Category Archives: Apple

Apple, Just Stuff

Star Wars: Battlefront

Aspyr announced yesterday that they will be porting Star Wars: Battlefront to the Mac, with an estimated release of June of 2005. The game looks good, you get to fight in pretty much every major battle that has happened in the SW films so far. And you can pick which side to be on, from choosing to be an Ewok throwing rocks at Stormtroopers, to battle droids slaughtering Jedi at Geonosis. I’m thrilled its coming out, and if I remember the release date of the Playstation/PC versions its only taking like 8 months to port it to the Mac…which isn’t as good as a simultaneous release, but its better then never being ported..

Now..if they would just announce that they are already working on the port for Knights of the Old Republic 2… so that it can be a close to simultaneous release with the PC version……

Apple, Site Stuff

.Mac Affiliate Program

So a little while ago, Apple introduced a .Mac affiliate program, similar to the iTunes affiliate program I’m a member of (Click on the iTunes graphic, or one of the songs on the right to buy from iTunes Music Store and help me earn a little commission)

And I figured since the list of ‘requirements’ to join the .Mac affiliate program were similar to the ones for the iTMS program, I’d go ahead and join up…. The other day I get an email back from the .Mac Affiliate Program.

Telling me that I have not been accepted into the affiliate program. The email goes on to state “The reason for this decision may be as follows:

* inability to access web site

* Web site not yet live

* traffic levels to low

* inappropriate material on site”

So..since the top reason they listed was inability to access web site…. how would they know if there was inappropriate material on the website (I wonder what material they thought was inappropriate?) And since the page is hosted on .Mac (I didn’t register it under either theteppers.net or kaelkicksass.com) wouldn’t the .Mac affiliate program people have known if there was some kind of systems issue preventing access to the .Mac servers…and then tried again later?

Oh well… overall..no big deal, it’s not like I’m raking in the dough from the iTMS affiliate, so I don’t think the .Mac program would have made that much of a difference.

Apple

iPhoto’s Enhance Feature

I realize that this feature was talked about non-stop in all the reviews of iLife ’04 when it came out

But.. I still think its one of the coolest features in iPhoto (Yes.. now that I’ve said that, Apple will release iLife ’05 at MacWorld January..and it will have something even cooler). What it does, is take your picture, run it through a bunch of magical formulas..and automatically adjust brightness, contrast, etc… with pretty good results. take this before picture

Before

Notice how ugly the snow looks..really..the snow in Denver is white when it falls! I Promise!

Same picture… after clicking the enhance button in iPhoto:

After

Look at how much more snow like the snow looks! and thats just one example of the enhance feature. If you’re not a professional photographer, or graphic designer who knows Adobe’s Photoshop like the back of your hand… iPhoto is still among the easiest to use of photo manipulating (as long as your editing needs are basic) and its great at storage/organization of your photos.

Apple, Just Stuff

KOTOR-Defeated

So..it took about 43 or 44 hours of game play..

but… I beat Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I had purposefully avoided reading to many of the reviews of the PC version.. so that any twists in the story would come as a surprise. And I can say, I honestly did not see the big twist in the game coming… I’m not going to say what it was here, in case there is anyone reading this playing the game that hasn’t found the twist yet. But, for those of you who have played the game..you know what twist I’m talking about.

When I played it through this time, I played it ‘good’ and went towards the light side. I’m curious as to the story differences if I were to go through it as a dark sider… Maybe I’ll run it through again… of course, if anyone’s played it through dark side, you could always let me know what the differences in the story arc are.

All in all, I’m impressed with the game, even though my iMac doesn’t meet the system requirements, the game play was still smooth (for the most part, it did bog down and get a little screwy in areas where there were lots of characters, and lots of interaction (background changes, sky changes, etc…) but.. even those were livable (once I got the hang of controlling my character in those areas). If it didn’t take almost 50 hours to play all the way through, I’d probably play it through several more times. But, 50 hours is a lot…so I’ll probably run it through 1 more time to play evil.. and then shelve it, until KOTOR2 gets released, then I’ll play again, while waiting for the Mac version of KOTOR2 to get released.

Apple, Just Stuff

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic :

So I got a copy yesterday. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to play it.

But.. I did find out that it will run on my machine, even though its a little bit below the system requirements. I do need to turn some of the video goodies off, and I need to make sure I’m not running anything super memory intensive (like burning a DVD, rendering video) in the background.

From what I’ve seen…the graphics are excellent, the gameplay is good. I think this will be a fun one to play. Of course… if I had a dual processor G5… it’d be even better…but.. that’s not in the budget for the immediate future (unless a whole lot of people suddenly start buying songs through the iTunes Music store link on the right)

I’ll have another update once I’ve had a chance to play for more then 5 minutes…

Apple

iTunes Music Store Affiliate Program

The other day, Apple introduced the iTMS affiliate program

Where webmasters can submit their site for approval, and if approved any purchases at the iTMS inside 24 hours (made by following a link on the affiliate website) result in a 5% commission being paid. After seeing some of the sites that have been approved, I figure it couldn’t hurt to try.. so I applied to be an iTMS affiliate today. Just waiting to hear back, and see if I got approved (hopefully!).

The same day, Apple announced that iTMS has sold 125,000,000 songs, further extending its lead as the market leading (and best!) online music store!

Apple

It’s Comng!

Finally! Aspyr has announced that Knights of the Old Republic has gone gold!!!

It was supposed to be released in the middle of August.. that didn’t happen though… Today, Aspyr announced that the most anticipated game of the Fall (at least…by me!) has gone gold and is expected to be in stores on the 19th of September…. I know what I’m buying myself as a post-labor day, “hey, it’s almost October” gift!