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Zut alors! MacBook announcement doesn't translate well
Thanks to what appears to be a character encoding problem on a French version of the Apple website, the MacBook announcement -- meant to say "perfectly designed" in French -- came out reading "perfectly dumb" (or as one of our tipsters said, a more vulgar version of "perfectly poopy"). That wasn't the only problem: according to Macenstein, a Macgeneration article noted that the announcements were replete with spelling and grammatical errors. (Link is en français.) The pages have since been updated with better grammar. Unfortunately my decade-old high school French can't tell me what about the grammar is wrong, but hopefully our commenters can let us know by leaving a comment. Thanks, Bertie and Fabrizio!
Forum Post of the Day: I'm a WoW Widow
And Belfaire doesn't care.Reader Kyver tipped us off to a gem of a post on the Customer Service Forums today, titled "I'm a WoW Widow" (moderately NSFW, PG-13 rating). The story goes like this: A girl, Missmegan, lost her boyfriend to the Burning Crusades [sic]. They used to play together horde side, but after buying the expansion he turned to the alliance and is dedicated to his guild mates. All is lost, as he's no longer interested in his girlfriend's "assets" and rambles like a two-year old.Of course this makes our forum posting protagonist upset, and she needs her boyfriend back. Now obviously this is a joke. At least I hope it is. And Katie (my girlfriend), if you're reading this I promise I'll never let it get this bad. I mean, I only play for 5 hours a day, not 13 as the boyfriend in the story does. And I make money with all this, so it's okay, right? Sweetie? Darling? Honey... D'oh....Tagging the first response to this thread is Belfaire The Mighty, with the simple response "Dear WoW Widow, It's actually Burning Crusade. Yours, Belfaire." This had myself and the other writers here laughing. We had to share it.So dear readers, I ask you, are you a WoW widow?
A typing tutor for the iPhone
A while back, we reported on a study that (not only had all kinds of holes in it, but) claimed the iPhone's keyboard was two times slower than other phones. But as many commenters said, the keyboard just requires practice.And there's no better way to get it than to jump into a typing tutor. We've seen one before for the iPhone, but reader Travis (thanks!) sent us a tip about TypingWeb.com's free iPhone tutor (just go to their site on your iPhone, and enter some information to create an account), and I was impressed by how smoothly it worked. During the Basic test, I moved pretty quickly-- a nice 36 words per minute. But on the Advanced test, they throw all kinds of things at you (including intentionally misspelled words, so you have to dodge Apple's corrections), and I dropped down to about 16 wpm.Definitely worth a try. A lot of iPhone typing seems to be situation-- moving around in a car or bus, for instance, makes things a lot harder. But at least this will give you a ballpark figure of your typing prowess.
Everyone on the Internet should buy Spelling Challenges
Well, this is a start to solving the Internet's problems. Next up: Learning the Difference Between "Your" and "You're" Challenges!We've received some screenshots of Crave's Spelling Challenges and More!, the spelling-based game show game with over 25,000 words to spell. We can see a sort of Jumble-style anagram game called "Mish Mash" and a "Bomb Blast" game that gives players a limited time to pick out a correctly spelled word from a group of horrible mistakes.The game uses a very simplistic, clean presentation that we find appealing. Not every educational game needs a charismatic floating head.%Gallery-4721%[Via press release]
Typinator 2.0 released with a flood of new features
Typing tools that increase your efficiency are all the rage for anyone who has to type more than their name and credit card number on a daily basis, and ergonis just upped the ante with the release of Typinator 2.0. Competing directly with similar tools like TextExpander and TypeIt4Me, this new version of Typinator brings a virtual boatload of new features to the table, including: Sets allow convenient organization of abbreviations Import and export of abbreviation sets Comes with auto-correction sets for English, German and French Import from Textpander, TextExpander and TypeIt4Me Application-specific set assignment Typinator can be disabled in individual applications Clipboard insertion within expansions Streamlined user interface for improved conformance to Apple's guidelines The abbreviation table can be sorted by abbreviation, expansion, options, and conflict status Expansion of abbreviations is much faster now, even while typing extremely fast and with thousands of defined abbreviations and auto-corrections Significantly reduced memory requirements, especially with large expansions and much, much more As a paid user of TextExpander, this new release of Typinator looks quite tasty indeed. I'm actually just glad the typing tool space is getting more competitive, as I can't write or work on the web without one anymore. A demo is of course available, while a single licenses sells for about $26 (EUR 19.99).
Five tips for guild applications
So maybe your current guild just isn't doing it for you. They're casual players and you're ready to step into something more hardcore, or you can sense some impending guild drama and want to be far away, or maybe they're like my guildmates and keep talking about wangs in guild chat for, like, half an hour. It's time to suck it up, tell them you're moving on, and then go to the realm forums and start filling out guild applications. Despite what you may think, guild applications aren't quite as rough as job applications. They're mainly there to weed out the total idiots and incompetents. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to appear like a total idiot or incompetent, so here are some tips for your applications. Happy hunting!
