correspondence
Latest
Storyboard: Putting the RP out of the G
Roleplaying happens in the game, that much is a given. For some players, it's a supplement to the other parts of the game; for others, it's the whole point of playing. And there's nothing wrong with leaving your roleplaying as just an in-game thing, something you put down as casually as any other in-game activity. But there's also nothing wrong with working on developing your character and her story when you aren't logged into the game, and this week, I'm going to look at some of the more effective ways to do just that. The obvious question about taking RP out of the game in part is the question of why. It could be for any number of reasons -- maybe you can't access your main game computer at a given time, maybe you want to fill in the gaps in your character's life, or maybe you just want to make the experience of the character herself more immersive. Whatever your reasons, there are three main ways to keep your character interactive and living even if you haven't logged into the game proper.
Greatascent: Highrise meets Address Book in web and desktop 2.0 harmony
Web 2.0 is great and all, but I bought a Mac to utilize the power of Mac OS X and its software. While working in a browser certainly has its advantages, I believe that the sweet spot of getting work done shouldn't force the user into choosing between two appealing environments. The sweet spot of which I am speaking, of course, is integration and sync - the much sought-after, hard-to-find features that some companies offer with their products, while others at least leave the door open for enterprising 3rd parties to pick up the slack. Fortunately, one of the 'others' I speak of is 37signals with Highrise, their popular web-baesd contact and correspondence app, and the enterprising 3rd party in this case is Simon Menke, developer of Greatascent. This is one of the hands-down coolest plug-ins I've seen in a while that unites web 2.0 with what I like to call desktop 2.0 - the place where desktop apps can interact and sync with online services. Greatascent, currently in a private beta, is a plug-in for Address Book (and soon other parts of Mac OS X) that serves as a middle man between the contacts on your Mac and those in Highrise. In its early beta state, Greatascent can pull down the contacts you're already working with in Highrise, but its real appeal is allowing you to drag and drop contacts from Address Book onto a new group that is added (pictured) to instantly sync them up to Highrise. Once synchronized, however, another gem of working in Highrise is brought to the desktop: from Address Book's File menu, you can select a Highrise contact and create a new Highrise note or task that is then synched up to the service. Read on after the jump for some screenshots and details of just how cool this plug-in can get.
