Solutions
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HTC Vive will help more companies jump into VR
Much like how Microsoft has positioned HoloLens as an enterprise-friendly tool for training, HTC Vive wants to help businesses take advantage of virtual reality. The company is launching a new unit today, Vive Enterprise Solutions, that'll be entirely focused on professional needs, be it VR hardware, software or services. It follows the release of the Vive Pro last year, a headset that managed to fix all of the problems of the original Vive, but at a high $799 cost that would really only appeal to businesses and professionals.
Recon's deal with the 'other' Motorola could see a rugged Glass rival
Head-mounted computing specialists Recon Instruments is building quite a team to take on Google Glass. Last year, Intel offered both cash and its manufacturing and technology expertise, and now the "other" Motorola has followed suit. Motorola Solutions has opened its checkbook and pledged to share its product development and distribution know-how with the Canadian outfit. Why has a company with a pedigree in walkie-talkies and barcode scanners teamed up with Recon? Not only does it have plenty of experience making rugged gadgets that'll likely improve the Jet and Snow2's hardiness, but it also already makes wearable computers on the side. The Motorola HC1, you see, is an enterprise device that's designed to work in extreme environments where it'd be too dangerous to use a phone. Perhaps the two of them will develop a new wearable platform that's as comfortable on the slopes as it is on the oil rig.
WebHelpDesk acquired, Mac and Linux versions disappear [Updated]
Web Help Desk is software that runs on Mac OS Server, among other platforms -- it's an enterprise "help tracking" package that allows small and large companies to track IT and help support across large teams and customer bases. Users access the ticketing system via their web browsers, or via their iPhones with the Web Help Desk iOS app. The company that makes this software just got acquired by another IT software company called Solarwinds, but apparently Solarwinds is planning to do things over there a little differently: the Mac and Linux version download links have been removed from the website. A salesperson at the company emailed TUAW reader Neil, and says that "moving forward [Web Help Desk] is strictly Windows-based." That's a strange decision -- according to the company's page, even Apple makes use of the Web Help Desk software, so there's definitely a call for the Mac version. On the company forums, another representative says the issue isn't quite over yet: Web Help Desk will continue to support previous Mac customers, and hasn't yet decided what the future holds. In the meantime, there are plenty of alternatives for issue-tracking systems like this, many of which will work fine on Mac OS (and quite a few that are open source as well). Our own Brett Terpstra recommends the hosted Tender web app as a support solution, so that's worth checking out as well. Still, migrating from one of these systems to another is likely a huge pain, so hopefully Web Help Desk and Solarwinds will find the resources necessary to keep its Mac version up and running. Update: Solarwinds has contacted TUAW to say that the Mac and Linux versions are still available from the company, and still supported. Anyone who wants to use or try out the software on Mac or Linux need only ask, and the software will be provided to them. So why were the links removed? Denny LeCompte, the VP of Products at Solarwinds, had this to say in our comments: "Since we acquired Web Help Desk on July 25 and started selling it the very next day, we handed a brand new product to our sales team with very little time to train them. For the short term, we chose to reduce the variety of OS's we support for the 30-day free evaluation period. We did that to make it easier for the sales engineers to support the new product and provide a great experience for customers. We chose Windows to start with because it was the most popular evaluation download for Web Help Desk. We expect that we'll add back OS's to the evaluation as the internal team comes up to speed on the new product. And as a couple of the commenters point out, the UI is completely web-based, so we're really only talking about which server OS it runs on. The founder of Web Help Desk was and is a big Apple fan, and the product is built on an Apple coding platform, and the UI has a very Mac OS feel to it. It's one of the reasons so many Mac folks have gravitated to the this product, and one of the main reasons we chose to acquire it." You can read more of his statement below. Thanks, Neil!
Wings Over Atreia: Rant powers activate!
So there I was, with another topic planned and article well on its way to completion when fate intervened and thrust a new subject upon me. And not in a happy-Fed-Ex-guy-handing-it-over kinda way either, but a growling, grumbling, grit-my-teeth-and-try-not-to-speak-in-asterisks (%#$**!) kind of way. Oh yes, this is a topic of great rantiness for me. I freely admit that I rarely reach the heights of true frustration within Aion (not counting launch queues where I simply chose to stop logging in altogether), especially to the point of actually tossing aside another column to express and share said frustrations with you. But now, you have a second opportunity to witness my small yet developing rant lobe -- placed, I believe, somewhere behind the occipital lobe judging by the fact that when it revs up people tend to see red. And the truth of it is, I am going to derive great pleasure from venting about this topic. So what has me so fired up right now? The venerable AP harvesting grounds of the truly lazy: AFK Dredgions. Queue up then enter past the break for a discourse on the evils of this practice and what NCsoft should do about it.
How to: Listen to your Amazon Cloud Player music on your iOS device
[H/t to Mashable's Christina Warren, who wrote this up yesterday. We independently arrived at the same place and had not seen Christina's writeup. - Ed.] Have you signed up for Amazon Cloud? It's a newly launched service that offers 5 GB of free online cloud storage and affordable paid plans up to 1 TB. Competing with Dropbox, Amazon Cloud takes measures one step further -- integrating with its online store to provide over-the-air media access, like SugarSync, Mougg and AudioBox. Unlike those latter services, however, Amazon Cloud provides media storage for free -- so long as you purchase that media from the Amazon store. Your Amazon music will not eat away at the free 5 GB that come with the basic plan. If you're hoping to play your Cloud music on your iPhone or iPad, you might be put off by the user interface, which offers an MP3 icon but no play/pause button -- the way that it does on your Flash-enabled home computer. Fear not. There is a workaround.
Calibrate your monitors for cheap
In the world of computer monitors, there's quality, ... and then there's the rest of us. I buy my monitors at places like Costco, Target and Best Buy, where you can pick up a 27-inch unit for under $300. Remember that statement about "you get what you pay for?" It's particularly true of low-end monitors where color calibration is often an afterthought rather than a guiding product principle. TUAW Talkcast regular Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd offers a great workaround for all of us who buy low on the food chain. Instead of spending upwards of $200 for a display calibrator, he's discovered that you can rent a color meter from your local photo shop for somewhat less than $20. He offers a quick but excellent write-up on his personal blog, with hints about the process. (Don't forget to save your calibrated settings in case you need to swap out hard drives or upgrade to a new OS.) Apple-branded shiny and white is a wonderful thing, but it's not a solution for everyone. Doc's calibration rental solution provides an effective workaround for people who want to make the most of the equipment they can afford.
Ghostcrawler on the Path of the Titans
Our good friend Ghostcrawler (I can say that now, because we all got to meet him at BlizzCon the other week) has done his best to explain the new Path of the Titans feature coming in the Cataclysm expansion over in this forum thread. We had this same question come up on last week's podcast as well, and we said pretty much the same thing GC does: Path of the Titans is a brand new way for max-level characters to keep improving themselves. Of course, the feature is still being developed, but the goal is a "gated, not grindy" way (as in, you'll earn rewards by doing things, not by doing them over and over again) to experience character progression outside of just reputation grinding, PvP, or raiding.He clarifies the idea more later in the thread as well. The different paths of the Titans are meant to be class-independent, but GC says that they do want players to debate which path is best for which class, even if they do end up with a "best" solution in the end. Archaeology is meant to be a part of it, so GC agrees that it could be more of a mandatory secondary profession than Cooking or Fishing has been in the past, but they're aware of that danger. And just because the paths may be tied to dailies or instances doesn't mean they'll work the same: the time in which you can progress might be longer than the daily quest limit or shorter than the weekly raid limit. The idea, as above, is to give players who don't necessarily raid or PvP something else to do with character progression at endgame.Should be interesting to see what they come up with. Personally, this sounds a little bit to me like D&D's prestige classes -- not nearly as powerful or varied, but a way of separating your character out from the rest of those that chose the same class you did. That's just me being hopeful, though -- Blizzard seems to have a lot of development before we see this as a finished product. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.
Behind the scenes of WoW's bandwidth
We heard a little while back that it was AT&T who provide data center hosting to Blizzard and this gigantic game (and actually, we've had outage problems before due to maintenance on AT&T's end), but our friend Tamara Chuang of the Orange County Register went straight to the source, and spoke with the big bandwidth provider on just what it takes to keep the servers up. There's some good information in there, especially if you're interested in all of the motherboards and wires that run the World of Warcraft. MMOs are apparently AT&T's biggest gaming customers, and they run the wires for companies like Blizzard as well as Konami and Turbine. They originally helped run Battle.net, and when Blizzard wanted to expand with World of Warcraft, AT&T's gaming division expanded with them.Unfortunately, there's a lot of secrets here -- given that they're selling a service, AT&T doesn't speak too frankly about how much downtime they're really responsible for, and of course as a trade secret they can't give any numbers on how much bandwidth is passing through and where it's all going. But they will say that they've got latency levels down to milliseconds (in their testing, I'm sure -- lots of players would probably suggest it's a little worse, depending on which ISP you use), and that they offer services like Synaptic Hosting. During times of hard usage, Blizzard can ask (for a price, of course) to open the floodgates up and make sure there's enough bandwidth to go around.
Can Blizzard fix all their launch problems in Wrath?
Our good friend Relmstein (who I was able to finally meet in person at BlizzCon this year) is back to blogging about World of Warcraft, even though he was on a WAR trip for a while there. But we're glad to have him back -- yesterday, he posted about how Wrath might tackle all the launch issues we saw with the Burning Crusade.Everyone knows by now that Blizzard has split the entry area into two different areas (with four total Northrend entry points, one for each faction), and of course there's also Death Knights to roll, so hopefully the lag problem is helped (hard to believe it could actually be solved). But Relmstein has other ideas in mind: the dynamic spawn system (mobs will spawn faster the more people there are around killing them) causes some crazy repops last time, and hopefully that's been evened out a bit. He's also worried about the "leveling truce" on PvP servers -- during the last expansion, everyone was more interested in exploring than fighting for the first few levels, but if you missed that ad-hoc "truce," you had new level 70s beating you down as you were trying to explore the world. Hopefully the Lake Wintergrasp PvP zone will keep PvPers busy without griefing all of the people trying to see Northrend for the first time.And later on, the Karazhan bump is a worry as well -- lots of guilds, early on in BC, were crushed by Karazhan's 10-man limit and the gear checks in there. Will 10-man Naxx also cause a ton of guild breakups, or will the 10/25 man split help guilds play what they want to play? We'll have to see how it all works out -- this is only the second time Blizzard has released this amount of content into the game, so while they're sure to have evened out some problems, you have to think that there will still be a few bumps in the road.
DS Daily: Problems and solutions
After seeing this thread over at NeoGAF, we spent a little time thinking about the DS Lite. Obviously, we're fans, but we're not going to say it's perfect. There can be problems at times. We're not sure we're ready for a whole new redesign (though we don't hate Shogmaster's mockup design at all), but if someone handed us a free new DS with a few issues fixed (d-pad, anyone?), we wouldn't argue. So we thought we'd ask you: what would you change? What would you fix? What do you think the Lite didn't address when it moved up from the DS?
Razer introduces feature-packed keyboard with iPod dock
Is that plain-jane Apple Keyboard starting to feel a little lax in the feature department? Do you find yourself wanting for, say, 10 programmable hotkeys and dedicated iTunes control keys? How does a built-in iPod dock sound, with an audio line out port for the ultimate in keyboard luxury and integration?If your keyboard juices are 'a flowin, check out the new Pro|Type™ Multimedia Keyboard from Razer Pro|Solutions, a decked-out keyboard with all the fixins, except a cup holder. No pricing or availability has been announced, but we'll let you know as soon as we hear when you'll have yet another option for keeping your iPod front and center in your life.[via iLounge]
