Telltale Games Cheats Strong Bad Fans, Mac Gamers

Strong Bad gives Telltales Games the "Double Deuce"

I was so excited when Telltale Games announced it was going to bring its games to the Mac.  I only knew about the company because it developed Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (SBCG4AP), a popular PC and WiiWare game based on the Homestar Runner universe.  I was thrilled to find out that Telltale Games was even going to let people vote on which game would be the second one to get ported to Mac (the first was Tales of Monkey Island, which was released simultaneously with the Mac announcement).  Strong Bad should have been a shoo-in; it was up against Sam & Max and Wallace & Gromit, and early numbers indicated that the latter wasn't even close to getting the most votes.

Naturally I was dismayed when the announcement came that Sam & Max had won (by a very, very slim margin; I checked the votes earlier in the day).  But it wasn't a fair fight at all.  The good folks at Telltale Games made a critical error in the voting form; Sam & Max (which was listed first) had its vote button preselected, so anyone who accidentally submitted the form without first changing their selection would unintentionally cast a vote for Sam & Max.  But that wasn't the only problem.  To make matters worse, the form only allowed one vote per IP address.  If you accidentally voted for the default selection instead of the one you really wanted, you had no way of changing your vote or casting an additional vote for the one you had intended to vote for.  Furthermore, there was no way to check on the current status of the poll before voting, so some people probably cast their one and only vote for Sam & Max when they expected to be able to go back and cast a vote after finding out who was winning so far.

What about households with more than one gamer?  Since only one person per IP address could vote, whoever got there first stole the opportunity from everyone else who lived in the same home, worked at the same company, or otherwise shared the same IP address with other gamers.  I understand trying to prevent clever individuals from stuffing the ballot box using methods such as deleting cookies or voting with multiple browsers or multiple computers, but one vote per IP address simply wasn't a fair way to do things because it prevented many people from being able to cast a vote at all.  And what's more, for most home users it's actually fairly trivial to change one's IP address and vote again, so even restricting the poll to one vote per IP address couldn't really have prevented determined individuals from voting as many times as they wanted to.

Perhaps prefilling the voting form wasn't an oversight after all.  Might it have been a devious plot by the company (or at least the webmaster) to give their favorite game the edge it needed to win the vote?  Maybe Telltale Games had already been working on porting Sam & Max to Mac and didn't want to put it on hold to work on Strong Bad, so they decided to give Sam & Max a little boost.  Whatever the case, Telltale Games did a disservice to Mac gamers with their loaded poll and overly restrictive measures to try to prevent ballot box stuffing.

Thanks a lot, Telltale Games.  I mean, seriously, thank you for turning to the light side and committing to Mac development, and thanks in advance for eventually bringing Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People to the Mac, but no thanks for your bias towards that other game.

Oh, and when SBCG4AP finally comes out for Mac, I want a review copy.  Thanks, ol' pals!  =)

First Impressions of Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard

Yesterday I went to the Apple Store for the launch of Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard. Here's a video with some of my initial thoughts and notes, followed by a few additional details.

You can get Snow Leopard at a discount from Amazon through this link.  As of when I'm posting this, it's only $25 with free shipping!

Following are some of the notes I took at the Apple Store (some of which made the cut to this video).

Apps that I tested and found to still work fine in Snow Leopard:

• Invisibility Toggler (my app)
• 7zX
• Chicken of the VNC
  
• EasyFind

Security notes:

• Safari: the Status Bar is still hidden by default
• Finder: file name extensions are still hidden by default
• CoreTypes now detects two specific types of Mac malware when downloaded from specific applications such as Safari—read more about this at my security blog—but all other malware is not detected, nor is the eicar.org test file

Other random stuff:

• New autocorrection feature: In TextEdit, if you type "eicar" it autocorrects to vicar, even if you put it in quotation marks. Weird. Apparently autocorrect is a new feature, but it's not very smart. Autocorrect should fix typos, not completely change the word. The letter e and the letter v are far away from each other on the keyboard. Autocorrect is interesting, though; it automatically fixes misspelled words like keybord, keybored, keybaord, keyborad, even kybord, etc. It doesn't fix certain common typos like accidentally hitting the m key when trying to hit the comma, such as keyboardm, housem, applem, etc.
• Screenshots are still saved on the desktop, but now the filename makes it clear that the file is a screenshot and gives it a name based on the date and time it was taken, e.g. "Screen shot 2009-08-28 at 9.23.21 AM". It's saved as a .PNG file.
• Wi-Fi signal strength now shows up in the AirPort menu for each access point, not just the one to which you're currently connected
• Trimming movies is super easy in the new QuickTime Player; it works very similarly to the iPhone 3GS
• The final build of 10.6 is Build 10A432
• There's no visible difference between .RTF and .RTFD files in the Finder; two files in the same folder that in reality have different names look like they both have the same name because the file extension is hidden by default
• I don't know yet whether iChat videoconferencing works between 10.5 and 10.6 because I didn't have a 10.5 machine in the store with which to test it. Video chat is not possible between 10.4 and 10.5, but I'm hopeful that 10.5 and 10.6 may be compatible

My related sites:

• Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks: http://social.thejoshmeister.com
• Check out my computer security blog at http://security.thejoshmeister.com
• Subscribe to my podcasts at http://podcasts.thejoshmeister.com

Google Picasa: How to Fix the "Localhost" Image Problem

Picasa is Google's photo management application for Mac, Windows, and Linux. (I've always thought that Picasa for Mac was kind of redundant seeing how iPhoto comes preinstalled on every new Apple computer, but I digress.) Today my wife installed Picasa on our iMac because her sister, who uses Picasa on Windows, recommended it for creating photo collages for her blog. I got my first taste of the program when my wife informed me that when she tried to post the photo collage she'd created, she could see it in her browser, but her sister couldn't see it when she viewed the blog on her PC. Naturally, since I'm the one-man tech support staff for our home, I had to investigate.

I quickly found the problem. I opened Picasa and found the collage that my wife had made. When I clicked on the BlogThis! button, then selected the blog, layout, and image size I wanted and then clicked Continue, I was given something that looked like this:

<div style='text-align:center;margin:0px auto 10px;'><a href='http://localhost:63927/748c32b0f480bb22083a99404387413a/image/60488be178128f6b.jpg'><img src='http://localhost:63927/748c32b0f480bb22083a99404387413a/image/60488be178128f6b.jpg?size=400' border='0' alt='' /></a> </div>

My wife is savvy enought to know that that's HTML code, and she knew how to copy and paste it into her blog, which she did. When I looked at the code, I instantly saw what the problem was: the server on which the images were supposed to be located was "localhost".

For those who might be unfamiliar with the term, localhost is a fancy way of saying "the computer I'm currently using." Web browsers can use localhost (or the IP address 127.0.0.1) as a way of pointing to the selfsame computer to view a locally hosted image, for example. That's what Picasa was doing, and why my wife saw the picture in her own browser but everyone else on the Web couldn't see the image in her blog post.

So here's the solution: I clicked "Save As Draft" in the Picasa: BlogThis! window, then I went to my Web browser and pulled up the Blogger Dashboard, and then I clicked on the "Edit Posts" link for that blog. Voilà! The code was no longer pointing to localhost; Picasa had actually uploaded the image this time, so the code was legit. Here's what it looked like:

<div style='text-align:center;margin:0px auto 10px;'><a href='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LO2ns0hgXtQ/SgkVHZZksqI/AAAAAAAAAPo/zJDtQ_xMyxU/s1600-h/Halloween+Fun+with+the+Taylors.jpg'><img src='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LO2ns0hgXtQ/SgkVHZZksqI/AAAAAAAAAPo/zJDtQ_xMyxU/s400/Halloween+Fun+with+the+Taylors.jpg' border='0' alt='' /></a> </div><div style='clear:both; text-align:CENTER'><a href='http://picasa.google.com/blogger/' target='ext'><img src='http://photos1.blogger.com/pbp.gif' alt='Posted by Picasa' style='border: 0px none ; padding: 0px; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial;' align='middle' border='0' /></a></div>

Whoa, that's a lot more code than before. Apparently, Google really wants the whole world to know that you're using Picasa, because it sticks a little Picasa logo after your image—without asking for your permission to do so. If the logo annoys you, it's easy enough to remove; just copy everything up to and including the first </div> (right about in the middle of all that code). Then from your Blogger Dashboard, click on Edit for the blog post to which you want to add the image, and paste the code. In this example, the code I pasted looked like so:

<div style='text-align:center;margin:0px auto 10px;'><a href='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LO2ns0hgXtQ/SgkVHZZksqI/AAAAAAAAAPo/zJDtQ_xMyxU/s1600-h/Halloween+Fun+with+the+Taylors.jpg'><img src='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LO2ns0hgXtQ/SgkVHZZksqI/AAAAAAAAAPo/zJDtQ_xMyxU/s400/Halloween+Fun+with+the+Taylors.jpg' border='0' alt='' /></a> </div>

That's all, folks! There might be a couple more steps in there depending on whether or not you're already logged into Blogger within the Picasa program, etc. I should also mention that if you want to create a brand new blog post with an image from Picasa, you can just delete everything after the first </div> and then finish your blog post right there in Picasa (just click "Publish Post" when you're done), or you can Save As Draft and then finish the post in your browser if you prefer.

Also, I suspect that these instructions should work on Linux or Windows as well. A Google search for picasa localhost brings up results from people using both platforms who had the same problems and couldn't figure out the solution (hence my decision to blog about this rather than just show my wife how to fix the issue).

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