I've been using the chat client Digsby for a while now, and it's pretty awesome. It's comparatively new (less than a year), but quite stable, feature complete, and adds a bunch of new features that simplify things substantially.

• Cleanly integrates with all the traditional instant messenging systems, adding gtalk, facebook chat, and twitter.
• Integrates mail and event notifications from almost any mail source, as well as facebook and myspace's event feeds
• Free!
• Almost cross platform - the initial release is Windows only, but they're releasing OS X and Linux versions soon
• Lets you neatly merge multiple accounts on different services belonging to the same person. Then, just tells you if they're online on any service, and intelligently uses that one to communicate with them.

Given the proliferation of social networks and messaging networks, it's quite nice to have one tool that bridges them. I don't have to deal with the fact that not everyone uses the same tools - Digsby gives me a list of everyone, and when I want to talk with them, it just works.

I love tools that hide complexity without being simplistic.

Just had a chance to play with the new Adobe Photoshop Express - a really simple version of Photoshop that runs in your browser. For brevity, I'll call it APE.

In reality, it's not a lot like Photoshop, but rather like Picasa, the desktop photo organizer application from Google. It has a similar (if slightly more limited) feature set, and a similar usage metaphor - you use it to manage a series of galleries / folders full of images, and are able to quickly pop open any one of them to quickly modify it.

So, the pros:

• You can link it into your photo galleries on Facebook, Photobucket, or Picasa. That is, you tell it how to log in to you account on one of these services, and can then use it to manage and edit your photos within. Since APE runs entirely within Flash, it's a lot more responsive and easy to work with than doing so directly with the web interfaces for each of these tools. Plus, you can batch update captions, which is often quite time consuming. You can even use it to transfer images between different gallery services (Facebook, Picasa)
• It's entirely browser and Flash based, so you can run it on any OS with reasonable Flash support, and you can access it from anywhere. In comparison, Picasa runs on the desktop of a particular machine, and is only available for Windows (though presumably that's something Google plans to address).
• It's really convenient to upload and manage small numbers of images. You can do this in Picasa through the web interface, but you have to fiddle with the image locally first. It just feels a bit smoother doing this in APE, then dragging it into whatever storage space you've chosen.

And the cons

• It runs entirely online. Before you can edit your images, you have to upload them. It's fine for working with small numbers of smallish images that are already uploaded on a nice fast server somewhere, but there's no way I'd be using this to manage my images as I retrieve them directly off my camera. Obviously, it's not really intended for this, but this is an important part of my photo management process, and so is worth mentioning.
• Though the management of various galleries is faster than using each gallery's web interface, using APE to edit images is definitely not faster than editing them locally, for obvious reasons - everything is either processed rather slowly by flash, or pulled down the intertube.

For me, it's a nice tool for managing small amounts of images; for example, the screenshots and snippets I put in my blog. It's also nice as a bridging tool between the three gallery services it supports. I'm not likely to use it for managing large photo galleries - Picasa trounces it there. But, it has a niche, it's really easy to use, and doesn't cost anything. So, it's definitely worth taking a look at..

Try it out - there's a 'test drive' demo that's gets you in to try it out quickly. From there, it's easy to join, and doesn't appear to gather piles of personal information.

vector: Daily Bits.
x-posted: Meme Hazard

I haven't said much about games recently.. Here's what I've found cool over the last few months and felt I should review:

• Aquaria - probably the best indie game I saw in '07; it's an arcade adventure game with a lot of depth, as well as a lot of breadth. That is, its game play elements provide for diverse and interesting experiences, and there's a lot of them. You play a Naija, a water nymph lost in an underwater cave system, full of placid scenic schools of fish, great crabs, forgotten temples full of strange magic, monsters in the hidden depths, and back again. It's very well constructed - the music, graphics, and game play fit together seamlessly to create moods ranging from calm relaxation to rampant fear, all strung together into a non-linear game of exploration. An absolute delight - I thoroughly recommend it. Windows only, unfortunately.
• Battle for Wesnoth - fantasy turn based strategy game with a whole pile of user-created campaigns, some brilliant, others not. Feels a lot like Fantasy General (1996). Units gain experience and skills as they go. Nice, deep, interaction between different types of weapon, terrain, armour and unit. Pretty well-balanced, and fairly addictive. Worth a look, even if you're not into strategy games, simply as it's provides an example of a user-expandable game design done well. Available on most desktop platforms
• Chromadrome 2 - simple, mouse based game of skill. You control a marble, racing along a track covered in traps and obstacles with variable speed, attempting to finish in the shortest time possible. Slick, flashy visual design. Surprisingly deep play, despite its simplicity. Highly addictive. There's a lot of game play packed into the demo, so it's well worth a download.
• Chocolatier 2 - a thoroughly addictive blend of management, recipe construction, and light weight adventuring. You start as a young entrepreneur hoping to challenge the great Baumeister chocolate empire in San Francisco of 1925 or so. After learning to manage the supply of ingredients and completed chocolates, you slowly move into wider markets, with new ingredients ranging from six types of varietal cacao, exotic spices and so forth. Essentially a classic production management games, but with sufficient diversity of factors and supply chains to manage that it becomes challenging without declining into furious mouse clicking. Simple, well implemented, distraction. Addictive, but not too long - the core game has about 15 hours of gameplay - long enough to suck me in, but not long enough to drive me mad with boredom.
• Darwinia - not a new game, but one I've only recently gotten into, Darwinia is from Introspective, a three man game development studio in London, also famous for Uplink (a surprisingly realistic hacking game), and Defcon (a game of Mutually Assured Destruction). To some extent it's a real time strategy game, in others it's more a tactical shooter with a top down camera view. You are a programmer who has intruded into Darwinia - a simulated world in which a researcher, Dr Sepulveda, has been experimenting with artificial life. However, many of his creations, the Darwinians, have been corrupted by some sort of viral infection that turns them violent and unpredictable, destroying most of his research, as well as the simple, placid life of the uninfected 'green' Darwinians. Game play consists of creating and controlling squad processes with which you eliminate viral infections, engineer processes which harvest the souls (resource allocation units) of lost Darwinians, and various other units that allow you to affect the otherwise independent Darwinians such that you can lead them to freedom. Though there's only about 8 game levels and the basic premise of play is laid out clearly in the first, there's quite a lot of depth and diversity. In many cases, your enemies can only be defeated by carefully prising open their defenses with skillful use of your squads, then pressing your advantage with legions of Darwinians. Unfortunately, the Darwinians have minds of their own, and often require substantial cajoling before they'll willingly enter battle on your behalf. Lots of fun; the real time strategy formula is present but subverted by indirect control and a focus on tactics rather than economics.

So, a couple of weeks back, I read in Warren Ellis' blog a while back that 2000AD were going to start releasing their progs online. The 12 year old in me with memories of reading manicgnome's collection back in the early 90s became curious, so I tried it.

What you pay:
I paid £1.58 for a single - a year's subscription (51 progs) costs £79, which, considering the quantity of comic you're getting for that, is pretty good value. The download interface was nice and clean, and it seems like it maintains a log of progs you've purchased previously if you want to download them again later.

What you get:
One PDF, no DRM, no faffing about. The image quality is pretty good, but not perfect - the publishing details fine print requires a little effort to see, but all of the actual comic content was fine. Resolution is such that a double page spread fits nicely into the widescreen of my monitor, making it nice and easy to browse through. I haven't read the full way through, but if you're OK with reading things on a monitor in general (as in, you don't get headaches and you find your desk chair comfortable), it seems like it should be pretty pleasant.

I never used to purchase 2000AD myself; I always borrowed manicgnome's. Nonetheless, I became thoroughly absorbed in Judge Dredd, the ABC Warriors, and crazy stuff like Sam Slade. Then, a few years back, I acquired vizi's collection of old progs (now passed on to confusiontempst, and got more into stuff like Nemesis, Slaine and Strontium Dogs. Though I by no means like everything 2000AD published, I certainly liked enough of it to make it worthwhile, and though £79 is a reasonable amount of dosh, you get about 2200 pages of comic (plus about 2-300 of ads) for that, so it's not really too bad. I'm not sure if I really have the time to keep up with a weekly like this, but hell, if I was going to get back into 2000AD, this would be the time.

I have to say, I really like the idea of being able to get publications online like this in a relatively open format. Sure, I can presently only read it on my desktop PC, but given the current surge in reader gadgets, that could well change. And besides, it's not like I really wanted huge piles of paper lying about. Once I thought it was the tactile pleasure and flexibility I liked, but I'm beginning to wonder if, to some extent, it was also the structure of a packaged format. Either way, this has turned out pretty well, I think.</a>

They use a service called Clickwheel, which apparently offers a variety of comics - I haven't taken a good look through their range, but the interface is good, the format is great, and if there's other good stuff in there, I'd be interested in hearing (not being one who really knows what to look for in these things). 2000AD downloads.

via Jay is Games, I've encountered an awesome remake of Wizball; probably the best game I played in 1989.

Fundamentally, it's a shooter, but with some great twists. Basically, you're a wizard transformed into a bouncy sphere whose goal is to restore colour to the world. You do this by killing aliens and collecting their blood, which comes in three colours: red, green or blue. The actual collecting process is done by your cat, who is in turn transformed into a sphere called the 'Catellite'. Levels are bidirectional horizontal scrollers with various obstacles and decoration, initially coloured in a drab grey.

Initially, you move around by bouncing, though you get all sorts of upgrades as you play that change this. Probably the coolest part of this game is that while it _can_ be played single player, it's best played as a cooperative two player with one player as the wizard, the other as the cat.

It's really impressive as far as remakes go - the gameplay's exactly right, and while the graphics and sound are all improved with GL and FMOD, they're perfectly in synch with the spirit of the original.

It seems that the makers have done quite a few other remakes, including Cybernoid 2, Quazatron, Meta Galactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, and an upcoming remake of I, Ball 2, another favourite of mine. As an aside, don't you just love the kitschy 80s titles?

The Wizball remake is currently available for PC and Mac, though it looks to be available for Linux eventually. It's probably readily emulable, as it's just GL and sound; no annoying DirectX or anything like that. They've released the source for several of their other titles - I'm hoping they'll do the same for this.

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend this, though, as mentioned, you really need a second player to make it work.

Actually, pretty much all of the guys in this weekend's second roundup are worth a look..