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Ask Massively: Stir-crazy edition
With no power, no real Internet access, no running water, and no access to just about anything, I was getting a little bit stir-crazy. Fortunately, I've made use of my training as a Boy Scout and assembled a crude pastiche of elements to bring some of my favorite electronic online games into the offline space. Success has been mixed. Sitting in dowtown and periodically shouting that a level 34 Dragoon was looking for a party produced exactly the right reaction to simulate logging in to Final Fantasy XI, but my attempt at "logging in" to City of Heroes resulted in a lengthy discussion with police regarding the appropriateness of waving a Nerf sword at teenagers. My makeshift attempts at answering this week's lineup for Ask Massively, however, have proved pretty fruitful all around. Skip on past the break for discussions about some very meta considerations, not the least of which being a potential subdivision of the site. As always, leaving a question in the comments or mailing it to ask@massively.com will quite possibly get it included in a future edition of the column. Sometimes even if the question is ridiculous.
TextExpander 3.2.2 available, fixes auto-capitalization bugs
TextExpander, a very useful application which will automatically expand various text macros for you, has been updated to 3.2.2. The release notes indicate that 3.2.1 was submitted to the Mac App Store, and that Dropbox syncing had been improved. The Smile Software blog also notes that auto-capitalization has also been improved, solving many of the annoying issues with the recent feature. Notably, if you switched from one app to another and then back, TextExpander sometimes thought that was a new sentence and auto-capitalized it. There are some other notes that users should read for more details. TextExpander also has a new welcome screen -- presumably to help new users who find and download the app via the Mac App Store -- which includes video tutorials and links to additional help files. Users can download the new version right now.
iPad keyboard has broken shift-drag capitalization under iOS 4.2.1
The iOS 4.2.1 update for my iPad brought many welcome features -- and one unwelcome one. Since upgrading, I have found myself unable to use the handy shift-drag trick to type capitals. Now, I move my finger down to shift, place it on the screen, drag to the letter I want, release it -- and get something random. Rarely, it's the character I was aiming for. More often, it's some other character I dragged my finger over on the way to it. Even more often, it's something nothing at all. The video shows the problem in action. This is really quite annoying -- I failed to log into a server several times this morning, and it wasn't until I watched the password box like a hawk that I could deduce why. Fix it please, Apple! Thanks to Jon for sending this in
Editorial: The Engadget style guide reaches a MILESTONE
So last week the New York Times Magazine published a piece called "Against Camel Case" which argues that intercapped product names like iPhone and TiVo are "medieval," because they harken back to a time in which people mostly read aloud, slowly sounding out each word as they tried to understand them. Proper word spacing, says the Times, "eventually made possible phenomena like irony, pornography and freedom of conscience." That's sort of a crazy coincidence -- while we're not so sure word spacing and porn have anything to do with each other, we did just re-do our style guide when we launched our jazzy new redesign, and we actually thought long and hard about how to handle intercapped, all-capped, and otherwise non-standard product names. This is something we deal with a hundred times a day, and we simply weren't going to let Motorola tell us to write MILESTONE over and over again, completely contradicting our own sense of style and taste -- as the Times says, "Writers of the world, fight back!" Well, we can't say no to that, so we thought we'd share our four newly-minted rules for writing out non-standard product names: Product and company names that are regular English words shall be treated like proper English nouns, complete with proper capitalization. Example: DROID becomes Droid and nook becomes Nook. Product and company names that are not regular English words shall be capitalized first as proper nouns, and then as the company treats them. Example: RAZR stays RAZR, but chumby would become Chumby. Intercapped product and company names should generally be treated as the company treats them, unless it's egregious and / or looks weird. Example: iPhone stays iPhone, BlackBerry stays BlackBerry and TiVo stays TiVo, but ASUSTeK becomes Asustek. This rule is subject to many exceptions based on usage and history, and also functions as the "this is stupid" loophole. Acronyms should obviously be in all-caps. We think these rules are flexible to handle most situations, although there are some edge cases and blatant Rule 3 violations out there. Still, it's a start -- unlike the Times, we're pretty sure "iPhone" and "MasterCard" are here to stay, but we feel like our rules are a small step towards making our site clearer and more readable. Either that, or we're just crazy in the head.
