Monthly Archives: August 2009

Apple, Tech

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard was officially released yesterday.  I took half a day off from work to try and get an opportunity to play with it.

Initial impressions:

64 Bit Safari… is Fast!  But, the adblock extension for Safari isn’t 64 bit, so to use it, I’ve got to run Safari in 32 bit mode, where, it’s still fast..but not as fast.

No 64 Bit Firefox yet either =(

I like the “new” menus that are triggered from items in the Dock, very cool.  Overall, it seems much ‘snappier’ and is well worth the upgrade price (hey, it’s $29 bucks, you can’t go wrong… well.. unless you have a PPC based Mac, those are unsupported.. SL is x86 only).

I realize this is kinda short, but I haven’t had a whole lotta time to play with everything yet.  I did an erase and install, so I’m still in the process of reinstalling all my Applications.

Note to WoW players, SL and ATI 4850/4870 cards are having some issues.. Here’s Blizzard’s thread on it.

Gaming

Starcraft II Ship Date

Blizzard announced the ship date for StarCraft 2 today… kind of.

Technically, they announced that it *isn’t* shipping in ’09, but the announcement does say that it will be in the first half of 2010.

Blizzard information here.

Text of release here:

Today we announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will not be ready for release by the end of 2009. Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game. The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward. This extra development time will be critical to help us realize our vision for the service.

Our mission is to develop games that deliver an epic entertainment experience. As part of that commitment, we will always take as much time as needed to ensure that our games and services meet the expectations of our players and the standard for quality that we set for ourselves as developers. As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we’ll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series’ legacy in the first half of 2010.

We will share more details about the beta, Battle.net, and StarCraft II’s launch in the future. Keep an eye on the official website athttp://www.starcraft2.com for updates, and as always, thank you for your continued enthusiasm and support for StarCraft II and all of Blizzard Entertainment’s games.

Gaming

Warcraft – 3.2

Today is patch day!

Patch 3.2 “The Call of the Crusader” hit the live servers this morning, which means, of course, that Blizzard has extended maintenance beyond the normal end time.  They currently estimate that realms will be up and playable by 1500 PDT.  My guess, is that they’ll actually be up and playable around 1900 PDT.

So far, I’m most looking forward to the increased speed of the non-epic flying mounts. Hopefully, it’ll feel fast enough, that I won’t feel the need to spend 5,000 gold (each) on all my alts to get the epic flying.  I’ll have more comments after I can actually get into the game (after work tonight) and try some of the new things out.

Patch notes, if you haven’t seen them already are on the next page, they’re kinda long. Continue reading Warcraft – 3.2 →