get well executed high speed racing.

As far as video, PSP Video 9 rocks. People are floored by the quality of the video on the PSP. It’s a killer app by itself. The drawback is that those damn Memory Stick Duo’s have an unreasonable price tag right now. Word is that PSP’s are still available.

If you are in SF looking for Lumines, try the EB Games on Powell. The playstation store and Virgin are sold out.

Update: check out Kobus’ 360 blog for a pic of the PSP playing video

Paul Graham’s Return of the Mac

This was on slashdot today. Paul’s essay on the “Return of the Mac”.

Basically, he’s saying it’s good. With OSX and Apple’s product design great hackers are moving to Macs. With the hackers comes the great software that hackers produce and with that will come the regular people.

I’m a new Mac user myself not a returnee, and I think he’s absolutely right for the most part. It’s obvious there are great programmers writing apps for OSX (look at Quicksilver and Adium) and I think Paul’s reasons for why are true. We programmers love it. Some of the smartest, most successful programmers I know have switched to powerbooks. Others would like to but can’t yet switch because the market for their products is primarily PCs.

I also have a theory that it’s hard to make ncie things when you work in a shitty environment. Desolation and frustration don’t inspire creativity and for programmers our environment is the machine. We live “in” there and it’s nice to live in OSX. It’s familiar (*nix tools) and also pleasant (stable, nice fonts, some well designed apps). The only OS I liked as much was NextStep.

What I think he might be wrong about is whether the people in the “middle” will come to the hardware. Aside from the core of Mac faithful, Apple has what he calls the low-end users and now is getting the high-end users. I’m a little uncertain about the “middle” of the road user coming to Apple. I hope he’s right.

Yahoo 360 moblogs!!!

I must have missed this last night, but blogging text and pictures from your phone is really easy. Just send it to yahoo via email or mms.

check out my first moblog post

Permalink too… pretty sweet.

Yahoo 360, no javascript

I like the edit this “live” page concept. I think it’s where blogging needs to go.

What I would love to see is if they took some client code from Flickr allowed you to edit the page without click throughs to another page.

So all the edits would be done in-page without a page reload using javascript. If you have a Flickr account, it’s how editing discriptions is done.

Yahoo 360 launches

So thanks to a friend I have a Yahoo 360 account. Taking a quick look around, I’m a bit confused.

They obviously decided to stick with their existing interaction model, where most actions are accomplished by clicking a link to another page. No fancy google-style fancy javascript.

The bulk of it reminds me of a friendster/orkut deal just a little cleaner. The upload photos section actually takes you to a page showing everything in your Y! photo album. Permissions for viewing things are tied to your friends list and to Y! messenger.

They support RSS 2.0 (good)

You can restrict access to your blog to just your friends.

No templates yet. So far you don’t have much control over the look but I expect that to change soon.

There is a messaging system outside of Y! mail. 360 has it’s own system.

Biggest focus seems to be on Social Networking and the ability to have a blog restricted to you locale on the social network.

Too tired to play with it more…

check out this link it shows a sample page with some descriptions of the features:
Yahoo 360

I think they are doing good stuff there and hopefully we’ll see a nice tight integration between my favorite Yahoo property (flickr) and 360. Then perhaps I won’t have to host my stupid : )