President Bush showed quick reflexes when an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at him two weeks ago during a press conference in Iraq. No one should be throwing things at the U.S. President but the incident has provided inspiration for the creation of funny animated graphics and free web games. Dvice has posted a round-up of the top ten Bush shoe dodging games. Some of the better ones include Sock and Awe, Bush Shoe Incident and Bush vs. Attack of the Shoes. In the last two games you play the President as you try and avoid incoming shoes.
John Maushammer has created a watch that lets you play asteroids. What’s really unique about it is that you control the asteroid blasting spaceship by moving your wrist. Maushammer did something similar with Pong on a watch last year.
These are cool enough that the watchmaking Maushammer should be selling them. Here’s a video of the watch in action. (via Dvice via Didn’t You Hear)
Everyone knows by now that WordPress 2.7 is packed with new features. Now that it’s available (almost 600,000 downloads as I write this!), it’s time to start working on 2.8. There were dozens of things that got tabled during 2.7 due to time constraints, and there are a lot of high-rated features in the Ideas forum, so there are a lot of potential features under consideration.
Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. The rest of the development time will be taken up with bug tickets and additional features/enhancements from a prioritized list. To that end, we’ve posted a new survey for you to help us prioritize features for 2.8. The list pulls from the developers’ “2.7 leftovers” list as well as the most popular features from the Ideas forum. Just rank each feature and tell us your top pick (up to three). You also have the option of adding comments or additional suggestions, but this is not mandatory. For your response to count, you must rank all of the features in the list. The survey has only one page.
Note that media features are not included in this list as we will be posting a separate survey for media-specific features soon.
Cast your votes any time this week, but as always the sooner the better. This survey will close at noon on December 31, 2008 UTC.
In the new year, we will be reviving scheduled IRC developer chats, where the lead developers will discuss the week’s progress on feature development, providing opportunities for people to ask questions or make suggestions. These will be held early in the day on Wednesdays (U.S. Wednesday), and the specific time will be posted here on the development blog once it’s been finalized.
As a related aside, we spent a significant amount of time during 2.7 development sifting through Trac tickets that really shouldn’t have been there. Feature ideas and requests do not belong in Trac, they belong in the Ideas forum. Please reserve Trac for reporting bugs and things that need fixing (typos, code enhancements, etc.). If you are asking for a new UI, a new feature, or a new approach to coding something, that’s not an enhancement, it’s a new feature. New features will be entered into Trac by developers once it has been determined that the feature should be included in core. To help speed up development, moving forward we will close Trac tickets that are actually feature requests, with the comment that they should be posted in the Ideas forum instead. Please help the developers maximize their time by following this guideline.
Nielsen has issued a year-end look at the most played PC games during 2008. The titles below are ranked by the time PC Gamers spend playing the games. World of Warcraft nad Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were well ahead of the pack as you can see in the more detailed chart here.
PlayStation Home is a 3-D gaming community for PlayStation 3 that debuted this week. MSNBC’s reviewer Winda Benedetti called home a “theater of the absurd” and a “testosterone-fueled meat market” because men greatly outnumber the women. However, Winda Benedetti also said the virtual world is a fascinating experiment.
Last Thursday, Sony launched the open beta for Home - a 3-D virtual world that anyone who owns a PlayStation 3 can visit for free. It is at once a grand, fascinating experiment in virtual community and social gaming … as well as a theater of the absurd.
It is a place where people get together and connect over the games they love ? and it’s also a testosterone-fueled meat market where the men massively outnumber the women. It is absorbing, cool and frequently hilarious. But it also feels, at times, like a world where the madhouse inmates have been set free to run amok.
Director for PlayStation Home Jack Buser gave a detailed 24-minute behind-the-scenes look at PlayStation Home to GameStop. Take a look:
Ridemakerz, a retailer of custom-built toy cars, has launched a virtual world for boys with the help of Gamelab and The Electric Sheep Company. Ridemakerz could fill a virtual world niche for kissed missed by more cutesy virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz.
Ridemakerz Founder and ZEO Larry Andreini says Ridemakerz, “does not draw a distinction between on- and off-line activities, but rather integrates them into a best-of-both-worlds experience. We believe this is particularly important for boys, especially those up to the age of 12, who before Ridemakerz have been overlooked in both real and virtual environments such as American Girl, Build-A-Bear Workshop Buildabearville.com, Club Penguin and Webkinz. Ridemakerz is in a unique position to connect with boys virtually just as we do in the real world - through cars and authentic car culture. Our online experience is an extension of the interactive, off-line experience that boys have customizing RIDEZ and learning about cars at home or in one of our SHOPZ. And while the boys are having fun playing, what they’re also doing is being creative, making choices, collaborating with friends and family, and building confidence.”
Here’s some of what they are promising in the Ridemakerz online universe.
Larger play area - providing a fully immersive look and feel
More sophisticated - improving quality of game play
Higher-quality graphics - increasing authenticity and taking on
movie-like qualities
Console game attributes - a dynamic driving experience that puts
players in the action
Advanced effects - smoke, flames and other particle effects (including farts!)
Yes, they are really promising virtual farts. The virtual world move is probably a smart one for a company like Ridemakerz. It is starting to feel like most toy brands are going to have a virtual counterpart. TechCrunch has more details on the virtual world in this article form earlier this month.
The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)
Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.
Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)
For a visual introduction to what 2.7 is, check out this video (available in HD, and full screen):
It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.
Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.
(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)
The Story Behind 2.7
The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.
For some of the back story in the development of 2.7, check out these blog posts (thanks to WeblogToolsCollection for the list):
This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.
For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.
The Future
Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.
That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.
There comes a time in every WordPress release when it’s ready for the world , to come out of its cocoon and feel the light of the world on its wings for the first time.
Of course if you were already testing 2.7, you can just use the built-in core updater (Tools > Upgrade) to download and install RC2 for you (and later upgrade you to the final release when it’s available) but if not you can use the download link above.
We feel this release is pretty much exactly what we’re going to ship as 2.7, barring any final bugs or polish tweaks that you report or we find.
This trailer for a Ghostbusters video game is getting a lot of buzz. The graphics look great. It won’t be out until June, 2009. The official website for the game is at ghostbustersgame.com but it’s just a teaser site as of this writing. There is a new Ghostbusters movie in the works as well.
