ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • The SimCity Debacle: A Case for EA

    The SimCity Debacle: A Case for EA

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    I was one of the nerd horde desperately following news of the new SimCity’s release. Eating up every glassbox demo video on youtube. Visiting the website daily to check the release date. When March 5th rolled around, I convinced my wife to let me install Windows on her MacBook Pro and sat there eagerly awaiting my download.

    That was 10 days ago.

    Today, to put it lightly, the game is not living up to expectations.

    A short list of the reported issues with the game:

    • Server capacity issues leaving game unplayable.
    • Always-On “DRM” annoying gamers.
    • Broken AI, causing serious gameplay issues.
    • Broken simulation, in the form of incorrect population reports.
    • Map size too small.

    And on and on and on. Take a look at the unofficial subreddit for more details if you’re so inclined.

    Many redditors and gamers in general have called foul, accusing EA and Maxis of lying and deceiving customers in an attempt to boast sales. Frankly those claims are not unfounded. EA has a history of poor customer service, etc.

    But what if EA simply under estimated the number of people interested in the game. What if EA has no clue who buys their games? This would explain the utter brokeness of the servers at launch.

    It might explain why they decided to release such a buggy game. If they completely failed to understand how many people would buy the game, they may have thought it would take much longer for the bugs to surface. They might have assumed they had more time to address the bugs.

    The always-online gameplay model allows EA to iterate. If AI is broken, they can fix it, release a patch and instantaneously fix everyone’s experience. Iteration is good.

     

  • Google Reader is Dead. NewsWorthy.ca to the rescue!

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    NewsWorthy.ca NewsWorthy.ca is a project I’ve been working on for the past few months. In a nutshell, it’s a better way to get all the latest local news in one place. Sites like Reddit and Google News are a good way to get the “best” or “most important” stories of the day. But they sometimes fail at surfacing up to date, breaking news. If you’re a news hound like me, I think you’ll find NewsWorthy quite useful.

    With Google announcing their intentions to shut down Google Reader, today seemed like the perfect day to pull off the “alpha” wrapper and release it to the wild!

    At the moment, NewsWorthy only supports Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. I’m looking for the best ((“best” means, updated frequently and intensely focused on local news)) news source in every Canadian city. If you’d like to recommend sources in your city, feel free to email me.

  • Mailbox.app – First Impressions

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    I got access to mailbox.app last night around midnight, have been using it all day.

    My very brief review:

    • The ability to mark emails to “read later” seems clever and works fairly well. It’s smart enough to know if it’s 1am and you tell it to read an email tomorrow, you actually mean at the beginning of the next day. All “later” email get’s placed in a gmail label [mailbox]/later.
    • The short/long swipe interface is cute and works fairly well. But get’s tedious with multiple emails. The app needs a better way to preform actions on multiple emails at once.
    • Overall the UI is great, in general.
    • I noticed that the pending email badge count is actually the number of email threads in your inbox, instead of the number of unread messages. This is acts as a great little nudge to inbox zero.

    That’s all for now.