Screenshot of Flick Golf

Flick Golf is the third iPhone release from my employer, Full Fat, and the first I’ve been involved with. Our first two iPhone titles, Deadball Specialist (featured by Apple in the Rewind 2010 and App Store Essentials), and Zombie Flick received excellent reviews, but neither have achieved the success of Flick Golf.

I designed and created the logo for Flick Golf, along with all the interactive elements of the game UI (buttons, titles, dialogue panels, etc). The wonderful loading screen images and UI backgrounds where created by Heather Sheppard (who you can also find on Twitter masquerading as DinobotTwit), who also painted the beautiful background for this Flick Golf marketing poster (click the image for a huge version):

Swanky marketing poster

It’s very nice to be involved, even if only in a small way, in a product that has been so successful, and received consistently high praise from reviewers and casual gamers alike.

The biggest “gotcha” I’ve encountered is with trying to link applications that I’ve already installed to my App Store account, so that I can get the quick and easy upgrades it makes available (installing and upgrading apps from the App Store is really nice). I found out to my disappointment that there is no way to link applications I’ve paid for without buying them again (Apple really should offer developers a way to allow existing customers to upgrade to the App Store versions for a reduced fee), but I didn’t think I’d have any hassle with free applications. Well, it does work, but I discovered that it’s not necessarily straightforward.

I’m a big fan of the OS X Twitter client Itsy. It’s simple, lightweight and easy to use. I much prefer it to both the official Twitter client, and the other popular Mac OS X app Twitterrific. When I came across it on the App Store, I decided I’d like to download it. I was impressed to see that the App Store app showed it as installed, but less impressed that it offered me no option to overwrite my existing version. A quick Google search told me that I should delete the currently installed version, relaunch the App Store app, and all would be well.

A quick trip to the Terminal to remove the Itsy.app bundle, relaunch the App Store, and oh, it still shows as installed. I tried logging out and back in, but the result was the same. Itsy was gone from my Applications folder, but the App Store app still showed it as installed. A restart led to the same result. Well, that was annoying, but not the end of the world. I logged into my administrator account, and used Titanium’s excellent Onyx to remove the system caches, in case this was causing the problem. I let Onyx do it’s stuff while I continued sorting my bank statements into date order (it’s Tax Return time again). Another restart, then back to the App Store app to discover that, oh for goodness sake, it’s still showing Itsy as installed?

So, I did what I should probably have done in the first place. I ran a Spotlight search for Itsy, and discovered a copy of it still in my Installers folder (I have a habit of dropping apps that I download into this shared folder, so that when I log in as an admin user, I can install them with the correct ownership and permissions settings). I dropped the rogue copy of Itsy into the Trash, relaunched the App Store app, and sure enough, it was now available for free download. A real facepalm moment.

So, the moral of the story is that if you have an application that the App Store insists is installed, make sure you look further than your Applications folder before you resort to drastic measures. But at least I finally got around to doing some overdue clean up on my iMac.

I started work at Full Fat about sixteen months ago, and spent the first nine months wrestling with a Windows XP machine. I tried to like it, really I did, but eventually the boss got fed up of my whinging and sulking, and invested in the mighty Mac Pro that I am using now. Luckily for me, as well as having management willing to invest in relatively expensive hardware to keep me happy, our IT department (Mat) was also willing to support a new OS in what has previously been a Windows only environment. Overall, integrating the Mac into the companies network has been relatively painless. However, there have been a few minor technical hurdles and “gotchas” to overcome, so I thought I would use this blog to outline some of the benefits and burdens of being the only Apple in a company of some thirty plus Windows XP users.

Most of these posts are likely to focus on technical issues, but I thought it might also be nice to discuss some of the perceptual problems that have ensued from being odd man out. Many people still have a distorted view of Apple and the Mac OS; most often the Mac is dismissed as being “too expensive”, or “just a toy”. Some of these attitudes are just leg pulling and banter intended to provoke my inner Apple Evangelist; others arise from a genuine, or even sometimes wilful lack of understanding.

My intention is to be as forthright and unbiased as possible, but as a Mac user for more than 10 years now, there will inevitably be a bias towards my preferred platform. After using a Windows XP as my primary OS every day for some nine months, I feel I can at least attempt an informed comparison between XP and OS X, but I will state right from the outset that, in my experience, and in terms of usability, XP is markedly inferior to OS X. Given that XP is several years old now, this perhaps isn’t surprising, but given the reception Vista has received from the press and from people I know, it doesn’t seem that Microsoft has made up much ground.

And Leopard is only a few weeks away.

Iridium gives all application windows a smooth, uniform theme. I combine this with a 50% grey desktop background to give me a subtle interface that stays out of the way and doesn’t interfere with my colour perception while I’m working. If you are not a fan of Brushed Metal (why would you be?), and miss the uniform look of the Platinum UI, then I recommend giving Iridium a try.

It comes with it’s own installer, and creates a backup copy of the default Aqua theme if you want to restore the “factory” look. I have just installed this new update; everything works perfectly and looks great.

I don’t know if these where also released today, or whether I missed them, but there were also updates to Bridge scripts, Photoshop scripts and InDesign CS2 available. These updates have cured the problems I’ve had switching to the Adobe Help Centre and Adobe Bridge from within Photoshop and Illustrator. The problem affected people like me who (for security or other reasons) work from an account that doesn’t have administrator privileges.

The Wacom drivers have come in for a lot of stick over the years on sites like Version Tracker, but personally I have never had any problems with installation or reliability; especially since Wacom added support for Fast User Switching in the previous release. The latest driver installed without a hitch, and works flawlessly. Perhaps this is because I only use the tablet when I’m working. I don’t use a mouse unless I’m playing the Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo. In that case, I have to unplug the Wacom tablet, as there seems to be a minor but irritating conflict that causes the pointer to suddenly jump across the screen every few minutes. I don’t know if it’s a driver conflict or a hardware problem, but unplugging the Intuos solves the problem and makes playing UT a little less challenging.

If you ever have trouble with the Wacom drivers, I recommend the following trouble shooting steps:

1. Use the Wacom installer to uninstall the current driver.
2. Repair permissions.
3. Restart.
4. Install the new Wacom driver.
5. Enjoy.

The problem was that my G4 was starting to it’s age a little, particularly running heavyweight applications like Creative Suite 2. So, instead of upgrading the whole thing, I decided to drop a little cash on a new video card. After 3 years, I was still using the original 32Mb nVIDIA GeForce4 MX, and my 20″ Cinema Display was stretching to the limits. I expected the 128Mb ATI Radeon 9200 to improve the performance; what I wasn’t prepared for was just how big the speed boost would be.

The new card has transformed the performance of my old workhorse. Switching between applications is almost immediate, and the speed of Exposé is a revelation; so far I haven’t managed to open enough windows to make Exposé pause noticeably. I also get the cube effect when I switch accounts, even with a lot of windows open (something the nVidia card couldn’t manage consistently) The performance improvement has certainly justified the cost of the card, and I’d recommend the ATI card to anyone who wants to squeeze a bit more performance from an older Mac.

I’m even tempted to install a game demo just to put the card through it’s 3D paces.

I maintain two partitions on my “main” hard-drive (I have another physical hard-drive that I use for all my work files). One partition (called “Boot”) holds the operating system, user folders, local mirrors of my web sites, etc. The other partition (called “Storage” – I’m all for exciting volume names) is used for all my downloads; installers, guides, reference material, media files (mp3s, movies, photos, etc). I have already copied all the media from “Storage” to my external Firewire HD (which continues my exciting naming convention and is called “Archive”), using the Terminal and the “ditto” command (it’s faster than using the Finder). When the Tiger DVD arrives, I can erase “Storage” (using Terminal again) and install Tiger on to a nice blank partition. Over the following few evenings (or over the weekend if the package arrives tomorrow), I can then start installing all the drivers for critical stuff like my Wacom tablet, SCSI scanner, printer, etc. Once I’m sure they all run okay, I can start loading on all the applications and copying critical files from my Panther Home folder to the Tiger installation. This will allow me to carry on working from Panther during the day, then switch to Tiger full time once everything is running as it should. Then I can erase the old Panther volume and copy back the media files from the external drive.

This might seem like a complicated way to go about it, but it has a couple of advantages. It means that I get a pristine Tiger installation, with only the applications and files that I really need (none of the crap I’ve accumulated in the last year will make the transition). It means I can carry on working as normal, uninterrupted by potential wonky settings and broken apps that sometimes result from a normal upgrade. It also means I can easily cherry-pick documents, preferences and config files from Panther and copy them straight to the new OS as I need them. One last additional advantage is that Spotlight, the new system level content indexing feature, will only need to index the files that I actually need, rather than having to churn through all the rubbish that has built up in dark corners of the hard drive.

I’m also going to give my hard drive partitions slightly more exciting names this time round. At the moment I’m favouring using character names from my favourite Sega Saturn game, Panzer Dragoon Saga.

I’m looking forward to the new tools in Illustrator CS2, as well as extra features of the suite like Version Cue. This looks like it could be really handy when a client asks me to supply different colour versions for them to choose from. I have a terrible habit of saving colour changes over older versions, and having to re-apply the approved colours by picking them off raster samples of the variations.

Fingers crossed that CS2 will ship earlier rather than later, as my Illustrator CS tryout version expired in 14 days, and I don’t want to have to go back to version 10. CS has too many nice features that I’ll miss.

I shall bask happily in the cosy feeling that comes with owning legit software.