Bloatware is a issue that is overlooked by some developers. It’s when a program has too much features that the purpose of the program is difficult to find. Take the program I made in the image for example (I would never release a program like this), can you really find the main purpose of the program? I made this program for word processing. The problem is that this program does so many other things that it really isn’t a word processor anymore, it’s now a word processor that browses the web, shows resource usage, displays photos, etc.. It really can’t do anything perfectly. Now why would you want a program that does so many things badly over a program that does one thing well?

Bloatware is much more common in desktop applications than mobile applications. The thing is that with mobile applications, there really isn’t much room to make a program that does multiple things. On my iPod, I have a separate application for web browsing, viewing photos, listening to music, etc.. simply because the screen is too small to have other functions besides the main function. But on a desktop program such as Firefox, I can have multiple functions using add-ons and extensions, simply because there’s space for those functions. But there are times when desktop applications only perform one function; take Tweetie for Mac by atebits for example , it only lets you post to and read your Twitter.

David – Senior Editor

The hype of the 3-D movie age is only getting larger and larger with new technologies like Digital 3-D and stereoscopic 3-D which requires no glasses, but is this hype really worth it?

3-D movies have never really seemed to amaze me. I mean, I just can’t seem to find two blurred images that make an illusion like they’re popping out of the screen interesting. The movie industry is really focusing on making 3-D movies now that they really can’t seem to make a decent 2-D movie. It’s like having a nice-looking video game that fails when it comes to playability. What’s the point? Also, movie theaters have to invest in new projectors to display some newer movies. Is this really fair?

3-D movies have always seemed to annoy me because they make me dizzy and I can never seemed to focus on the whole picture because the foreground object always seems to be standing out too much. Isn’t the whole point of a movie to enjoy it in its entirety, not to just focus on the frontmost object.

I think that with this 3-D age, the movie industry can’t focus on other technologies that could be cool like 360-degree movies or movies which make the viewer feel like he/she is in the environment using elements such as wind and temperature. I think that 3-D is just an on-going fad that’s taking away from the good part of the movie industry; the movies, and  I hope it gets out-dated soon.

David – Senior Editor

If you’ve been on Steam recently, you may have noticed the huge hype of a Valve’s brand new, free game called Alien Swarm bundled with the Source SDK. Developed by former Black Cat Games employees, this 3rd-person shooter brings you in an “icy planet’s surface, to a subterranean lava-flooded mining facility” over run by aliens.

After the large amount of traffic on the Steam servers, I was successfully able to download and install Alien Swarm on my Macbook Pro’s bootcamp partition. Since the game is around a co-op campaign, I decided to go right into the online mode. Based on the loading times, you could tell that the servers were very packed. I was greeted by three other players. We all chose our classes (tech, medic, etc.) and started the game.

First thing I noticed was the weirdly-layed out HUD. Being more of a health at the top, weapons and players at the bottom-guy, it was difficult to adjust to this layout.

The gameplay is really unique compared to many other games and it FEELS like a console game for a variety of reasons. And the weapons make it all the better. Players get new, stronger weapons when they level up.

As for the campaign, the story line isn’t the best, and easily becomes confusing due to the plot.

In terms of the engine, the graphics look very nice but in terms of performance, it’s not living up to the Source engine name as far as expected. Example: at 1080p, David’s Mac Mini (bootcamp) gets about 15-25fps.

Overall this game deserves 4/5, especially for being free. If you have time to spare, check it out here.

Lev – Lead Writer

Even though HP recently bought Palm, there hasn’t really been much hints of them trying to develop a device that uses Palm’s WebOS operating system. HP has just recently registered the “Palmpad” trademark. This is a possible hint that HP is developing a new tablet that uses Palm’s WebOS. After seeing the Windows 7 tablet HP had been working on, I think that this will have a similar design, but at the same time much lower specs. I’d probably expect it to have a 1GHz Snapdragon and 256MB RAM, but we’ll have to see what HP has in store.

David – Senior Editor

We’ve reviewed the Boxee HTPC application, but news just came in yesterday that the Boxee Box is now being produced and should be available in November. The Boxee Box is a little box that runs the Boxee application without any need for a computer. The hardware is being produced by D-Link, a networking company that has never seemed to satisfy me with their routers (that’s just me of course). It was first announced at CES 2010, and the box has gone through much changes since then. Some of the differences include weight changes, nicer plastic, and a smudge-free surface. I think that this is starting to look very promising and I’m waiting to get some video of the actual performance of the thing. If I’m going to consider getting it, it must perform faster than my netbook when in the application. It doesn’t necessarily have to have better specifications since it’s actually going to be running the Boxee software natively and it should run well. Here’s a video that explains the Boxee Box in full detail:

The first Boxee Box arrived from the D-Link Factory from Zach Klein on Vimeo.

David – Senior Editor

iPhone 4 with OWLE and EnCinema 35mm Adapter (SLR Lens) from Vimeo.com

Yesterday, Media productions company Vid-Atlantic posted a video showing how the iPhone 4 was capable of using a SLR lens with only minor adjustments to a few 3rd-party products. And though the quality was decent, it got me thinking, would it be worth it to make something like this? After some investigation, probably not. Here’s why:

The materials used in the making of this video were, an iPhone 4 ($200-$300), a Canon EF 50mm f1.8 lens (at miniumum $90), an OWLE bubo for the iPhone ($130) and an EnCinema 35mm Adapter ($200). The price would be at least $620, about the price of a Canon Rebel XSI or a Rebel T1i. The money spent would be better put to use for a DSLR (in terms of quality as well.)

Lev – Lead Writer

Earlier today, Steve Jobs stepped on stage and made three announcements about the iPhone 4 and some of its problems.

The first of which was about the phone’s antenna problem. Jobs explained that Apple isn’t going to change the design, explaining that it’s even “better than the 3GS.” Instead of doing a recall, Apple will be giving away free bumpers and a selection of other cases until September 30 to iPhone owners. We’re expecting that Apple will have a solution to the problem by then anyways.

Next up was the discussion about the long-awaited white iPhone 4. Jobs said that it will be available soon with limited quantities.

The final announcement was about the iPhone’s proximity sensor problems. Unlike the case of the antenna, the proximity sensor will be fixed by a soon-to-be released iOS update.

We would still like to mention that you can return the iPhone 4 until your 30 day return policy is up, if you feel like a bumper/case or software update wont fix the problems.

Lev – Lead Writer

Sources: AppleInsider Live Blog; Gizmodo Live Blog

Image Credit: Kotaku

The dashboard (home screen) of the Xbox 360 has only been redesigned once, but that one redesign was very significant. The NXE (New Xbox 360 Experience) was a big change in terms of interface though in terms of displaying content, it wasn’t so great. The original dashboard featured a series of controls on a page, which is owned by a tab that the user can flip through with their controller. It was very clean and efficient and you can get what you want to quickly. The next image shows the issues with the new NXE dashboard.

The red lines show the alignment of the elements, the faded white color shows wasted whitespace and the blue shows elements hidden behind other elements. This is a very inefficient way of displaying content. It is very clear that you can only get complete information out of elements 1 and 2. The rest are hidden behind other elements, hiding a lot of the content. Though it does look appealing, the perspective of which the elements are viewed at just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and it just makes it harder to get to the content you want.

The new rumored dashboard, on the other hand, takes a similar approach on displaying content to the original Xbox 360 dashboard. It doesn’t look much like it, but it is just the original design but with tabs sorted vertically and content displayed horizontally. I hope Microsoft releases this new dashboard because it looks very promising.

David – Senior Editor

We’ve reviewed Apple’s new Mac Mini before and we included some information about what kind of performance we are getting out of this machine, in terms of gaming, but I thought that instead of telling our readers what gaming is like on this computer, we should show them.

I then found my World of Warcraft discs (sitting in a closet) and installed them on the Mac Mini. The video shown below was recorded using the in-game recorder on the Mac version of World of Warcraft and I must say that using the recorder didn’t exactly add to the game’s performance. It did drop the framerate by about 15fps, but the video will give you a basic idea of what you should be expecting out of this computer. The game was played with all the settings on Ultra and at 1920×1080. The reason the video is only 720p is because the in-game recorder sacrifices a lot of game performance, so I had to use these settings: 720p, medium quality, H.264 recording. The actual compression only took about 2 minutes on the 40 second clip. I did not stop the recording, the recorder actually stopped itself, probably because the video file was getting too large.

David – Senior Editor

After the wide-spread iPhone 4 antenna problem hit many owners of the phone, Apple has taken the wrong turns in covering the issue up.

Along with ignoring it at their stores, they’ve begun censoring this problem on web. They’ve started deleting threads on their forums mentioning the now – common problem. Luckily, voices can still be heard as they don’t have the right to delete threads on other sites.

But their maybe a fix! The three possibilities that may fix this problem are: the on-going lawsuit involving both AT&T and Apple happens to win against the two companies; Apple could give out free bumpers (which only cost a dollar or two to make); or consumers maybe able to get their phone replaced. Tech site Gizmodo.com has already mentioned that some of their readers have had their iPhones silently recalled due to the issue. Hopefully we’ll see a fix in the near future.

Lev – Lead Writer

Update: Apple is set to hold a press conference on Friday about the iPhone 4. We do not have information on whether or not Apple will discuss the antenna issue.