Over many years, Rockstar Games built games that tried to bring stuff that we, decent and equipped in a brain people, do not do, into the gaming world. What kind of stuff?

Well, stealing, killing crazy amounts of people, driving over pedestrians, selling drugs, dealing with mafia is simply all Grand Theft Auto series is about. There are many reasons of why they succeeded in doing that – but as the biggest one I’d name openess of the world. It’s truly eye-popping how in GTA we can do almost everything we want, without being limited to very closed areas, simple missions and very few other possibilities.

Life is complicated; I killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different

And usually, this advantage was just enough to bring thousands of gamers in front of their machines. But with GTA IV, Rockstar took it even further. The game finally consists not only of huge world, but also of a plot that is very appealing to most of us and huge number of other improvements.

The plot

American dream – full of filthy amount of money and naked women, chased by thousands of immigrants, arriving to the US with very high hopes… Just as Niko Bellic – main character in GTA IV. But he stands out on every other aspect – as the game progresses, we find out more about Niko’s brutal past, previous life, Europeans going after his life and, maybe most importantly, we get to know the guy.

Daddy’s back, you bitches… Daddy’s back, you bitches!

Niko turns out to be a man with a sense of humor that fits into the game perfectly, quite smart thoughts and a moralty that fades out with every step he makes and every bullet he fires. Don’t make me even start with comparisons to main characters in previous versions. If I’d want a total douchebag, I’d just run San Andreas with its lame CJ guy.

The story develops wonderfully, too – we slowly get to know all the important people of Liberty City, kill few of them and plan to fuck the rest. In short, it has everything a good story needs. Sadly, the ending kind of sucks.

The city

It’s what I like the most in GTA IV – city, developed with crazy attention to every single detail, moody, full of people behaving in their very own way. Perfect. It has its own foggy, dark Brooklyn, filled with skyscrapers Manhattan and a bit less impressive New Jersey.

Every part of Liberty City is alive. As the weather changes, people take their umbrellas out and crazily run into yellow cabs. As I take my gun out, they scream, curse and get the hell out of the streets. See what I’m talking about? Not a static place anymore, full of people scared of psychopaths.

And important place of it is the radio and… the Internet. Radio news establish to event all around the place and also manage to crack us up with typical, Rockstar humor. Music hits the spot too – depending whether you’re a fun of smoothy jazz or rap, you’ll find it enjoyable. Personally, I loved Electro Choc and JNR.

The fun

I haven’t had so much fun in the entire series while simply driving along the city with a quick stop for a burger to regenerate health, and obviously passing all the missions. Every single one of them is much more complex than in previous versions – not the level we all hope for, but yeah, they’re longer and way better. Most importantly, we get to shoot way more!

And who doesn’t like to grab old-school Kalashnikov in one hand, grenade in other, and blew some warehouse in the earth? Come on, it’s entertaining!

My favorite mission is definitely one when you get to rob a bank with a bunch of Irish bastards. It involves running away through the subway. So it’s simply fucking awesome, trust me.

But as written earlier, game is way more fun itself! Moving around with cabs, exploring the city, passing by people, stabbing someone in the back once in a while, and many other cool stuff you just gotta see. However confusing may be calling stabbing someone in the back cool stuff, though.

Summing up

If I’d want to write about every little improved detail in GTA IV, it would take years.

It’s a game that makes previous versions look like an unpolished diament, now killing your eyes with its glance. Or something. I always sucked at metaphors. Just make it more cinematic, and for God’s sake, do something with PC performance.

Fingers crossed for fifth version, Rockstar!

Anyway, just get it. Definitely made my Christmas Break more fun. And you guys, stay tuned for Mirror’s Edge review. If I ever get through that shit without smashing my computer.]]> http://eraevion.net/w/niko-bellics-story-gta-iv/feed/ 2 http://eraevion.net/w/tweetie-2/ http://eraevion.net/w/tweetie-2/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:41:53 +0000 eraevion http://eraevion.net/w/?p=863

Trending Topics on Twitter hit within minutes after this announcement, which massively flood my feed with RTs and other expressions of excitement, rocking Top Paid Apps in U.S. AppStore after about a day, thousands of congratulations and praises…

No other app may brag about stats like Tweetie 2, that’s for sure. But was all the buzz adequante to app’s quality? Or again, did we happen to be victims of a huge hype? Well, let’s try to answer that.

Here’s a review of Tweetie 2, an app that managed the impossible – beated its perfect archer.

Paying for an update

At first, I was skeptical about the idea of giving $2.99 for something, that as a matter of fact is just an update. Even though developer denies, and we truly believe him… an average user won’t notice a huge change, since interface remains the same.

Tweetie 2 is built from the ground up to take advantage of these fantastic new technologies.

A perfect solution would seem to sell Tweetie 2 as an update, but… Hail to one of the biggest flaws in AppStore – Apple in one of its genius ideas decided not to allow paid updates (which in some cases even makes sense), so whenever developer decides that an update needs to make more money – he has to release a new app. So yeah, Atebits wants everyone to pay for Tweetie 2 – doesn’t matter, if you bought original Tweetie a day earlier – you just have to.

Thanks, Apple.

Still, that was not the reason for my skepticality – not even one cent in $2.99 spent on Tweetie was cried over later. The problem was, that this app had a hard task in convincing me that I actually need a new version. Come on, Tweetie rocked in its flawless work, minimalistic, Apple-like approach and perfect amount of features. Yet solid set of awesomeness was armed and ready for Tweetie 2, otherwise people just wouldn’t update. Stuff like offline support managed to turn me over to the dark side of spending money I rarely have. And as in case of Tweetie, regrettion is the last feeling I’m experiencing.

And hell, we probably made Loren Brichter a millionaire.

Good things

When I first touched this new shiny icon of Tweetie 2 – which is way better than previous one, by the way – I was expecting a lot. So let’s go. Quick logging in, and there is my feed. Oh wait, one more thing. Default font size is horrible – necessary change for 14 pt. Okay, keep going.

Feed looks just as good as previous one – what I noticed first was lack of signatures under icons on the bar and a shine, when you got unread tweets, replies, or whatever. Very useful and good looking. Navigation feels more natural this way, too.

Missing something? Well, no longer, thanks to this shiny & cute reminder.

Another change, one that probably is my favorite thing in Tweetie 2 – new approach to refreshing your feed. All you gotta do is slide to the very top of the app, release it, and magic happens. No buttons pressing, just sliding. Feels very natural and intuitive.

I’d love if this idea was included in a standard way of refreshing data on the iPhone – like… everywhere. Imagine this kind of awesomeness in Mail.app, for example. Tweetie 2 is worth buying for this very feature itself. Bravo, atebits!

Oh, and searching within timeline, replies and whole bunch of different places. Lovely.

Nearby feature! Great job with this one – now using Maps to show you data by placing pins exactly where tweets are posted. Will probably get even better with Twitter geolocation feature on its way.

Now a huge one. Offline support. Everything you do within app while not connected to the Internet is remembered and posted immediately after you get online. And yep, tweets are cached too. Very, very useful especially with people like me, that have EDGE turned off.

That would be most of things. Also worth mentioning is noticeable speed increase – Tweetie was a performance monster already, Tweetie 2 got even better. Feels like every iPhone app should feel – waiting is a pain you won’t experience and crashes? Never heard of ‘em.

Bad things

This part is gonna be way shorter. Unfortunately, it still exists.

First, THIS. Way Tweetie 2 marks your own tweets is horrible – moving avatar to the right and lett the text flow on the left side with an incredibly small margin? Changes the flow of timeline in too radical way and looks ugly. What’s up with that? It’s definitely just a detail, but one of those extremely annoying.

From what I’ve gathered it seems to be mostly solid, but like any 1.0 app there are always those niggles that crop up at the last minute and make you want to kick yourself. They’ll be fixed soon.

Then there are problems ensuing from automatic loading tweets that are further back in time. Let’s take an example. Almost everyday, at the morning, between yawning and swearing on the alarm I find time to run Tweetie and check all the tweets I missed. This routine in Tweetie worked perfectly – when I wanted to move on, I just pressed ‘Load more’ button and… more tweets showed up.

Now it’s not really clear. Tweetie 2 shows up tweets you had loaded earlier and then adds newest. It gets confusing while browsing all those night tweets and there is suddenly a huge hole – between, for example tweets from 3 hours back (loaded at morning) and 9 hours (loaded last night). Hope you get what I mean. Hopefully this will be fixed somehow.

Aw, and I can’t turn multiple accounts off. Seriously not getting the reason for it. Probably most of the users are not even using this feature – because what for? Now there is always a link back to ‘Accounts’ on the top of your timeline. Too hot spot to put a button that is useless for most people.

Is it worth the money?

Yes. Big, huge, certain yes.

Whether you have already been a Tweetie user or have never used atebits software – $2.99 is already a low price for software on that level.

Tweetie 2 remains my favorite iPhone app ever, feels better than most of iPhone software made by Apple.

Looking forward to another Loren’s ideas. Now go ahead and buy Tweetie 2.]]> http://eraevion.net/w/tweetie-2/feed/ 2 http://eraevion.net/w/radiohead/ http://eraevion.net/w/radiohead/#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:52:52 +0000 eraevion http://eraevion.net/w/?p=757 Credit for this photo goes to robseye67.

I’ve been trying to wrap up and finish that post for last couple of weeks; but there has always been a weird lack of words to describe what happened on 25th August this year. Not really happy with that post, but well… at least it exists.

My fascination with Radiohead began at the end of 2007, when they released In Rainbows – I was already into computers a lot, so releasing an album in the way they did couldn’t pass through me unnoticed. As with everything they did, those sounds didn’t hit me after first listening. Altough I remember as today how I loved Jigsaw Falling Into Place and as this one was followed by others, just as epic songs.

Then I moved on with other albums – I still find every one of them different in style, but best pieces of music ever created. Ever since that I dreamt about seeing them someday within borders of Poland. When I woke up one day during April and read the news, a massive WTF sign showed up above my head while reading some rumors about Radiohead performing in Poland. It was like Christmas, but way better. So much organizations tried to get them on their festivals – with no results. Then Poznan tried to get them on during Poznan for Earth festival – and since the band loves ecology and tries to make the world better – they agreed to come. Then life was mostly just about counting days to 25th August 2009.

My arrival to Poznan contained over 4 hours in a train fullfilled with Radiohead fans. MANY of them (which is why we were standing all the way). But who’d give a crap about details like that with perspective of seeing those geniuses later the day? We got there around 2PM, met with people and moved on to Cytadela Park, when all crazy stuff was about to happen.
Of course, before entering the concert area, we spent some time walking around Poznan, which seemed like a pretty cool city – and most importantly, the only one that managed to get us Radiohead. Gates were about to open around 4PM, so about thirty minutes before that we joined the line. Plenty of people just as psyched as we! Anyway, there was a little delay and gates opened almost an hour later than planed. What we saw later was hundreds of people running towards the stage to get some good places (the area was divided into three zones with different prices, though). So, after visiting Merchandise with fucking high prices of awesome tees and buying something to drink we moved to first zone and got surprisingly cool places – about 20 meters from stage.

Moderat

First of all: they weren’t welcomed very warmly – most of Radiohead fans was there to listen older pieces like Creep or Paranoid Android, in spite of Radiohead’s pretty electronic present.

I loved Moderat – these tunes fitted great as a starter. Three guys with some hardware on stage, with rare appareance of guitar and vocal (damn good, though!) with visualisations behind them. About that – effect could have been great, if not sun shining on us – it was just too early to make good impression. Also: guy who was handling them was kinda amateur – come on, visibility of cursor for few seconds while changing pictures? Anyway, it was so worth to get their album before the show – good to know their tunes!
So, an hour passed. They got some applause and went off. That would be it.

Although I’d love to see them again someday! Preferably in some club. Like that.

Radiohead

It got dark, all useful stuff got set up, and stage began to look incredible. All those sticks hanging from the top looked just amazing, as always during In Rainbows tour. Crowd was waiting – clapping, screaming… waiting. When lights went out – craziness began, intro music got played, and… wow. Magical experience. Radiohead came out.

Moment when first sounds of 15 Step sounded was one of the best in my entire life – seriously, after waiting years to hear it, imagining its performance, what I heard was so above my expectations. Trippy song, fullfilled with Thom’s dance, crowd trying to stay up to him – totally rocked.

Then, as usually, went There There with strong ending, then Weird Fishes and so it went on, making 11 of my biggest wishes true… Every song, hell, every second of this performance was amazing.
Highlights? Well, every song had something special inside, but what stuck into my memory especially was rain down period in Paranoid Android, Gloaming, Idioteque, You And Whose Army with crazy Thom’s eye, Reckoner and obviously Creep.

Also, I’d like to thank all the people I met that day – especially Jola with friends, Wojtek and others.

I frankly can’t imagine not seeing this band again someday and experiencing all that all over again. Hopefully in Poland.

It’s safe to assume, that Flickr is a service that might serve as a source of statistics of most popular cameras out there. In spite of photographers and social web freaks being a huge part of its community, regular people upload their pics too. That’s why iPhone camera rocking statistics might be a surprise.

Almost always Canon’s EOS 400D was the most popular device – cool DSLR that provides unbelievable effects. Then what made iPhone so popular? Why is it reaching out for the first place?

Because Apple tried a different approach

Every single phone with camera I ever owned was simply unusable because of the way you could access it. Okay, just running this thing is simple, so is shooting pics (far from iPhone’s simplicity, though), but ways of accessing those? Come on.

Dad’s Nokia 6300 is making great photos – not gonna underestimate this one, because camera is really good. But let’s say I took a pic – what next? On iPhone, I simply click this little icon on bottom left and do whatever I want with my picture.

How does it look on Nokia OS-based device? Options, go to gallery, find your way through most confusing trees of catalogs ever seen, and… there is your pic. Makes you never want to use this feature again.

Also, Nokia 6300 is not Symbian OS device – it’s just at front simple-looking Nokia’s OS, that as it turns out is just as big pain in the ass as Symbian.

Because of constant Internet connection

iPhone vs. other mobile phones. Not really a hard fight.

Again, Wi-Fi on iPhone is the most amazing execution of this feature in mobile phone I’ve ever seen. In Symbian OS, I had to connect to network every time manually and it couldn’t even work with every application. What’s even the point of having that kind of connection on your phone? People simply couldn’t upload their pics to Flickr. Now it’s easy, you get one app, select photos and upload them. Nothing more simple.

And it’s not like you even need Wi-Fi – iPhone can make decent use of your EDGE/3G connection, too (not on my freakishly expensive plan, though).

This experience just feels right.

Because of the users

Users of Apple’s phone are definitely more into social networking than other phones’. They make use of Internet’s goodness, share their stuff more often and generally, are into that kind of things.
Even is someone is not really into that, buying an iPhone is a great way to start.

A tiny device beated up every DSLR and every point’n’shoot camera we’ve seen. That’s another major breakthrough for iPhone. Building a camera function into phone that doesn’t feel like a useless crap.
Even though quality of it is not far from other phones’, this one feels better – ability to take off camera out of your pocket whenever you want and just take a picture in a pleasant way.

After recent few mentions from Radiohead about not publishing any more albums so much stuff happened for fans of this band. People were thinking about Radiohead’s plans for keeping to rock the industry, release plans…

Then a mysterious song leaked up on a popular message board for fans. By whom? I’m certainly sure that by Radiohead itself to build suspense over this new thing. Hell, it worked.

Fans gathering clues, analizing lyrics and everything. Then, when wallofice.com redirected to official band’s store, everyone was certain about new EP coming on Monday. So was I. Well, we were wrong.
Leaked song had a release date marked, 17th August 2009. Which is today.

First thing I did in the morning was looking up Dead Air Space for any news. Haven’t seen any, though. Few minutes before noon an item showed up in store. We received These Are My Twisted Words, a single song, completely free of any charge downloadable in .zip package with artworks. Disappointing? Not at all! Radiohead releasing new stuff is best news we could get – sure, EP would be better, but it’s still a lot.

The song itself is ass-kicking. I’d put somewhere between Amnesiac and In Rainbows, with almost 3 minutes long intro, and some Thom Yorke goodness afterwards. Feels good.
If it wasn’t enough, here’s an assurance of new songs being created and the fact, that they will play These Are My Twisted Words live. Which makes me even crazier about 25th August, if that’s even possible.

There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.

This band rocks. Now head to W.A.S.T.E. store and get the song.

Time for us to play with this technology. We’ve created a litttle experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine. Each particle represents a tweet – click on one of them and it’ll appear on the screen.

Beautifully created. Seriously, what remains are there still for Flash? We got native video tag, audio tag and now also awesome animations thanks to canvas magic combined with JS. You might see the effect above, and it’s mindblowing.

BURN IN HELL, FLASH. You’ve been an evil technology, now get the hell out of our lives. And sorry, but you won’t be missed.

Just a short catch-up to let you all know about less significant and those more significant improvements on eraevion.net, that happened during last few days.

Most importantly, images just to round corners are dumped. That let me use border-radius in more cases, so whole website isn’t that sharp as it used to be earlier.

Regarding Internet Explorer users: they’re not target of the website, so screw them (but still, besides those roundings everything seems to be working quite well). Get a better browser, guys.
Earlier, eraevion.net used images also to create comic bubbles, but now in order to make it faster, they’re not bubbles anymore. Just rounded rectangles, that frankly I find even better-looking.

A little, but noticeable content reorder. To let users know, where I might be found on the web, I put icons of my favorite services and just linked to them instead of writing full sentences, which sucked and was too chaotic. Better?

And last one – changes in work show-off. As feedback said, those works got there from literally nowhere and user had no idea what the hell were they about. Have I made them or what?
Now, there is a headline my most recent works to inform you about that. And for better watching experience, margins between works are massively decreased.

Hope you like it now! Can’t wait to hear some opinions!

]]> http://eraevion.net/w/improving-homepage/feed/ 0 http://eraevion.net/w/twitter-homepage-redesigned/ http://eraevion.net/w/twitter-homepage-redesigned/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:58:38 +0000 eraevion http://eraevion.net/w/?p=537

One would think, that Twitter crew while busy inviting more and more celebrities over won’t bother itself with improving user interface. Couldn’t be more wrong.

I was always thinking of Twitter as example of perfectly executed UI job. Minimalistic, yet full of details, gathering user attention where it’s needed, coded as it should be… That brings Apple to mind, doesn’t it? I wish more companies would design stuff like they do.

Changes, earlier pretty rare at Twitter, now, after join of Doug Bowman as a Creative Director and few other guys, are common thing. Few pages, like list of people you follow, just needed redesign as fast as possible. So did homepage.

Why homepage was on list of priorities?

Because Twitter changed. Once it hit the mainstream, it’s not about What are you doing? anymore. It became a source of news, social buzz, protests, way to promote basically anything and so much other things far from original idea.
You’re not longer isolated from the rest of community thanks to real search goodness – although it’s been always kinda hidden and went through unnoticed for most users, now it’s hard not to see. On new homepage, search form is a main spot put right in the center.

Search matters now. As long as Twitter existed as a closed community for folks you’re interested in, now it’s basically entire world discussing every possible matter – not only people you follow. And you’re a part of it.

The design itself

First of all: it’s different. I mean, like for Twitter different. For service that even tiny change (remember dumping italic Georgia in tweet informations?) gets noticed by entire community. New homepage is entire new concept, focused on new things, but it’s still Twitter style as we love it.

Firstly, It’s rounded. CSS3 and border-radius is rounding the web one site at the time, and I love it. Almost every button is rounded, container got 10px of radius too, and this whole thing looks just sweet. Experience is much smoother than with sharp corners. Fortunately, they’re extinct.

To move on with CSS3 usage, text-shadow is all over the spot too! Nothing more stylish than a little white shadow on the dark text. Sexy.

More JS, too! See the darkish, but a bit transparent cloud showing up after cursor is above the question mark?
Lovely.



Same with logging in – we might fill in our data only after clicking Sign in button and when form will appear afterwards. No need to reload, obviously, but I’m still not sure about experience of this solution – one more click needed to log in? Uh-uh.

Search results were also redesigned to fit into new homepage style.

Impressions?

I am totally in love. Twitter is doing so great job on its interface to encourage new users and show the current ones what this thing is all about.
I sincerely wish them not to lose their style while becoming more and more popular. Just… keep your current crew, Twitter.

Also, can’t wait for other pages to get a redesign like this one – sooner or later, we all know it’s gonna happen. In the meanwhile, why don’t you just head to Twitter.com?

Also, follow me, if you’d like!

Vampires are creatures that are lately becoming seriously popular whenever we go to the cinema or turn TV on. Something in sucking blood and being immortal secretly attracts people. True Blood is another TV show trying to get a piece of this vampirish cake. After first season, it tastes damn good.

What is obviously different in this show, is a vision of the society living together with vampires. Media knows about them, government respects them and generally, they’re being treated pretty normal (but yeah, they’re also racists).

This vision is pretty scary and I frankly can’t imagine being together in one room with a person who can suck my blood whenever it gets hungry. But show dealt with it greatly, and the idea itself deserves a thumbs up.

The vampires part

They’re perfect. Bad-ass, brutal, full of violence and brutal sex, with fangs, creepy faces, but when circumstances require, gentle and nice. Their nature is best shown on a trial, in 10th episode, where a man called Magister (played by genius Zeljko Ivanek) judges vampires from their actions. Best scene ever. Old parking lot, vampires all over the place, middle of the night, and there sits Magister, suited up, with his evil laugh punishes others. Awesome.

You see, most vampires obviously can’t cooperate with humans. Whenever they get into, for example, a human bar, something bad happens. They don’t need a reason (the most common one is lack of Tru Blood, though) to be pissed at every fucking person in there.

Once again: best execution of vampires society ever.

The humans part

First of all: Bon Temps is pretty fucked up city. Looks like a typical US small town in the state of Louisiana – hanging out in bars in not really cool cowboy hats, drinking beer, getting drunk, and working. But almost every character created in the show has its own problems – some people are drinking addict, some are shapeshifters, some can hear people thoughts, some are V-addicts, drug dealers… Truly remarkable people. Yeah. But the fact remains, that they suit perfectly into the darkish vibe of the show.

One thing I don’t really like on True Blood, is a selection of actressess. Almost none can be found attractive (except Amy, but well… she’s not staying here for long), and main character, Sookie Stackhouse, is particularly unattractive with pretty big crack between teeth. Shame, since every character is sooner or later shown naked.

The opening

Masterpiece. Over 1 minute long, with moooody song in the background. Pleasure to watch. I wanna do bad things with you.

Encouraged? I hope so.

• Beetlebum
• Song 2
• Country Sad Ballad Man
• M.O.R.
• On Your Own
• Theme From Retro
• You’re So Great
• Death Of A Party
• Chinese Bombs
• I’m Just A Killer For Your Love
• Look Inside America
• Strange News From Another Star
• Movin’ On
• Essex Dogs

Album has been released in 1997, great year for rock music and it still sounds cool. Since that wasn’t supposed to be a review, I just would like to recommend this piece of music as a great rock (or britpop, so glad indie didn’t exist back then).

Seriously, check it out. Worth it.