A Series of Tubes

My MacBook Pro arrived on my doorstep two years ago, yesterday. She is still an amazing computer, and I use her every day. I’m learning to program in Objective C now, so I can make better use of her. The only things I have changed since buying her are an upgrade to Leopard and an upgrade to 2gb of ram instead of 1. Anyway, Happy Birthday, Eve!

My MacBook Pro arrived on my doorstep two years ago, yesterday. She is still an amazing computer, and I use her every day. I’m learning to program in Objective C now, so I can make better use of her. The only things I have changed since buying her are an upgrade to Leopard and an upgrade to 2gb of ram instead of 1. Anyway, Happy Birthday, Eve!

I noticed today that the official Firefox icon is still using the old 128×128 resolution, rather than the new 512×512 icon size that is the standard in OS X Leopard and I think Windows Vista too. Since the Firefox icon is a vector image, it is (in theory) infinitely scalable, so it should be a breeze to make a larger one. In light of that fact, I made a larger icon, which you can download here.

For comparison, here’s the new icon compared to the old one, at 512×512 resolution (click for full resolution):

To use the new icon, you can get a program like Candybar, or simply ctrl+click on firefox (in the /Applications folder), choose Show Package Contents, and replace the icon in the Resources folder.

Electronic Arts released the Spore Creature Creator on Tuesday. The Creature Creator serves as a sort of demo for the full Spore game (which is currently marked for a September release), and also as a stand-alone product from Spore, because it is actually really fun. I downloaded the Trial Edition (yes, there is a full version and a trial version of what is basically a glorified Spore demo) on Wednesday, and with the help of a friend, I have created 7 creatures so far. Here are a few examples:

You can see all the creatures I’ve made so far, as well as all the creatures I will make in the future, on my page at the Sporepedia.

Anyway, the trial edition is nice, but it only has 25% of the parts that the full version has, and since the full one is only $9.95, I figured I’d download it. But wait, what’s this? It seems that EA only has the direct download option for PC users. How odd, considering that EA is offering the game for both Mac and PC platforms.

Sure, I can buy the boxed version of the Creature Creator here, for both Mac and PC, but then I’d have to pay (and wait) for shipping, something I don’t want to have to do. That plus my disc drive is broken, so physical media is useless to me. EA, why can’t I have a direct download for the Mac version? This is just stupid. It’s not like Macs can’t download things that PCs can….

After about 10 minutes of googling, I found Game Tree Online, a site devoted to direct downloads of Mac games. They have Spore imagery all over their site, but the Creature Creator download for Mac is listed as ‘coming soon’, with a pre-order available. I don’t really understand why, because if I remember correctly, EA had said that it was going to release Spore for PC and Mac at the same time, and I would tend to assume that that meant the Creautre Creator as well, in a format that’s actually useful. I’ll get it when it comes out, but I’m disappointed, EA.

Electronic Arts released the Spore Creature Creator on Tuesday. The Creature Creator serves as a sort of demo for the full Spore game (which is currently marked for a September release), and also as a stand-alone product from Spore, because it is actually really fun. I downloaded the Trial Edition (yes, there is a full version and a trial version of what is basically a glorified Spore demo) on Wednesday, and with the help of a friend, I have created 7 creatures so far. Here are a few examples:

You can see all the creatures I’ve made so far, as well as all the creatures I will make in the future, on my page at the Sporepedia.

Anyway, the trial edition is nice, but it only has 25% of the parts that the full version has, and since the full one is only $9.95, I figured I’d download it. But wait, what’s this? It seems that EA only has the direct download option for PC users. How odd, considering that EA is offering the game for both Mac and PC platforms.

Sure, I can buy the boxed version of the Creature Creator here, for both Mac and PC, but then I’d have to pay (and wait) for shipping, something I don’t want to have to do. That plus my disc drive is broken, so physical media is useless to me. EA, why can’t I have a direct download for the Mac version? This is just stupid. It’s not like Macs can’t download things that PCs can….

After about 10 minutes of googling, I found Game Tree Online, a site devoted to direct downloads of Mac games. They have Spore imagery all over their site, but the Creature Creator download for Mac is listed as ‘coming soon’, with a pre-order available. I don’t really understand why, because if I remember correctly, EA had said that it was going to release Spore for PC and Mac at the same time, and I would tend to assume that that meant the Creautre Creator as well, in a format that’s actually useful. I’ll get it when it comes out, but I’m disappointed, EA.

Today, Mozilla released Firefox 3, the newest version of the best browser on the planet. They’re trying to break a world record, so head over and download it now!