The future of gaming?

I've recently been finding out about a cloud gaming service called OnLive. I first saw it a few years ago, and was completely blown away. This sort of thing is supposed to be impossible. The service seemingly broke the laws of physics! If you watch the genius of Steve Perlman giving an iTunesU lecture it all makes sense.

OnLive runs Windows games (and potentially games for other systems in the future) in the cloud, in a data centre on very powerful gaming rigs. After downloading a small 1mb piece of client software available for Mac(OSX), PC(Windows), PC(Linux-soon?) and even your TV through an inexpensive micro console, you are able to play any game on any system.

The virtual game runs on a virtual system on a virtual graphics card streamed to any system, it uses custom hardware in the data centre to compress the video signal taking only 1ms per frame! This means you don't need a powerful computer or console to run a game, you never have to upgrade expensive graphics cards, there is nothing to download, and your games are saved in the cloud with your OnLive account. You can even post video of your gaming prowess instantly without the need to make or edit video files. What OnLive have achieved is truly staggering!

If you can do this in the cloud, you could do anything!

I can start a game on my iMac, play a bit more on my Sony Laptop, move to the TV and play some more, carry on where I left off on a netbook that has a graphics card and processor that would normally not be able to run the game at all. There is an OnLive viewer application available for the iPad, iPhone, and Android, which will soon also be able to play games. Imagine playing a Windows game on the iPad which looks like it is playing on a top of the range very expensive PC gaming rig!

Check out this video of my driving skills playing DiRT3 on the Mac using the OnLive service. This game is not available for the Mac, but runs like a dream. The frame rate in the video looks fairly low, but that is only because I am recording the whole screen at 30fps. The actual fps is very smooth, even on my modest broadband setup.

The OnLive cloud gaming service is coming to the UK 22nd of September!

Trying to play a game

Men are simple creatures... All I wanted was to play a game, starting Half Life 2 episode 1 after recently completing Half Life 2, arguably the best game ever made!




I was using a Windows 7 system, Steam, and The Orange Box.

Unfortunately I had to earn the right to game, by going through a torturous process..

1. Boot.
2. Windows decided it was not registered, I had to install the Juniper VPN client to connect to our licensing server.
3. Virus killer updates were needed.
4. Adobe reader decided that it needed to patch itself.
5. Steam wanted to update, which is fair enough but it initially refused to connect to my account.
6. Then there are the usual windows updates and dropbox syncing.

Windows isn't doing anything wrong but it took 30 minutes to be able to start a gaming session. I only had an hour :( perhaps a computer should be used for computing and a games machine should be used for gaming?

Now that steam is available on the Mac, I think I'll be swapping to that in future as when it boots it only needs to do steps 5 and 6 above, and it does this quicker than windows. I'll also be gaming more on the iPad playing stunning games like RealRacing2HD.

I am also very interested in the OnLive service, cross platform cloud gaming, if my broadband speed can keep up.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

History about to repeat itself?

When I was using a PowerPC based Mac, I could have spit my biscuit across the floor in disbelief as I watched a particular Apple keynote. In said keynote Steve Jobs said that Apple had secretly been working on a version of OSX running on Intel processors for 5 years!

Nobody saw it coming!

As is the way for almost all Apple products, the transition from one CPU to a completely different one was slick, seamless, and incredibly well done. Now all Macs run on Intel processors, which allow them to do fantastic virtualisation and even run windows natively. In fact many people (myself included) think that Windows runs best on the Mac.

Why do I bring this up?

In the desktop / laptop world Intel is king, however they have not had as much luck in the mobile market, where ARM is the most popular processor maker, powering devices like the iPad, although Apple actually use their own CPU that uses Arm technology. Rumours abound that the next version of Windows (in a very familiar sounding move) will work on both intel and ARM!

Macs can now easily run Windows. It will be a huge shock if one day, it may be possible to run Windows natively on an iPad. As more iOS technologies move into OSX, will this be mirrored by Windows mobile technologies moving into windows to create the next mobile friendly windows?

There are even rumours that an Arm version of OSX exists. Where does that leave intel?

More to the point, would anyone want to run windows on an iPad, even if we could?

Apple feedback

Apple have had a feedback form for a number of years at http://www.apple.com/feedback

Here is my latest feature request for iPad
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I have had a stunning idea, it would be great for users, and be very easy to implement.

iTunes has a share photos on your network feature. Allow the photos app on iPad to connect to this, then allow ratings and comments to be added that sync back to your master iphoto library on your Mac.

This will be a killer iOS / Mac integration feature that would be stunningly useful for photographers. Get to it, cool Apple dudes!
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Let's see if this gets into iOS 5. They have implemented a few of my previous suggestions already!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Mobile Safari bookmarks tip

No idea how I missed this, as I've been using mobile safari on iPhone and iPad for ages. I have just noticed that the bookmarks bar appears when tapping on the search or address bar. This is particularly useful as I sync all my browsers with the stunningly useful xmarks browser addon. I then sync my iPhone and iPad with safari.




This means that every time I sync my iPhone or iPad I always have my latest bookmarks. Also every time I change or add a bookmark on any computer it appears on any other.

Awesome!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Magic mouse tips

I am a fan of Apple's Magic Mouse. It has some great features, but it has a serious flaw for anyone that needs a middle mouse button. It doesn't have one!

I use a middle mouse button extensively with applications such as Google's SketchUP 3D software. There is a solution for magic mouse users to get their middle mouse button, in the shape of MagicPrefs. This application is so good that it should be thought of as a must download for all Mac users with a magic mouse. And it's free!

My second tip is to find out how much battery juice you have remaining. Simply hover your mouse over the entry for Apple's wireless mouse on the Bluetooth menulette.







My last tip is the purchase of Apple's new (ish) battery charger. What's so special about a battery charger? Well this little beauty includes 6 of the best rechargeable batteries you can buy. While many lesser batteries discharge easily over a month, Apple's rechargeable batteries stay fully charged for a year!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Just two types of Operating System

I was having an animated discussion with a couple of collegues the other day. We were chatting about the relative merrits of OS's, as you do...

Some good points were made by all,including "the iPhone is too expensive for what it is", iOS is not as customisable as other Os's, and "iOS is too locked down, I bought the device, it should be my choice what I run on it"...

Then I said something controversal! I said that there are just two types of OS in the world. There are Windows based OS's or Unix based OS's. I then followed this up with the even more controversial statement, that if you count up every electronic item in your house that uses an operating system and made a nice little table, you would find that devices running Unix based OS's outnumber devices running Windows based OS's.

Devices such as a dell laptop (windows 7), and dreamcast games console (windows CE) are windows based. whareas devices such as Mac laptop (OSX), and Playstation games console are Unix based. Some devices run an embedded OS stored on chips instead of discs. I've not done any detailed research to find out what OS my washing machine runs for instance, but these embedded OS's are usually derrived from freely available Unix varients.

OSX arguably the most advanced OS on the market, was itself based on the free verion of BSD called freeBSD, which was itself based on the original Unix.

As a side note, many people don't know what OS their devices are running. I met an extreme Windows fan while on holiday, who insisted that he would never think about using any computer that didn't use windows. I had to point out to him (sorry couldn't resist it) that his phone (a pocket computer after all) was running Android, a mobile version of Unix ;)

So here is a little chart I made showing the devices I have (minus the washing machine), and the type of OS that runs on them. I wonder what other people's charts would look like?