Imagine a library where you’re free to browse the stacks, but when you pull a book from the shelf it’s magically transformed into a card which says, “You’re holding one book”… until you set it down on a desk or the checkout counter, at which point it magically changes back into the book. The real world doesn’t work like that—neither should the computer.
Halo didn’t initially work on my iBook G4; it would always quit just after showing the splash screen. After some weeks, Greg Grimes at MacSoft figured out that I should copy the “shaders” folder on the CD into the “Halo” folder on hard drive. Now it works, and the performance is acceptable on the iBook with everything on low quality, which is more than I as expecting. As to Halo itself? The game was worth the wait, though I’m disappointed about the sloppy resolution switching code that messes up all my window positions.
Freshly Squeezed Software has released a public beta (1.0 build 10) of Rock Star, a fun Mac game that melds the iPod’s music trivia game with You Don’t Know Jack-style visuals. The beta seems stable, but you need to be patient when launching it; that took 25 seconds on my machine, and another 20 seconds to load my playlists. Parsability of XML not withstanding, I still think that Apple should open up the APIs that its iApps use to share information.
