Just two days ago I’ve got one of the less welcome e-mail type ever. A service I use and like is shutting down. Saturday morning I’ve got an e-mail from Springpad telling me that they are shutting down the service on June 25th. I’ve started using Springpad even before I was using Evernote. Springpad was perfect for me.
Great management interface, ability to add stuff I want buy and get a price list for that product… and so on. The perfect personal assistance.
As far as I can remember, Springpad is just one more on long list of services I’ve used and are now lost.
The first one to go was Posterous. One of the best group-blogging services I’ve used. Never had a replacement quite match it.
Then there was one that specialise in saving videos for later. You would simply add the video to the list, and the service would download/convert the video to your android device. Very useful service. Dead now.
Catch, previously 3bananas was the third I remember. This was the first note taking/note syncing service I used. I started using it on 2006 when I got my HTC MyTouch3G and use it all the way to it’s end.
And now Springpad.
The guys at Springpad where nice enough to provide us a easy exportation tool for Evernote that I have already used and my notes were transfered quite well. but I haven’t had time to check them all.
To conclude, I’m very sad for another great service to die, but I have to think that web-ecosystem is just like this. I hope the good people at Springpad that are not assimilated by Google get a good job quickly and Thanks to all for the great service you provided for so long!
/takes hat off
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Iron Maiden makes millions of dollars by playing live for pirates – http://pulse.me/s/JNsu8
Welcome to the new world of music! Iron Maiden apparently understood a Very basic concept.
Piracy surge = increased number of fans. Pure and simple. How to deal with it? Also simple. Make something that it’s not “piratable” like a tour.
To all bands I say this: Wake Up and smell the coffee! This is the new media world.
To all the music editors: The world is changing, you either adapt or you will be ruined. The old business model no longer work.
Cheers!
The blog of Sony Europe made a challenge for the users to elect their top 5 games of the Instant Game Collection (IGC) for 2013. And they’ll also offer 5 yearly subscriptions among the comments. You can find the post and comments here.
I wrote a text about it and the blog told me that my comment was to big so I had to shorten it a lot. Because I didn’t want to lose it, so I’ll post it here.
I hope you enjoy and give me your opinions about my choices.
Hi there everyone. Despite some of my (more than fair) complains about the service, I do love it. So here goes my top 5 games of ps+ for 2013, actually it’s 10 games, 5 for each console.
My top 5 is based on 3 things:
1. How much I enjoyed the game
2. How well the game adapts to the console in question (controls, graphics, and if the game uses the full capabilities of the console – mainly in the ps vita category)
3. How well the game looks
I’m a huge fan of RPG (prepare for a landslide of them) and I’m completely unable to play fps on a console because I’m left-handed For my brain it doesn’t makes sense to use the right analog for camera and the left one for movement, my brain thinks in mirror mode. On a pc, where I’m really good (no bragging here) at FPS, I use the mouse on my left hand and the keyboard with my right hand, this is the only reason why I won’t be putting many fps in the list.
In the PS3 Category we have
(like all good top 5, I’ll start by the bottom :p )
In 5th place I give you Infamous 2. Why is an FPS here you could ask right after what I wrote above. One single word: Move. I only play Infamous with move. I loved the game, the story and the graphics. In my book, it’s a very worth 5th place.
4th Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I’ve been an unconditional fan of Need for Speed games since Need for speed 2, played all of them on the psp and I love it on the ps3. Thanks for this one.
3rd Kingdoms of Amalur – Reckoning. I’ve been a huge fan of R. A. Salvatore for years now. When I heard that he had participated on the lore of this game I was on my nerves to get it, but my pc can’t support it, so didn’t bought and them SCEE gives it on ps+. Awesome. About the game: compelling story, great graphics and excellent game play, what more one ask.
2nd Assassins Creed 3. It’s free-run, it’s parkour, it the American Revolution a guy with a personality to match! I love this game. The graphics, the Story, the game play and the hours of fun I had with it.
1st Lord of the Rings – War in the North. I’m a complete geek when it comes to “Lord of the Rings”. I was planning to buy this game when Cris announce it for ps+. This game gives you the opportunity to play the story parallel to the events of the books (and the movies) from the instant before Frodo arrives to Bree, to the destruction of the One Ring in Mount Doom. If you ever wanted to know what else was going on in Middle Earth during those months, than this game is for you.
And now for the PS Vita
5th – Uncharted Golden Abyss. This game is here for one simple reason. It uses the ps vita capabilities to it full extend. Every single game on the ps vita should be developed with the same hard work this one had.
4th – Oddworld Stranger Wrath. I bought this before it came to the IGC (bought it on cross-buy). Despite being an fps, is one that I can actually play and enjoy. The game is very good to play on the go and that’s why it gets the 4th place.
3rd – New little King Story. A very simple and childish game, but great to play on the go. It joins two types I really like a lot, RPG and Building. Give it a try.
2nd – Gravity Rush. The game is an almost perfect. Great Story, good controls, full use of the ps vita hardware (including Accelerometer, back touch pad, etc)
1st – Lego Lord of the Rings. Gets here for the fact that is related with Lord of the rings (I’m a complete geek remember) and I love Lego. This game does fall short on two aspect, replaying already passed levels, appears shorter than the ps3 version (although I don’t why).
Honourable mentions. This are games that I didn’t enjoy for the fact I’m unable to properly play them on a console, but if I could, they would be on the top five for sure:
Far Cry 3, Battlefield 3, Hitman, X-com Enemy Unknown (bought this one on Steam after it hit the IGC).
Now games from December because I was on exams this past month and hadn’t time to check them.
Cheers!
In the last post I’ve talked about a money saving app, today I want to bring to you a time savng app for android tablets.
I’ve found this app last week while I was searching for an app to help me in Math.
Stylus Beta allows you to use your finger or stylus as a real pen on a real notebook. It supports language dictionaries, auto correction, correction of miss spelled words on wrongly recognized words, special characters (for example @ and &) and numbers ( 1 2 3…).
The is so good that I wrote this entire text using it and stylus pen (adonit jot pro).
Of course if you happen to have an android tablet with a keyboard, the keyboard can be faster, but if not, or you want to take notes from a lecture than this is the app you need
However keep in mind that this is still a beta app so bugs and problems are to be expected.
Play store link
Technical information
Written on a TF101 Eeepad, on Word press application (v. 2.5.1), input method: MyScript Stylus (Beta) (v. 3.2.11.m0.3) and adonit jot pro stylus.
Going back to the origins of this blog, today I’m doing a review off one of the biggest money savers in the Google Play.
Ever since the launch of the paid applications in the Google Play there have been apps going on sale. This is always great, specially if that application that you’ve meaning to buy goes on sale. But this type of promotions is completly pointless with the current state of the Google Play. You can’t organize the results of a search by price or check which prices have dropped in the last 24hours. And if you, by random chance, happen to find an app that went on sale, there’s no way to know the amount of the discount. This is a problem, specially for developers that wish to get reach a bigger audience by doing this type of promotion.
This is where AppSales comes in. The application allows you to check which apps went on sale on the past few weeks (that’s right, weeks). In the main screen they show all the apps that went on sale over the last 2 weeks (default as far as I can tell), as well as for which apps the promotion has expire. When you select an app, the program shows a screen where there’s a lot of interesting and useful information about the app in question.
You’ll have some screenshots of the application, it’s price in dollars, the option to add it to your watch list, share it over the web (by mail, social apps, etc). It will also gives you a brief description of the application and a graphic that shows the price evolution of the app on the last 3 months. There are other functions, but these are, in my opinion, the more useful and important.
About the general settings of the application, one comes out as extremely useful. You can login with your g+ profile (and you’ll have one since you’re using a google device). This option allows you to sync the watch list through multiple devices, like in my case, between my nexus s and my tf101.
Another very useful option is the ability to, indirectly, add apps from the Google Play to AppSales Watch list. This is done by simply going to Google Play, select the application you want to watch and click the share button. You’ll will see a selection of sharing apps, including AppSales. Select it and you’ll see a screen with a bunch of information about the app, including the eye to add it to your Watchlist.
I highly recommend the app to everyone that owns an Android Device and wish to save some money on paid apps. For me, it saved more that 50€.
Enjoy
A friend of mine showed me this concept a few days ago. This is an amazing concept. The though of been able to “build” my own phone is amazing. And if I can simply replace the outdated parts of the phone when they became too “old”, without having to buy a new phone is great.
Check out the links and share it your friends.
Cheers
Ever since the launch of ps vita, people complained about the lack of backward compatibility with the psp games. First of all, Sony abandoned UMD (thank the Lord for that), so no loading of UMD games on the vita; secondly, they announced that the program to get the umd at a lower price on psn was only available on Japan (hummm?!?); and finally they marked on psp games on the psn as ps vita games also, charging a full price for a 4 (or more) years old game.
This attitude left many dedicated fans thinking “What am I going to do with my UMD collection? Do I need to carry two consoles with me or just spend (another) bunch of money re-buying my games? (if they are available on psn, otherwise, tough luck).
The problem seems to be without solution, but only Sony wish it to be without solution. A few years ago, right after the first CFW/devhook for the psp someone release an UMD dump homebrew. The piece of Software basically made a file from the UMD that a CFW could read through an ISO loader. This allow legit buyers that had a cracked psp to carry with them a bunch of games without carrying a bunch of UMD’s. The games would all go to the psp memory stick. This had several advantages.
- you would carry several games on the same card;
- meaning that, when you where tired of a game you could switch to another
- and the games loaded much (really much) faster.
With this in mind, I came up with the idea of a official psp software that would allow us to dump our legit bought UMD’s to a ps3 hard drive and them just copy them to the ps vita.
In order to give some restrain to piracy, the dumped games could only be played on a ps vita registered to the same account on the ps3 where the files had been created. This still doesn’t stop you from borrowing your friends UMD to dump to your ps3, but it would limited it by far.
And if you don’t have a ps3, Sony could create a desktop app with the same functions and restrictions, an addon to CMA so to speak.
This idea might go a long way to boost ps vita sales, because people would at the console and say “Ok, if I buy this device, I can dump all my umd to my ps3/pc and them just play them on the ps vita. Nice”
Cheers!
I was going to check stumble upon profile because some friends asked me a full list of my web presence and I came across this siteweave silk
I’ve still don’t understand what’s the purpose of this site/application, but you can make some very beautiful drawings.
Simply check the two bellow made out of fun.
So I recommend that you check out this tool, and if you have an Ipad check the ios app (i’ll try it in a few seconds on my wifes Ipad)
cheers!
After deep consideration, I’ve decided to register a domain for myself. Fortunately the one I really wanted (Dreamcaster Studio) was available and I use godaddy to make the registration. The price was very nice, around 3€ for a year, and I manage to redirected it to my wordpress blog with the same name very easily. Then I came across the Affiliated program. Basicly they pay me to put a banner in my site, offering massive discounts (the one below is of 34% off) at the registration of new domains.
So, although this is an initial review, I’ve decided to post it here because this discount end by August 31th, so there not much time to take advantage of it. If you have a blog or a site and you where thinking about registering a domain for it, this might be the discount opportunity you’ve been waiting for.
With more than a year of life ps vita is far from being the success Sony expected. Vita sales are all times low and apparently, never, since launch, it’s weekly sales have surpass it direct competitor, the 3ds. One must ask himself what is the problem? I personally own a vita. When I bought it I was torn between getting the ps vita or the 3ds. End up with vita for a single reason: hardware specifications. All other arguments where in favour of 3ds.
More games, backward compatibility with other ds games, lower price, easier to hack and run homebrews (ds flash cards have been around since the console was released, and as I write this post it’s already possible to run 3ds games on 3ds via flash card). But where the 3ds lack, ps vita excels – the hardware it’s built in.
This relation led me to remember a device that was the “Next big Thing” in portable gaming. The n-Gage. It was a great device, that never succeed. So we come to my main question. Is the PS vita the n-gage of the 2012? N-gage had “almost” everything it needed to succeed. Good hardware, join games with music with cellphone, read memory card (sd at the time), easy to install games that weren’t “arranged” legally and had an OS with personal digital agenda (PDA) functions. I remember buying a s60 nokia phone in that period and I still use it. So why did n-gage failed? Because of the same reason that ps vita is failing: the sense that simply there aren’t any good games for the system.
Sure we had the release of Soul Sacrifice, Ragnarok, FIFA13, just to mention some. But the fact is, that if you start trying to pin-point the best vita games, you do not have much to choose from. For instance, where is Monster Hunter? Or Final Fantasy? Phantasy Star Portable?
Right now the system is on a life support system called “Playstation plus” that give 2 “free” games for the system every month and two extra for one year. However, it doesn’t have a life of it’s own, and the guilty part here is Sony.
They were so focus on preventing piracy that they ended up punishing the fans. And let’s face it, psp only started to sell like water in the desert when is was cracked. The good games for psp only came out after the console was cracked (like with all previous gaming systems from Sony). Now ps vita already has some good games (expensive as hell, but that’s another subject), it’s include in the ps+ program, has great hardware (lot’s of it not used) and the new ps4 will put the vita even more on the front line of gaming. But is that enough?
I personally don’t thing so. Where I live (Portugal) the ps vita as Zero Marketing and from I (don’t) see on youtube, neither the rest of the World. So I leave you with a list of what might save ps vita (with an emphasis on the “might”):
- More marketing (and a good one).
- Good games, at decent prices, need to come out.
- The memory card price tag problem must be solved ASAP, either by putting a 8gb card on every box or by lowering the cards prices (the second being the best).
- Some sort of backward compatibility for psp games and an app store similar to Apple and Google app store where apps can be published either for a low price or free (it’s a pity that all that marvellous hardware is only used on games).
With this I think that ps vita might actually beat the DS line to the ground, stop living on life support and be a true independent system, that can also work with living room system. Instead of the terrible feeling that I got from the ps4 show, The vita will be a companion for the ps4 that can also play games on the go.
Give me your comments and toughs on it.