Oh no… Another Facebook game to become obsessed with. Yesterday I couldn’t find anything to do with my boredom so I did the unthinkable and started another addictive Zynga game: PetVille. I had no intention of doing anything but seeing what it was, but now I have myself sucked into it. I have still yet to find the point in the game. Maybe there just isn’t one. Is there really a point to any of these Facebook games? All you do in FarmVille is manage a virtual farm. In Cafe World you tend to your imaginary cafe that doesn’t actually produce any sort of real currency. For the past 24 hours I have been trying to do everything I can to earn money and buy these nice speakers for my TV so that Jongo (my pet) can crank up the volume and have wild dance parties. Pathetic I know. Oh look! I have to refill his food bowl now!
Oh how much I hate you BlackBerry. 5 battery pulls in just 30 minutes? I’m surprised I was even able to do that many considering it takes 10 minutes just to turn the phone on! When I buy a really nice expensive phone I expect some quality stuff, but what I get with BlackBerry is far from quality! I have never seen another phone just decide when it wants to let you answer calls or receive messages. Shouldn’t I be able to answer my phone when someone calls? It’s as if the phone is holding a gun to my head telling me that if I answer it will pull the trigger. It’s ridiculous. I kinda want just a normal phone. Or an iPhone. That’d be nice…
So the school added a nice new feature this year… WiFi!!! It took them a good 7-8 weeks to get it set up but I finally noticed the signal last Friday. I found FCSFaculty and FCSGuest. I figured that only teachers could get on the faculty one so I tried my school login on the guest network. Failed. This morning Andrew told me that I needed to log in with my school account on the faculty network and it would work. Sure enough I tried it and I was able to get on everything. No websites are blocked or anything. It’s a pretty nice discovery. Now I actually have something to do during school!
Tweetie 2 was released yesterday afternoon. This update (sort of) has been anticipated for quite a while now. I had been looking forward to it because I loved the original Tweetie application so much. So when I heard the news I decided to give it a try. There were a few things that caught my eye but a few things that I didn’t like.
The biggest downside of this update is the fact that it’s not actually an update. This is a whole new application that has to be re-purchased even if you had already purchased the original Tweetie app. This seemed a bit ridiculous to me. It would be okay as long as there was a substantial amount of things added/changed in the new version, but there really wasn’t that much different about it. There are a few interface changes and some new features but not enough to make it a whole new app.
The second thing that I didn’t like was the fact that they Atebits decided to take away the multiple themes. They now limit you to the old default theme. I was personally a fan of the chat bubbles theme in the old Tweetie and was very disappointed to see that missing in the new version. Aside from those things, Tweetie 2 has some great new features and still gets a 5/5 star rating from me. Leave a comment and let me know what you think about it.
Yesterday I kept refreshing my SocialVibe tab hoping to see the long-awaited new interface to appear. Midnight approached and I figured that they had delayed it by a day. Little did I know, the SV team was at work all night to make the changes. When I checked my computer before school this morning I saw a new tweet from SocialVibe in Tweetie. It read “It’s Here! It’s Finally Here!: It took us all day (and almost all night) but the new and improved SocialVibe.co..http://bit.ly/g7F5m.” I clicked the link and fell in love. The new interface is quite awesome and very simple. It’s much improved from the old dark one. There are just a few more bugs for the SocialVibe team to work out then it will be perfect!
But they aren’t that great! I was kinda hoping that this year Apple would do something amazing with the iPod line but they really didn’t. They kept everything relatively the same except for a few small changes. There are a few things that I like about what they have changed but also a few things that I really disliked.
First of all, the only noticeably different thing is the nano. I personally like the overall design and the change to shiny aluminum but there was no need to make the screen taller. It was already borderline too tall but they had to go and make it even taller. It seems out of proportion and top-heavy. It looks almost ridiculous against the click wheel. The second thing they added was the video camera. I think this is absolutely ridiculous. The idea of a camera on an iPod nano just doesn’t work. The nano is just so small that a decent camera can’t fit inside of it. Now they have some crappy 320×240 video shooting camera. It surprised me that they chose to only let it take video. I’m sure they could have at least gotten a 1.3 megapixel camera on there to take pictures.
The new touch is visually unchanged. They updated the software a bit and added the ability to play HD movies. This was most likely an attempt to fight off the upcoming Zune HD. The processor in the touch was upgraded and it now supports Open GL but that means nothing to most people. I’m very disappointed that Apple decided to skip the camera in the touch. If they thought to put one in the nano, why not the touch? They could have put a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus just like the iPhone but they didn’t. They also could have added a microphone considering the growing amount of microphone-requiring applications in the App Store. They seemed to leave that out as well. The lack of these features is holding me back from buying the new touch to replace my old second gen.
The shuffles were all updated to the buttonless shuffles. They look nice but lack usability. That’s really all there is to the shuffle. The last change they made was to iTunes and the iTunes store. iTunes 9 is loaded with new features and a polished-up interface. The iTunes store also has a new interface. It’s a bit hard to get used to but I really like what they have done. I like the ability to play the songs right where you are in the store with the small play thumbnail rather than having to go to the album page. It’s a bit more like the iTunes store on the iPhone. There’s a new Genius feature called Genius Mixes. This automatically takes your most listened to songs and artists and combines them into genre-similar groups and makes a Genius playlist off of that. It’s a pretty good idea to me.
