Matt Heerema
Ames, IA - http://www.mattheerema.com
@mheerema on Twitter, Husband, Father, Musician, Geek, Blogger, Armchair Theologian, Web Guru.
Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters
Monster's Den The Book of Dread: an addictive dungeon crawling time-waster
by Matt Heerema Nov 13th 2009
Monster's Den The Book of Dread is a lo-fi, highly addictive, dungeon-crawling, RPG. Choose one of three campaigns (dungeons), create a party of four characters from seven possible character classes (warrior, cleric, mage, ranger, rogue, barbarian, and conjuror, the classics), select from one of three difficulty levels (beginner, standard, and EXTREME), and you are off to kill monsters and gather items.Seemingly endless levels, each with their own boss, and hundreds of possible magic items (weapons, armor, potions and scrolls) make this game very compelling for the avid dungeon crawler. I played one of the campaigns to level 118 (hangs head in shame...) before giving up on finding an end boss.
Random encounters, epic rare monsters that drop wonderful items, and the promise of more treasure just around the corner make up for this game's complete lack of graphics.
If you enjoy fighting orcs, undead, dragons, dwarves, humans, creatures from Greek mythology, and myriad other foes for the promise of experience points, stats boosts, and new spells and abilities, then do NOT play this game (or you might never stop...)
Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity
Dropbox Votebox lets you decide what they work on next
by Matt Heerema Nov 13th 2009
Dropbox is one of my current top 5 favorite apps. It's an extremely useful utility with a few, very powerful, easy to use features, and now they are looking to expand. With Votebox (must be signed in to see the page), they are letting the user base vote on which features they work on next. Thousands of votes have already been cast. Here are the top 5 at the time of this writing.
1. Selective sync. Ability to choose which files or folders get sync'd to which computers.
2. Watch any folder. Sync folders outside the My/Dropbox folder (thus essentially replicating the functionality of SugarSync). This would be sweet, though I wonder how it would affect the current simplicity and performance of the app.
3. Share folders without forcing other members to lose space. I'd be interested to see how they handle this one. It could open up loopholes for vastly expanded storage space for groups of people.
4. Email files to Dropbox. Use an email address to upload files to your dropbox space.
5. Mac resource fork support. Perhaps the most cryptic of the requests. The resource fork is essentially metadata attached to the file that helps the Mac OS understand the file better. It defines things like custom icons, window sizes, menu definitions and the like. It is also how Mac OS can do extension-less file names. These things are generally stripped by backup programs (like Dropbox). This would be an extremely useful feature for Mac users.
Filed under: News
Virtual reality helps some smokers quit
Can playing a video game four times a week for twelve weeks help you stop smoking? Apparently so for some.A small study conducted by the GRAP Occupational Psychology Clinic and the University of Quebec has found positive results from a specially designed, experimental, VR video game.
Smokers who play the game have a slightly higher chance of quitting the habit than those in a control group (playing a similar game with different objectives). Those who played the cigarette crushing game cite the game itself as an added defense in staving off cravings.
This type of "VR Therapy" is also used in treating post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq war veterans, and is gaining popularity in many other areas such as drug addiction and bullying. Researches say that what a person does in the virtual reality game actually has an impact on their real-world experience.
Filed under: Macintosh, Productivity, Beta, Web
CloudApp: Terrible name, useful little app.
by Matt Heerema Oct 22nd 2009
There's been a lot of buzz about cloud computing over the last year or two as more and more applications (email, Office, note-keeping and so on) move to the web. Then, a little over a month ago, I started seeing a lot of buzz surrounding something called CloudApp. A more generic sounding name, I could not imagine. All I could tell from the "OMG CLOUDAPP!!" tweets was that there was a new app named CloudApp, that beta invites were being issued soon, and that a lot of people were very excited about receiving an invite. I'm not sure anyone knew any more about it than I did other than "OMG IT'S IN THE CLOUD™ " and "OMG IT'S AN APP" and "OMG CLOSED BETA INVITE ONLY".
Three possibilities crossed my mind:
- Sociological study of the feeding frenzy surrounding beta invites and tech buzz words.
- Twitter phishing scam
- (remote possibility) an actual app.
Filed under: Design, Developer, Web services, Web
Mockflow: web-based, real-time, collaborative wireframing
A key part of interface design is an exercise known as "wireframing." In this design phase, elements of an interface are blocked out roughly to show relative placement, interaction, and functionality. It is a rapid way to talk through functional requirements of a project and get buy-in from stakeholders without having to waste a lot of time on visual design that won't remain in a finished product.
Mockflow is a flash-based, online, collaborative wireframing tool for Web and Software designers. It contains a fairly complete set of wireframe elements and icons for use in your wireframe with flexible customizability of all the elements. The killer app of the tool is it's ability to collaborate in real-time with other team members online. Very, very useful for distributed teams.
I tend to use Adobe Fireworks for all my wireframing (and everything else) but a coworker pointed me toward this tool and it captured my attention. I find flash-based tools distasteful, they always feel slow to me, but this one was simple enough, with enough features to make it compelling to use. Definitely the right tool for the right situation.
The basic version is free, but ad supported and you are limited to two collaborators. Upgrading (introductory price of $49 / year) grants you unlimited collaborators and projects, is ad-free, and gives you 500 MB of storage. Definitely worth a look for distributed Web teams.
Adobe Browserlab open for business
Several months ago Jay pointed to Browserlab, a very useful new service for Web developers from Adobe. Browserlab allows you to view a Web page in multiple versions of most of the latest browsers. Since cross browser testing is perhaps the most painful part of Web development, any service that aids in this task is very welcome. The service is now accepting new users, and is very cool.
The ...
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
