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NASA has completed the $8.7 billion James Webb space telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope has given humanity unprecedented glimpses into the universe, but it will soon be replaced by a far more powerful model. NASA administrator Charles Bolden unveiled the completed $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will be able to see the universe as it was 13 billion years ago. It's equipped with a 21-foot, gold-coated mirror array that can collect seven times more light than Hubble and scan the infrared spectrum to see through dust. "We've done two decades of innovation and hard work, and this is the result," project scientist John Mather says.
Mass Effect 2 has highest completion rate in ME, Dragon Age series
BioWare's director of online development Fernando Melo presented the above player completion rates for Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 during a panel at GDC Europe. Mass Effect 2 topped the charts with 56 percent of players completing the entire game, followed by Mass Effect 3 with 42 percent, Dragon Age 2 with 41 percent, Mass Effect with 40 percent and finally Dragon Age: Origins at the lowest rate of 36 percent. The spike in Mass Effect 2's completion can be attributed to Mass Effect 3's recent launch, when an influx of players were reminded of the game and attempted to finish it before that release, Melo said.
Five apps to help you stay organized
Time is one of our most valuable assets and it's a shame to waste it looking for things that are misplaced and forgetting things because the details of your life are out of order. This week's Five Apps will help you gain control of life and get yourself organized once and for all. Completion ($2.99) Completion is a task manager that's quick and simple to use. It doesn't overwhelm you with complexity which makes its easy to get your tasks organized and stay committed for the long term. The workflow is simple. You add tasks and assign them to a project like work, personal or household. Each task lets you specify a date, set a priority, add a note, and assign it to a group. You can then use the group, due date and priority information to sort each list of tasks. When you have completed a task, you can delete it forever or mark it as complete which archives it for later retrieval. It has an attractive, colorful interface that makes Completion a pleasure to use. Pocket Informant ($12.99; $14.99 for HD iPad version) Pocket Informant is a contact, task and calendaring application for the iPhone and iPad. It's a productivity app on steroids that supports multiple calendars and syncs to a variety of services including Toodledo and Google calendar. The best part of Pocket Informant is its long list of customizations and settings. If you can see it on the screen, you can likely change its appearance and configure it to your preference. It's meant for the power user who doesn't mind spending a few hours tweaking it to his or her liking. Once you get it set up, you'll have 75% of your life at your fingertips. Bill Minder for iPhone ($1.99) BillMinder for iPhone lets you organize your bills by recording payment, amount and due date information. The app has a calendar and a list view that'll let you see which bills are past due and which are due in the future. If you need some help remembering when each blll is due, you can setup reminders that will alert a set number of days in advance. You can also sync bills between your iOS devices and back your data up to the cloud for retrieval if your phone is lost or stolen. Payment from within the app is made easy by its integration with DebtMinder (also made by the developers behind BillMinder) and Pocket Money. Billings Touch (Free to try; $15 to unlock via in-app purchase) Billings Touch is an invoicing and billing app for the freelancer. It'll let you organize your clients, track the amount of time you spend working on a project and manage invoices. Developed by Marketcircle, Billings Touch works alone as an iPhone app or as a companion to the desktop Billings for Mac app. We took a look at Billings Touch when it first came out. We liked it back then and still like it now. It's not perfect -- you can't use a custom invoice on the iPhone, but it remains one of the best apps for freelancers who want to keep track of their precious incoming cash flow. Pocket Money ($4.99 for iPhone and iPad) Pocket Money is a financial app that'll help you organize your money. It uses a standard register interface and lets you add accounts like your checking, savings, credit card, and cash. It has all the information you need to record a transaction like category, date, amount, and note. Best of all, it lets you easily sync information between two iOS devices. You can also export transactions to your desktop finance app via Qif files. It's an excellent app for your basic financial needs.
The Daily Grind: When have you felt a sense of completion?
By their very nature, MMOs discourage being done. Not necessarily in an insidious sense -- but when your game relies upon people playing it for months on end, there's a natural emphasis on letting tasks stretch off to infinity. But while it's certainly possible to wind up with almost astonishingly long-running tasks, such as assembling the Relic Weapons in Final Fantasy XI, with enough persistence you eventually arrive at the day when you have your brand-new Excalibur. It's almost enough to just kill something with it and then declare yourself done. Even with an emphasis on long-term goals, there come certain points when you feel that your character has finished everything you want to do -- or perhaps points when the player behind the character just feels done. You are at the apex of power and knowledge, and there's no new challenges that won't be more of the same. In what moments have you felt a sense of completion and finality? Has that been your signal to quit, take a break, or just set a new goal for yourself? Are you happier with games that let you achieve several smaller goals, or one huge goal that feels more significant when you hit it?
Completion tracker and more from Wowhead
Wowhead has given us a few new features for holiday presents. The navigation tabs have been tweaked to showcase some of the features and pages they've been adding recently. There's also a super-cute wallpaper by Noxychu, featuring cartoon avatars of various Wowhead employees. More interesting, however, is the Completion Tracker, which works with their profiler and client to track your characters' endless quest to 100%. Areas tracked include quests, mounts, pets, and recipes. It's still in beta, but it seems to be working fairly well. It also lets you exclude categories that you may not be working on. The other feature that Wowhead added is one that I'm honestly not a fan of - the little "share" button at the bottom of blog posts. I know we have it on Wow.com as well, but I still think it would be better not to have it; people are perfectly competent to submit links to Digg or Facebook or whatever without you encouraging them to do it. That's just a personal opinion, though.
"Leading the Cavalry" achievement lowered to 50 mounts
Looks like our little survey of mounts available for the Leading the Cavalry achievement found some ground at Blizzard -- they've lowered the number of necessary mounts from 75 to 50 in the latest beta build. Seventy-five mounts is a lot, and even though, yes, we didn't actually count any of the mounts coming in Wrath of the Lich King (surely there are plenty there), Tauren especially would have trouble coming up with that many things to ride around.And as you can see, the prize for having way more mounts than you'd ever need is... another mount. You can nab an Albino Netherdrake (a few commenters say it's just a drake, but that model looks like a netherdrake to me) for completing the achievement. We can say this: it'll definitely stand out in a crowd. But the green and the white together? The skin may change before launch, but maybe we don't actually need to bother getting those 50 mounts after all...
3 Final Fantasy XIII games; 2 just for PS3
Final Fantasy XII won't be out for the PS2 in the States until October, but we now have a glimpse of Final Fantasy XIII thanks to Square Enix's pre-E3 press event -- and this installment in the series won't be coming alone.Like the different titles in the Compilation of FFVII collection of games and movies, the initially announced installments in the FFXIII universe will span multiple platforms which, in this case, include both the PS3 and sufficiently advanced mobile handsets. Not much is known about the mobile-bound Final Fantasy Agito XIII, but the subtitle-less version of FFXIII will concern a gun-and-sword-toting heroine in a futuristic world, while Final Fantasy Versus XIII will focus on "a spiky-haired character," "extreme action elements," and a primary theme of "bonding" (whatever that means). Anybody ready to "resist the world"?The multiple titles might explain the earlier rumor reported in March that FFXIII was "practically close to being finished" (maybe only one of these games was nearing completion). Whatever the case may be, we're just happy that more than one not-so-Final-Fantasy will be hitting the next PlayStation in relatively rapid succession. RPG feasting: on the way.[Via Joystiq]
TUAW Tip: Hit esc for some word suggestions
It appears that while typing a word in many OS X apps, such as iChat and Yojimbo, hitting the Esc key will present a drop-down list of word completion options. I *think* this might be a Cocoa-related service of Mac OS X (sorry, Firefox users), but I'm always hesitant to toss out a guess like that because I am constantly surprised as to which apps are actually Cocoa (Finder, for example, is still Carbon, even in Tiger). I get this popup in Ecto, Stickies and Mail as well, but not in any input areas on websites in Safari, so feel free to experiment with this handy but (as far as I know) undocumented feature.
