Inbox First Impressions

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks. Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/inbox-first-impressions-7d6f7fd6b577#.x1mz2x4ej

If you are wondering what Inbox is, read the announcement. I'll only be talking about what I have noticed about it since I started using it.

The fundamental ideas behind Inbox are great. Yes, I receive too much email. Yes, some of it I do not need to read and never will need to. Yes, some of it I will need to deal with, but I cannot right now. And yes, some of it is quick enough or important enough that I should deal with it right now. Inbox is the best way that I have seen of dealing with all of those cases in one place.

Inbox was clearly designed with mobile in mind first. The one-column organization and vertical navigation are suited very well to a phone. Swiping a message left or right to snooze it or mark it as done feels very natural, especially if you are on Android (think about the notification tray). The fact that you can snooze/mark as done from a notification is the icing on the cake. I do wish that I could swipe sideways while a message is open, either to snooze/mark as done or to navigate from one conversation to another like in the Gmail app.

The desktop version needs some work. It has the exact same layout as the mobile version, one column. We solved this issue a long time ago in Gmail: let the list of messages take up one column, and open messages alongside it in another column. Images are displayed awfully; I received a screenshot taken on a phone, and it was almost twice the height of my screen. Swiping obviously is not an option, so there are buttons on each message for snoozing/marking as done. It doesn't feel as cool as swiping the message away, but it is still a lot better than having to select a message and then looking around at the top to find the archive button. It is also only available on Chrome. They say that other browsers are coming soon, but what better way to test it than to let people who got into the invitation only program try it on whatever they prefer? Not to mention that this is an unacceptable abuse of Chrome's position as the most popular browser. Isn't the point of web applications that they are platform agnostic? I have also noticed that the amount of memory Inbox takes up slowly increases over time. This was not scientifically tested, just something I noticed.

Bundling messages together in a visual stack instead of tabs feels much better, in particular on mobile. It also makes it very easy to perform an action on all messages in that bundle. I am confused as to why a bundle's name will show up when there is only one message present in that bundle. I don't want to have to open the bundle to get to a message if there are no other messages in the bundle. Allowing the user to create their own bundles makes them infinitely more useful than the predefined tabs in Gmail. Any filters you already created in Gmail will be preserved in Inbox and can be made into a bundle easily.

Speaking of preserving things from Gmail, all actions that you make in Inbox happen in Gmail as well. Marking something as done in Inbox archives it in Gmail, and probably vice versa. However, not everything from Gmail has made its way over to Inbox. For example, in Gmail old chat logs can be found, but they will not show up in Inbox.  It also does not allow you to edit contacts.Gmail will obviously have to coexist with Inbox until they make their way over or are fleshed out into their own product. I am not sure it would be a good idea to bring them into Inbox, as its strength comes from its simplicity and cleanliness. Priority markers did not make the journey either, but they were clearly on their way out when tabs were introduced to Gmail.

I approve of reminders being brought into Inbox. It makes sense, because the act of snoozing a message essentially makes it into a reminder. It would not make sense to have one sort of reminder in Inbox and another in Google Now. The presence of reminders is another motivator to keep a clean inbox; if you have a bunch of messages cluttering it up, the reminders will not stand out to you. Gmail clearly intended for its users to archive messages when they were done with them, but it never encouraged that behavior the way Inbox does. And for that, I am sold. Plus, look at what happens when you have nothing in your inbox:

Steam In-Home Streaming First Impressions

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks. Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/steam-in-home-streaming-first-impressions-415860859b23

The best way to explain Steam's in-home streaming is to quote Valve directly:

Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games. For example, a Windows only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there.

In-Home Streaming is in beta right now, so I decided to test it out using my roommate's computer. We're both running Windows, but his computer is significantly less powerful: he has an i5-3330S with 8GB RAM, and I have an i5-3570K, a GTX 670, and 16GB RAM.

The first step was to make sure both computers are using the beta version of Steam (they already were.) Then I logged into both computers using the same Steam account. Both computers popped up with a message saying that they were ready for in-home streaming. I decided to test it out with games that a) were too graphically intense for Declan's computer, and b) were only installed on my computer.

First up, I tried Batman: Arkham City. It looked really good and I didn't detect any lag. However, I quickly remembered that I had gliding and grapple hooking set to my mouse's thumb buttons. Since Declan's mouse doesn't have those I couldn't move around very quickly or gracefully.

Next I tried out Borderlands 2, and I took a quick video of it. Naturally, that means that I was playing one-handed, so again it wasn't graceful. It's worth noting that although both computers display the game on their screens, only the computer that is receiving the stream outputs the audio.

Next I decided to try to break the system. I had read that when a computer is being used to stream a game to another computer, it can't be used for anything else. On a hunch, I Alt-Tabbed out of the game on my computer. Both computers were then displaying my computer's desktop environment. It was essentially just a remote desktop connection, though the only way to get out of the game is from my computer.

So there you have it, Steam in-home streaming works as advertised! Of course, it's only useful to those of us with multiple computers in their house, and I have no idea how well it will work on different routers. I think it would be a very good move for some company to come out with a Steam Machine as small and cheap as possible, with the intention of taking advantage of in-home streaming. It would be like the Chromecast of gaming, and we know how well the Chromecast sold.

Fly, Catbug, Fly! First Impressions

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks. Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/fly-catbug-fly-first-impressions-b3c0b6db8aa4

The name Catbug is well known among fans of Cartoon Hangover's series Bravest Warriors. As they branch out into other forms of media, they are coming out with a game called Fly, Catbug, Fly! featuring of course the most popular character from the series. Currently the game is in beta on Android, and will be launching on Android and iOS for $1 sometime in the future.

As the title suggests, it is an endless flyer (and a fairly simple one at that.) The point of the game is to avoid running into the floor and ceiling while collecting the many items that float in your path. These items are all from the show as well. Every once in a while you will encounter a portal, which you fly into to drop the items off and receive money. The money is used in the shop to buy upgrades such as extra lives or power ups that give you an advantage, as well as various hats. I asked the developers if they were going to be accepting real money in the shop, and they said that that is not going to happen. That's a relief.

 The bottom line here is that if you are a fan of Bravest Warriors you'll enjoy Fly, Catbug, Fly! (and can you think of a better way to figure out if you like a game than participating in a beta?) And if you're not a fan of Bravest Warriors, go check it out. I can't recommend it highly enough, and now is the best time to catch up, because there are still less than two hours worth of episodes.

If you want to get into the beta, join the Google+ Community and once you have been accepted, grab the beta.

Audiosurf 2 First Impressions

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks. Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/audiosurf-2-first-impressions-868d7a0d093

Note: A "first impressions" is basically like a review, but for a game that isn't finished yet. Depending on how the game changes between now and launch, my final review could be different.

Audiosurf is literally one of my favorite games, so I jumped on the Audiosurf 2 Early Access (read: beta) as soon as it came out. For those of you unfamiliar with Audiosurf, it is a PC game that takes any song you have on your hard drive and creates a course out of it. Whenever the music is fast and exciting, the course is fast and exciting. You get points by gathering blocks as you go down the course.

The main idea behind Audiosurf 2 is to support mods, namely custom modes and visual themes. This is a really cool idea, but I'm not sure it will scale well in an Audiosurf game. My main concern is this: in the original game you choose a character who has a certain special ability. At the end of the song, your score is compared to all of the other scores in the level you chose (so if you chose a Casual character, you would be compared to all of the Casual scores, etc.) In Audiosurf 2 it looks like the scores are only compared within the mode that you choose. What if I find an unofficial mode that somebody made that I really like, but nobody else plays it because it's not built in? On the other hand there is no way for all scores to be compared in any meaningful way because the developers can't guarantee that the scoring systems will be comparable.

The menu is one thing that is without a doubt better than Audiosurf.

In the original game I started out playing Casual characters, and quickly found that Mono was the best. Eventually I worked up the courage to start playing Pro characters, and I did quite a bit of experimenting until I figured out how to play Eraser well. Unfortunately there is no Eraser mode in Audiosurf 2 (though I am sure it is only a matter of time before somebody makes a mod of it).

Most of the official modes are variants of Wakeboard, which was teased in a couple of trailers a while back. Most of the points you get in Wakeboard modes comes from the jumps and tricks you do.

The problem with this is that you have to wait until the song is about to get fast (which happens maybe three times in a song), jump, and push a few buttons to do some tricks. It doesn't feel like it requires much skill on the part of the player, so I've been avoiding the wakeboard modes as much as possible.

Here you can see a couple of modes that are more similar to the ones in the original game. I felt more at home, but again my favorite character isn't there. Also, playing Double Vision while trying to take screenshots is impossible.

Audiosprint is a good example of what is possible with community-created modes. It's designed to be a party game where you take turns playing. It's pretty simple: either jump over or slide under the obstacles as you pass them. The runner emits this horrible scream every time she hits an obstacle, which is really distracting and will probably make you hit more obstacles. It's pretty hilarious in a group setting, but utterly obnoxious when you are playing by yourself.

That's right, someone made Triple Vision. My roommate and I played a game of it, but I think it would work best with three people. It also would have helped if we had communicated more on what colors we should go for, because we filled it up quite often and lost a lot of points that way.

At this point Audiosurf 2 is not worth getting. Audiosurf still has lots of people playing it, and you'll be able to compare scores with all of them. If you don't have Audiosurf yet I would highly recommend it; as I said, it is one of my favorite games, and my go-to game if I have a few minutes to chill.