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Dropbox's 100GB file-transfer feature is out of beta
This summer, Dropbox introduced a new feature called Transfer as a private beta. The goal was to solve a longstanding issue with sharing files via Dropbox. For years, users have been able to share files, but changes made to the file on either the sending or receiving end would sync. That was great for collaborating, but it was less than ideal for, say, sharing files with a client. Transfer aims to solve that, and now, it's available to all users.
Hearthstone due out on smartphones early next year
The one thing that Hearthstone currently lacks in comparison to traditional card games is the simple portability of a deck of cards, but that deficiency will soon be rectified. A new update on the official site shares an infographic with players and talks turkey on the upcoming clients for iPhones and Android phones. The client for Android tablets is nearly finished and should be ready before the end of the year; the iPad version softlaunched last spring. But the iPhone client is taking just a little longer to polish up. As a result, the clients for these devices will not be ready until early next year. So you won't be able to bring the game with you on your phone to winter holiday gatherings in 2014, but before long, you'll be carrying an entire deck of cards in a device that is smaller than an actual deck of cards. We've included the game's playerbase infographic below.
The Daily Grind: Do you prefer games available on multiple platforms?
There's a certain glee in knowing that any time I want, I could buy a copy of Final Fantasy XIV for my PlayStation 3 and just play there instead of on the computer. I doubt I ever will, but I always have the option. And I've met more than a few people whom I enjoy playing alongside and who do play on the console, so it's certainly enriched my overall game experience. Most MMOs launch for the PC and that's it. A small number go on to develop a native Mac client, some are available on consoles or mobile decides, and so forth. You can argue that developing these extra clients takes time and resources away from improving the main game, but you can also argue that these extra clients allow people who would otherwise have never played the game to experience something awesome. So how do you feel? Do you prefer games available on multiple platforms, do you prefer development focused on just one, or do you not really care? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Perfect World Entertainment explains more about Arc
Perfect World Entertainment is pulling its games together in a big way. The company's new Arc platform is meant to integrate all of its various titles, from Star Trek Online to Neverwinter to Perfect World International, under a single launcher and a more unified scheme. A new development update explains more about what this will mean for players of these titles and offers a rough idea of when these changes will begin rolling out. First and foremost in many players' minds, the new launcher will not be made mandatory just yet, although a new version of all the various game websites will be launching before the year's end. The change is also creating a new and streamlined format for buying Zen for each game, along with a new set of game guides to help new players understand what they're getting into. For more details on these changes as well as the new profile system, take a look at the full update, and keep your eyes peeled for our interview with PWE on these changes from Terilynn Shull.
RIFT sees a player surge thanks to Steam
The near-ubiquity of Steam as a distribution platform can certainly drive players to your game. A little less than a week after RIFT launched on Steam, Trion Worlds is reporting that RIFT and Defiance have seen a combined influx of 250,000 new players, beating out the numbers reported both for the launch of Storm Legion and RIFT's free-to-play conversion. It's the largest influx of players the game has ever seen since its original launch, for that matter: Trion says it made for the "highest single day gain in new users" since the game first opened its doors. What does that mean for the long run? That's the eternal question. RIFT launched its most recent major patch yesterday, but whether or not it will encourage players new to the game to subscribe or buy things in the cash shop is up for debate. Regardless, it's a good sign of health for the game as a whole, so congratulations are in order to the RIFT team on the number bump. [Source: Trion Worlds press release]
Twitter updates its OS X client
Twitter has updated its Twitter for Mac client, and you can see all of the new changes on the official company blog. The biggest update is that you now get a camera icon when you're composing a tweet, which makes it easier than ever to share pictures straight from your desktop (other Twitter clients have had this for a while, and you could always drag pictures over, but this is a clearer way to do this anyway). The app has also added Retina display support, which is nice, and there are now 14 more languages: Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese and Turkish. As always, the app is available for free directly from the Mac App Store. Twitter says to keep an eye out for more changes as well, so it's working hard on providing even more updates to the OS X app.
Vendetta Online pushes its Kickstarter program with new videos
Kickstarter isn't just being used by studios trying to get a new MMO off the ground. In the case of Vendetta Online, it's being used to fund something that the game otherwise simply wouldn't have. After nearly a decade of continual operation, the sandbox title wants to expand beyond desktop computers (it already has clients for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows, not to mention an Android client) by porting over to the iPad while launching a major graphical upgrade. Not convinced? The founder of Guild Software, John Bergman, has taken the time to outline some of what the small team wants to do with the added funding for development. First he discusses the dynamic warfare systems with full-on RTS elements, and next he discusses how new graphics will improve the game overall rather than just making it prettier. The campaign's modest $100,000 goal is already a quarter of the way to completion as of this writing, so if this seems like it'd be right up your alley, it's well worth a closer look.
Trade skill crusader brings back customer service and sweat equity to crafting
WoW players today tend to consider the deterioration of the in-game community in terms of relatively recent influences like the Dungeon Finder and then the Raid Finder. We sometimes forget that design tweaks and new systems have been chipping away at the paradigm of Azeroth as a place to forge ongoing personal relationships for years now. Take a gander at the beginning of this analysis I wrote on the death of the Azerothian salesman all the way back in the hyper-modern era of The Burning Crusade circa 2007: Forget the endless debate over hardcore versus casual -- there's another moniker that we here at Insider Trader hold dear: salesman. What's that? You don't know any salesmen in WoW these days? You're not alone. Times have changed since craftspeople toiled to build reputations as the go-to traders on their servers ... when Ironforge was the hub of civilization, where a few elite enchanters held court over the entire server with coveted formulae from such exotic locales as Stratholme and Scholomance. It's a brave new world in today's Outland. Most enchanters don't enchant for the general public at all, unless you provide mats and a tip. And in any profession, with so many other players on the servers who have the same patterns (even rare patterns are generally available from more than one player) and so many easy ways to make money (hello, daily quests!), there's little reason to hang around town to build a regular clientele. Components provided or created by other professions are readily available on the Auction House -- there's no need to seek out and nurture relationships with another player from a complementary profession. Have the conveniences Blizzard has developed for today's crafters meant the death of the salesman? Most WoW players would agree that convenience and self-service is the way of today's game. But for one stubborn tradesman on Sentinels (US), life as an Azerothian salesman is anything but obsolete. Daen, a dedicated craftsman and proprietor of Daen's Crafting Emporium, single-handedly maintains what may be one of World of Warcraft's last remaining bastions of personal craftsmanship and trade skill service -- with a twist. This proprietor not only aims to provide personal service, but he does it at no charge, with the insistence that customers devote sweat equity to their mutual creations as well.
GDC 2011: ArenaNet's Adam Vance talks localization for Guild Wars
Ask the average Guild Wars player what makes the game so enduring, and "localization" is probably not on the top of the list. But the game is truly a masterpiece of blending players across an international community, with a single multilingual client supporting a wide range of communities across the entire world. ArenaNet's Adam Vance hosted a panel on the localization process for the game at GDC, discussing the many trials and tribulations the game faces from both a business standpoint and a cultural standpoint. It certainly doesn't seem like a difficult task from a conceptual standpoint -- even just running a block of text through secondhand solutions such as BabelFish can produce something that looks somewhat translated. But as Vance explained, simply changing the text from one language to another is an issue, and linguistics only scratches the barest element of what's needed for adapting a game. "Localization should be as much a science as an art," as he put it during the panel. While the focus remained on localizing Guild Wars from a business standpoint, players will still find interesting facts within the discussion.
Twitter unveils new mobile version
It's probably fair to say that Twitter clients were the first "killer app" category for the iPhone -- Twitterific lead the charge way back when, but Tweetie came quickly after and then the flood gates were opened. But now, a late and unexpected challenger has entered the ring: Twitter themselves. Mashable has the screenshots -- Twitter has always had a slimmed-down mobile client (and it's still up right now at m.twitter.com, while the new preview is at mobile.twitter.com), but this one's a little shinier, with almost all the features and graphics of the main site. A few things didn't make it -- you can't skin your page as you can in the browser client (although none of the third-party clients that I know allow you to do that from the mobile client either). And lists are missing as well, though perhaps that's because Twitter doesn't quite consider them ready for prime time yet. Still, it's a definite improvement from the other mobile version, and the official blog on the subject says that they still have lots of visitors, despite all the other third-party clients out there.
Atlantica Online speeds up download with new Lite client
Atlantica Online just celebrated its first year in the US, but the free-to-play game apparently had another trick up its sleeve -- namely, allowing players interested in the game a chance to get in and start playing even faster. After all, it can be obnoxious to download a client and wait for it to patch through updates when you just want to dive in and get to playing. Ndoors Interactive has just launched the game's lite client, a way for a smaller initial download to let you start playing the game as fast as possible. The new client's trick is to only frontload the first twenty levels of play while downloading the rest via background processes. This allows new players to log in and start playing their character faster, but it can cause issues for existing players who might be at a higher level (and the press release specifically suggests avoiding the lite client if that's the case). For everyone who hasn't started the game, it's an interesting way to make the startup more accessible and significantly faster. Consider taking a look over the weekend, and possibly getting in on some of the one year celebration goodies Atlantica Online has to offer.
New SDXC cards to allow for greater MMO portability
Massively multiplayer online games tend to take up less space on your hard drive than your standard PC game, as the bulk of the data is stored on farms of servers that power your MMO of choice. However, despite the fact that most of the underlying magic is happening far away from your own screen, MMO clients still take up a number of gigs of space, as laptop users who regularly play different titles know all too well. But since an MMO client is really just an access point then, there's no reason why it has to be tied to any one machine or location, particularly if you're on the go for much of the time.While the typical solution for some MMO gamers with a preference for portability is to keep their game clients on a portable drive (myself included), even these small drives are beginning to look downright clunky compared to some of the other options available, or soon-to-be available.
More ecto 3 details, a screenshot and roadmap revealed
Adriaan Tijsseling, developer of the Mac OS X version of the ecto blogging client, has been teasing us with sneak peeks and development details for some time now, but he's just posted another more revealing screenshot of ecto3, along with more details and a basic roadmap. Adriaan has touted ecto3 as a complete rewrite from v2, ushering in a new plug-in architecture that should make the app far more extensible. Also on the notable changes list is the replacement of the rich text editor by Editable WebKit, a new, more WYSIWYG feature of the engine that is used to power Safari, many other browsers on Mac OS X and even HTML rendering in Apple Mail. While Adriaan doesn't have any kind of ETA for a shipping version or even a beta just yet, it does sound like development is wrapping up well. Since support for different blogging platforms has moved to the plug-in format as well, he still has to build support for the latest Blogger (yes, it'll be in ecto3) and WordPress. As a final note, it's always nice to hear a developer using their own product, as Adriaan is using ecto3 "heavily" to try and catch as many bugs and problems as he can before unleashing it in one form or another on the masses.
BoxCloud: dead simple file sharing
Billing themselves as "dead simple file sharing for design and media professionals," BoxCloud seems to have a good thing going here. If you deal with a lot of clients and customers who simply aren't hip to FTP or other ways of transferring large files, BoxCloud offers a pretty simple, nay - dead simple - alternative. Featuring software clients for both Windows and Mac OS X (though when Download Squad found them last year they apparently offered a Linux client too), all you need is someone's email address to share a file of any size with them. Your lucky recipient, be they a client, friend, family member or co-worker, will receive an email with a link to download the file from your BoxCloud page. But herein lies the twist: BoxCloud doesn't host the file, so you aren't charged for space - your computer must be running BoxCloud's client, be on, and connected to the internet in order to share the file (i.e. - you host it). Their service plan then simply charges you for monthly bandwidth, not storage space, and plans start at 1GB/month for free, moving on up to 20GB for $9/month.Sure, anyone who's domain + hosting savvy will scoff at this service, but anyone looking for brainless and painless file sharing might appreciate BoxCloud's simplicity. If you're interested, take their tour for more info on how simple sharing can be.
iPhoto Mailer Patcher hack for iPhoto 5
If you aren't happy with the small selection of email clients that iPhoto 4/5 can export to, Hawk Wings has found a handy little applescript by the name of iPhoto Mailer Patcher that can add quite a few clients to the list. Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail and more can be set as iPhoto's default email client, with one exception: there's some extra work you'll have to go through to get this to work with iPhoto 5. Fortunately, it isn't hard work, so check out the Hawk Wings post for a short how-to. iPhoto 4 users, however, can skip ahead and simply use the applescript as is.
Easy project folder setup with Client Folder Maker
Client Folder Maker (CFM) is a handy applescript applet for those of you who repeatedly have to create standard folder structures for any kind of projects such as websites or design proofs for clients. The applet offers a simple UI for essentially creating a folder structure template, allowing you to list all the regular folders you might need. Building websites for clients? Create a folder structure list in CFM with folder names like I have pictured and you can simply run this applet to generate all the folders you need for each project, named according to whatever scheme best suits you. It's a handy little applet if you're doing any kind of repetitive work like this, and for the mere price of $0, how can you go wrong?
