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Get your first look at the 'Super Smash Bros. Ultimate' Adventure Mode
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is getting a single-player mode, and the latest Nintendo Direct offered a first glimpse on what to expect when the game launches on December 7th. Nintendo is calling it Adventure Mode: World of Light, and promises that it's "more about fun than story."
'Super Smash Bros. Ultimate' is a refinement of a classic formula
It's December 1999. I'm sitting in my best friend's smoke-filled bedroom, frantically mashing the buttons of an N64 controller and having the time of my life. Six months later, I'm in the same smokey hovel, but now I'm deftly dodging attacks, timing blocks and dancing between the platforms of Planet Zebes. And I'm still having the time of my life. This has been the core appeal of the Super Smash Bros. (SSB) series since day one: No matter your skill level or play style, get together with a bunch of friends, and you're going to have a lot of fun. Put in the time to master the game, though, and you'll find a rewarding and deep fighter. Fast-forward the best part of two decades, and at E3 2018, Nintendo has taken the wraps off its latest SSB game, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. A large portion of Nintendo's Direct presentation, and indeed its cavernous E3 booth, was dedicated to the brawler, which is due for release on the Switch December 7th.
Nintendo's future lies in its 'Super Smash Bros.' updates
Nintendo will host the last "Direct" presentation for Super Smash Bros. (SSB) on December 15th at 5PM ET. As those that follow Directs will know, this is the third presentation dedicated solely to the brawler, alongside frequent SSB announcements through the regular Nintendo Directs. It's been a refreshing year of experimentation and additions from Nintendo; we've seen eight stages and five characters announced as DLC so far, and it's likely the final show will give us a couple more surprises. This slow but steady dripfeed of content wasn't a fresh idea -- games like Call of Duty have been doing similar things for years -- but Nintendo's adoption of the technique broke new ground for the company.
Make an SSB with Chrome on the Mac
A site-specific browser (SSB) is a great way to "package" a web app you use every day into a dockable, clickable app that maintains its own cookies, settings and preferences versus your everyday web browser config. On the Mac, the easiest way to make an SSB is via the handy Fluid app, which supports independent prefs in its paid version. Chrome's preliminary "packaged app" support, which will take the SSB concept to the next level, has been supported via dev builds on Windows and Linux since the beginning of the month; you can get a sneak preview of the App Launcher on the Mac, but actual packaged app support is still TBD. If you love the Gmail-savvy simplicity of Mailplane, but can't quite get around the price tag, you might consider an SSB for Gmail, which gives you some of the same functionality. Unfortunately, Fluid builds its SSB support on top of Safari and Webkit, which means your SSB won't be quite as Gmail/Google Docs-savvy as it would be if you were using Chrome. (Try printing a font-heavy Google Docs file from Safari.) There is a way out of this pickle: build an SSB using Chrome as the underlying engine instead. With a quick script and a few Terminal tweaks, you can make a double-clickable fresh Chrome SSB that keeps its own profile well clear of your normal settings. Don't like shell scripts? The CreateGCApp utility packages up the script and does all the work for you. Having a separate instance/SSB of Chrome is particularly handy if you have trouble with Gmail's multiple-account support in your regular browser, as sometimes can happen if one account uses single sign-on via a third party. Once upon a time, you could make SSBs with Firefox via Prism, but that project has been left to wither on the vine. [via Lifehacker & Bracken King]
Fluid lets you embed webpages as your desktop or in menu bar
I refer to my calendar a lot during the day, but I don't always have my calendar program running. Most of the time I just want to glance at something to confirm the time/date of an upcoming event, or just double check a date: "What is the last Sunday in May? Oh right, the 30th." It occurred to me today that I could make life a little easier if I could have my calendar embedded in my Desktop. Those of you who remember Microsoft Windows' "Active Desktop" feature may shudder in fear at the idea because, at least in my experience, Active Desktop was a complete and utter disaster. It never worked well, if you could get it to work at all. There are extremely geeky ways of doing this but MacOSXHints.com had a simple solution I didn't even know was possible: Fluid.app. Now I've used Fluid.app for a long time, but I never knew what the "Embedded SSB" or "MenuExtra SSB" actually did. Turns out that either of them are a potential solution, not just for calendars, but for any web page. [Editor's Note: Fluid just recently went open source, and though the blog hasn't been updated yet, we're told the SSB creator is now open source as well.]
Prism single-site browser goes 1.0 beta
The concept of a single-site browser or site-specific browser (SSB, either way) is simple: give me a window with one website in it, preferably a desktop application replacement like Gmail, RTM, Basecamp or Zoho, and let that window behave like a regular application with its own Dock icon, notifications, etc. If you're spending a lot of your time on a particular site, this can simplify your life quite a bit; if you're mixing up GTD with ADD (as so many of us seem to be), an SSB can help limit your distraction horizon while you're trying to maintain focus and flow. The inspiration for many SSB offerings was the Firefox offshoot Webrunner, and the descendant of that project has now earned a 1.0 beta designation and its own website: Prism, from Mozilla Labs, gives you a power tool for creating your own SSBs at will, either via a Firefox extension or by launching the Prism config app and typing in the target URL. Aside from having a dockable icon for each website you convert, you can also set your SSBs to launch at login, or assign mailto: links to open your web email client (similarly achievable for Gmail with the Gmail Notifier tool). If you have to keep separate sets of credentials for work & personal accounts for web services, no need to log in and out repeatedly -- just set up a Prism SSB for one of the accounts, and the passwords & cookies will stay as they need to be. In my brief testing this morning, several sites worked just as expected; the only sticking point is that the Choosy extension gets confused about whether or not Firefox is running when an SSB is open. Safari 4 developer seeds had offered a "Save as Web Application" feature for creating SSBs, which has been stripped from the File menu in the current public beta but still looks to be part of the final release; meanwhile, you can still make WebKit-centric SSBs with the excellent and free Fluid. What site or webapp would you put in a single-site browser? Thanks to everyone who sent this in. [H/T to Lifehacker]
Flickr Find: the Fluid icons pool
The team down the road from me at Carsonified have been doing it, and you can do it too. Fluid is a fantastic free app that turns any web site into a self-contained application on your Mac. If you want to keep your webmail outside your normal web browser, Fluid is what you need. Thing is, all the apps it creates need icons, just as any app in your Applications folder does. By default, Fluid grabs the .ico files it finds on web sites and uses them as icons, but they don't scale well. Where can you find decent alternatives? The answer is the Fluid icons pool on Flickr, where a busy community of Fluid users have been busy making a selection of beautiful icons that work perfectly with any Fluid SSBs (Site-Specific Browsers) you've created. The icons in the pool might look weird to start with, but that's because the PNG originals have been converted to JPG format by Flickr's brain. To make use of an icon you like, make sure you view and download the full-size original, which will be the PNG file you need.
More Smash Bros. Brawl videos than you can shake a remote at
After this week's spoilerific Smash Bros. Brawl leaks and video dump out of Japan, you might be sick to death of the game already. Or you might be writhing around on the floor, gibbering like a baby and drooling at the thought of more information about Nintendo's fan-service-fest.If you fall into the second group, the below videos should help stop the shakes for a little while. We know you're busy, so we tried to pick out the highest-quality, most intriguing and informative of the literal ass-ton of Brawl videos floating on the web, so you can get your spoiler-fix in the shortest amount of time possible. Enjoy!Warning: major spoilers contained in almost all of the below videos
