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Review: Qoop.com – Photo Book

The other day my qoop.com book arrived! Qoop has a partnership with Flickr, and users can order books and posters and such of their photos. Ordinarily I’m happy to be rid of the clutter of paper copies of photos, but I made an exception with I finished my year in photos project. Having a printed copy of all 365 entries is just too cool!

Unfortunately, cool is not cheap. This volume ran me around $40. Not something I’d do often, but as a splurge it was manageable.

Anyway, on to quality. I went with four photos per 8.5 x 11 page, for a 90something page count, and everything is crisp and viewable. I also had the book perfect bound, instead of stapled, and it looks very durable as a result. My captions for each photo are included as well. I was worried that some might be cut for length, but photo placement and font size is adjusted a bit where necessary to make sure nothing is lost. I’m sure there’s an upper limit to this adjusting, but I didn’t run into it.

My only real complaint is that there isn’t enough customization available. In particular, I would have loved to be able to design a better cover. The set of photos there is chosen at random, and I was allotted two short lines of text. If I liked some photos but not others, I had to generate an entire new random set. It took me an absurd number of tries to get one that I mostly like.

While this is unrelated to Qoop themselves, I was also disappointed with DHL’s shipping time of my book. The package got lost in limbo somewhere, and spent three days bouncing back and forth between Atlanta and Chatanooga. Thankfully the book was packaged very nicely, and suffered no harm.

So in summary: Due to the price, I wouldn’t recommend Qoop for mass production. But for one-off copies like this, I’m quite happy.

Review: Private Wars, by Greg Rucka

Private Wars

My rating: 3 out of 5

Just a brief review this time, but I liked Private Wars. Greg Rucka continues the story of British spy Tara Chace, in her second novel. The character originated in the Queen & Country series of graphic novels, so there’s more backstory out there than you might think at first.

Rucka loves his politics, there’s no doubt. This time around Chace gets involved in the affairs of Uzbekistan, particularly the ascension of a new President. I learned a lot about Uzbekistan in the process, but have to question how much is true and what is made up for the novel. If there was an afterword or some kind of notice establishing this, I’d be much happier for some reason.

Worth a read, but if you’re new to Tara Chace I’d recommend starting at the beginning. You’d be a bit lost at the start of this book, and definitely wouldn’t appreciate some of the longer-running character relationships. Plus, the cast is very large. Having a visual connection to them from the comics is a big help.

I do knock a few points off for the abrupt ending. I’d appreciate a bit more of where each character ended up, but if the series continues that may be taken care of elsewhere.

New writing: The Camera Eye

I’ve been waiting to post this until I actually wrote an entry there, but this year I’ll be posting movie reviews to The Camera Eye.

The blog is the brainchild of Evan, who I went to college with. He pretty much got me into writing movie reviews for the campus paper (and later I became entertainment editor), so how could I say no? I’m really looking forward to contributing, even if I don’t see as many movies as I’d like. We have seven contributors at the moment, so there should be a pretty steady stream of new posts.

Here’s my first review, King Kong.

Stuff I liked in ’05

In no particular order and by no means comprehensive:
(items with links are available for free online)

Books:
Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow
Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer

Albums:
Audioslave – Out of Exile
Ra – Duality
Harvey Danger – Little by Little

Movies:
Sin City
Batman Begins
Serenity
Kung Fu Hustle

Games:
Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS)
Burnout: Revenge (Xbox)
Guitar Hero (PS2)
Gun (Xbox)
Urban Dead (online)
(And an honorable mention to Halo 2, which I still play on the Xbox just as much as when it was released in November ’04)

Review: Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero

My rating: 5 out of 5

Guitar Hero is not just a game. It is an experience.

My brother Todd purchased this game for himself recently with some Christmas money. He was generous enough to let me rock out with it this week. To the left, you can see him demonstrating how to play.

In case you’re not familiar with Guitar Hero, here’s the basic concept: DDR, but with a guitar instead of a dance pad. The ‘frets’ of the slightly scaled down guitar controller are five brightly colored buttons. For each note or chord the correct combination must be pushed at the same time the ‘strum’ lever is activated with your other hand. A whammy bar comes into play for bonus points.

The concept is all well and good. But as with any rhythm game the song selection is what makes or breaks the idea. Thankfully, developers Red Octane and Harmonix outdid themselves! The song list includes David Bowie, Megadeth, Hendrix, Queen, Black Sabbath, The Ramones, ZZ Top, and many more. Here’s a full song list. I’m particularly addicted to Ziggy Stardust.

The recordings are cover bands, but excellent ones. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear most of them are originals. These Boston-based bands get to shine themselves with original tracks unlockable later in the game. And unlike songs in Dance Dance Revolution, all the game’s tracks are full length. Including bonus songs, there are 47 available to play!

In a nice touch, completing certain note combinations will increase your ‘star power’ meter. Once full, raising the guitar into a vertical position triggers a sensor and your points are doubled for a time. Meanwhile, the crowd goes wild.

Guitar Hero does an amazing job of convincing me that I am indeed a rock star. Unfortunately, I highly doubt my newfound guitar skills would transfer over to the real deal.

Guitar Hero will run you about $80 for the game and one controller. Extra controllers are roughly $40. We haven’t obtained a second axe yet, but hope to be dueling soon. The game is becomming hard to find at some retailers, and as far as I can tell the separate controllers are available only from the game’s official site.

Alas, GH is only available for the PlayStation 2. But, it makes me seriously consider picking up a used system for myself. Yes, it is That Good!

Meanwhile, Todd is heading out of town for a few days while I remain here. More time to hone my skills! Party on, dudes!

Xbox 360 – First Impressions

While running some errands at WalMart today, I noticed that they have an Xbox 360 out to play! Amazingly nobody was playing as I passed by, so I stepped up.

To be clear, my impressions of the system are based on a mere twenty minutes of play time on one demo. In addition, these kiosks are the most uncomfortable things ever to play. The widescreen monitor is directly above your head, with the result that playing is like sitting in the front row of a movie theater.

I played through the demo of Call of Duty 2, a World War 2 first person shooter. In this level you’re a British trooper assaulting a German artillery position. There are other demos on the kiosk too, but by the time I finished this one there were people waiting so I stepped aside.

My first thought: “Ooh, pretty!”

And I continued thinking that throughout my playtime. Unfortunately, the gameplay didn’t rise to the same levels. Oh its capable, worth playing, but we’ve seen it all before. There’s been a glut of World War II shooters recently (Call of Duty, the Medal of Honor series, Brothers in Arms, etc.), and the market is pretty saturated. Other than the graphics and slightly rearranged buttons on the controller, which is an improvement, there’s just nothing to write home about in CoD2. Certainly not $400+ worth.

The Xbox 360 will sell well at first no matter what the games are like. I just hope the quality of available titles can step up as much as the graphics have. In the meantime, I’m feeling better about my decision to wait on getting one.

Flickr Printing – Free sample review

I used my free ten prints from Flickr today. It went OK, but not without a couple of hitches.

I selected ten photos to pick up at Target on my way home from work. I cropped them a bit through Flickr’s printing page, since digital photos don’t quite line up with the standard 4″x6″ ratio of prints. Sent the package off, and went on my merry way.

I hit Target about two hours later, and my envelope was waiting for me. First problem: Target wanted to charge me for the prints. This despite the fact that Flickr clearly states the first ten will be free. Thankfully, I had my confirmation printed out and with me, clearly showing $0.00 (plus tax). Be sure you do the same, at least until kinks are worked out.

The print quality is as good as I expected. I purposely selected a couple of my older, lower-res pictures as part of the ten. They’re no better or worse than they should be. Some higher quality examples, like my close-up of a grasshopper, are jaw-droppingly awesome (if I do say so myself). However, in one case the cropping of my print is completely different than I selected online. Not sure what happened there. It isn’t to the point where its unviewable, but it certainly looks unprofessional.

All in all, a positive experience. Not perfect, but pretty decent for the first 24 hours of operation. And the convenience of being able to do all this natively in Flickr’s interface is what ultimately will win me over.

I’m gonna have to start buying picture frames again, aren’t I?

Ning – an attempt at social application development for dummies

I discovered Ning a while back, signed up for a beta developer’s account, and then promptly forgot about it. Today my account was activated, so I spent a bit of time attempting to create my own application.

Ning’s goal is to enable anybody to create “social applications” a la Flickr, Craigslist, etc. Essentially, web sites that focus on and serve a particular community.

Theoretically, anybody with a developer’s account can get an app up and running quickly here. The key is the ability to ‘clone’ existing apps. You make an exact copy of an app someone else has produced (code is not exactly secret in Ning), and then customize to your heart’s content. Put more simply, you are free to remix anybody else’s Ning-based site into something purely your own.

As Ning’s homepage proclaims, you can make a Craigslist for any city, a Flickr for any event, a Zagat for any interest… etc. I tried my hand at modifying an existing teacher review app (http://ratemyteachers.ning.com/) into a comic book rating system.

By following the readme file helpfully contained my newly cloned app, I was able to customize the interface on a basic level fairly quickly. Impressed, I went to add a sample comic review. I was promptly shown an error, informing me that I must not leave blank a field which I clearly did fill in.

I obviously either touched some code I shouldn’t have, or didn’t touch some that I should. I spent 15 minutes knocking my head against the files making up my app, but to no avail. This leads me to my main criticism of Ning: Just who is it for?

I don’t have the php development experience to work on complex applications like this. It would take me hours just to read all the code, figure out how the files are interrelated, analyze multiple generations of customization, and who knows what else. Even then I might not understand it enough to fix my problem. As a relative novice, Ning is above my head. But if I did have the experience I feel necessary to work in Ning’s environment, wouldn’t I be off building my app somewhere on my own already? Why would I make myself dependent on a third party?

Of course, like just about anything on the ‘net these days Ning is in beta. So I don’t want to be too harsh. I do think the concept has merit, and will watch to see what changes during development. A simple WYSIWIG editor would go a long way towards letting Joe Average build social apps in Ning.

In case you’re interested, here’s what I was able to accomplish in Ning before receiving the mysterious error: http://comicrater.ning.com/

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