Monkey Island 4 Graphics

After completing Monkey Island 2 and 3 from the collectors edition boxed set I bought last month I have begun to dig into the 4th in the series, Escape from Monkey Island.

Initially I was looking forward to the 3d graphics and new UI, however after the gorgeousness of Curse of Monkey Islands hand drawn 2d, the 3d was blocky and edgy, I was disheartened to say the least, until I decided to force anti-aliasing on in the nVidia driver, and suddenly the graphics became so so silky smooth.

If you're playing EFMI and are dissapointed in the graphics, go to your display properties and force your graphics driver into the highest Anti-Aliasing mode possible, its a dream.

The clothed baby

Raymond Chen has an interesting blog post regarding how software needs to be tolerant to various cultures around the world, citing an example of the two different Windows 95 box holograms, one featuring a topless baby, another featuring a clothed baby. Aparently the topless baby was offensive to a certain unnnamed government.

Aparently topless babies can almost be considered a collectors item. Unfortunately my Windows 95 box has a clothed baby :( Ohwell no riches for me!

Out of interest, my Windows ME box, and my Windows 2k box both have no hologram. I wonder if that is a consequence of the above? Any idea on that Ray?

Thankfully where I work we haven't ran into these issues yet (other than currency display problems). Interesting stuff!

Using Feedster to keep updated

I know this is probably not news to most people, however for those who don't know, Feedster provides an excellent mechanism for keeping updated on what the blog world is saying about things that interest you in your standard RSS aggregator (yes, including mReader).

When you perform a search in Feedster, you get provided with an XML link to those search results. By using that XML link as a feed in your RSS aggregator you will get new posts that match your search criteria appear in your aggregator whenever feedster indexes. Feedster even provides quick subscription buttons for common desktop aggregators to the right side of your search results.

For example, if you want to know when I release a new version of mReader, aswell as whenever someone writes something about mReader then you can perform the following steps

1. Go to Feedster
   
2. In the search box, type "mReader".
   
3. When the results page appears, right click on the XML button, and select your browsers "Copy Link Address" button. (link address will be http://www.feedster.com/rss.php?q=mReader&sort=date&ie=UTF-8)
   
4. Switch to your RSS aggregator, and create a new feed, using the address you copied to your clipboard.

It's as simple as that. You should now have a new feed in your RSS aggregator, and it should be titled something similar to "Feedster RSS Search Results for mReader". Whenever someone writes something new about mReader, you will know about it. Note that this also works with mReader itsself. You can enter the XML link provided by Feedster as a new feed in mReader itsself, now whenever you load the "Feedster RSS Search Results for mReader" in mReader, you will have the latest 10 things written about mReader.

Thanks Scott&Co. Thanks for providing us with an awesome tool!

mReader 1.01

mReader 1.01 is now ready for download. You can download both the JAR and the JAD file. Note that I don't think the Jad file I supply will work directly with the Sun Jar->JRC PalmOS converter. As with the previous version, point your wireless device's web browser to http://mobile.markallanson.net/ to download it using OTA.

Changes in this version:

• Feed support attempts to be really generic, so most RSS and similar formats should work (any RSS version, RDF, etc).
  
• More tolerant to RSS feeds. You should never get an empty list of feeds anymore.
  
• Formatting of basic HTML commands (ordered / unordered lists, paragraphs, line breaks) and &..; pairs.
  
• Threading, hence progress windows for feed downloads.
  
• Revised and improved menus to make feed navigation easier (Note that the UI has been tested on the Sun wireless toolkit default emulators, the UI may be a pain on your individual device, if it is, tell me whats wrong).
  
• Out of Memory Error handling so you know if a feed is to big to view.
  
• Feeds are now sorted in alphabetical order.
  
• You can delete a feed from your feeds list.
  
• Importing an OPML twice will no longer create duplicate entries in the feed list.
  

Things that are still annoying:

• Still No progress bar on importing an OPML.
  
• 50 entry limits still apply across the board.
  

All my testing has been done on the default emulators supplied by Sun with their Wireless toolkit, and the Nokia 7210 and 6310i emulators.

If you have any problems or feedback please email me.

mReader PRC for PalmOS Midp

Thanks to Omer Trajman there is now an mReader 1.0 binary (PRC) for PalmOS devices. This can be downloaded onto a PalmOS handheld running Sun's J2ME VM.

If you have a PalmOS Device and want to use mReader on it, Check it out.

Omer, Thanks again!

Progress Update

I've been doing some work on mReader and should have a version 1.1 ready to release sometime during the next week. The following things have been addressed so far:

1. More tolerant to post content in general. You shouldn't get any more empty lists of posts when you try to load a feed.
2. an attempt to translate some HTML tags and &...; codes into something readable on Midp devices (ie lists are given asterix's etc).
3. Proper Progress Indicators and Threading to make the device look like it is doing something, not just telling you it is doing something.
4. An out of memory exception catcher so that you know if a feed is too big. (ie .Net Notes)

If anyone has some feature requests give me a holler.

American Pie 3 @ Gold Class

Going to see American Pie 3 (chuckle) at Greater Union Gold Class cinema's tonight.. This experience better be worth my hard earned $35!

If you don't know, gold class is a special cinema experience where you get served alcohol and other such luxuries in comfy armchairs with <40 people in the cinema!

Have had some requests (and complaints) about mReader. Will get to these this weekend, promise! its all just been a b it hectic lately

Monkey Island Collectors Edition

I bought the Monkey Island Collectors Edition set last week and its consumed all my free computer time since! I played the first monkey island game in 1992 when I got my first ever IBM Compatible PC, 486 DX2 66, and loved it. It came bundled with the Creative CDROM drive.

12 Years later I still love the game enough to play the rest of the series. Such a bargin! $50 for 4 games, Monkey Island 1-4. It has to be one of the most humorous game series ever made.

Hint/Tip: If you want to play Monkey Island 2 on newer PC's that don't have hardware adlib compatibilty then check out VDMSound. Its not just a sound emulator, but an entire Virtual Machine for older DOS based games that simulates Emm386, Sound, VESA and more. It works like a dream with Monkey Island 2.