It’s a crazy week with the DoTA 2 International Tournament kicking off in Germany. For those who don’t know, the Philippines has team Mineski.Infinity representing us for a pot prize of USD million. Their first match will be at 10:00AM GMT+2 against Team SGC of the Czech Republic. Full schedule here.
Also, DoTA 2 is now open for limited beta testing under the Steam service of Valve. You will need to express interest by logging in to the service. If you don’t have a Steam account you can sign up for one here.
Please pass the word. Our local team needs your full support. In the same way that we’ve shown support for the Azkals, the Dragon Boat team, and SMART Gilas, there’s no reason why we should not support our budding eSports DoTA team! You can watch the games live via streaming through this page.
Kudos to Audible (@audible_com) for rolling out a standalone app for the Android platform. I’ve been a subscriber to Audible for the past 2 years and the experience on the iPod and iPod touch has left me complacent — after installing the public beta version. I used to think that “just listening” was a great experience, but the current build has an easy to use bookmarking feature, the ability to download new books from your library, and a bit of eye candy with the visualizer mode.
Previously with the iPhone, downloading audiobooks required a desktop sync with iTunes. On Android, you can do in-app downloads. With the visualizer mode, you’re basically listening to audio with a screensaver background. This mode activates touch sensitive features allowing to you drag across the screen to rewind and fast forward.
Right now the app suffers from Fragmentation issues as there are so many version of Android installed on many other phone brands so the experiences vary, unlike that of the iPhone. If you’re an Audible subscriber and have an Android-based phone (my copy is running on a Sony Ericsson X10), join the Google Group.
With more than 500 seeders, ROHAN Closed Beta is jump starting its way to local shores.
Kiven just announced the opening of ROHAN CLOSED BETA Philippines. I’ve been curious with this particular game franchise as a good number of people have been talking about it – all MMO games are a dime a dozen, especially the ones we franchise into the Philippines. But ROHAN seems to stand out mainly because it is an A+ grade game that’s completely free to play.
Another thing ROHAN permeates into its system is a phenomenon that was actually frowned upon by the industry – although the game is free to play, there is an option to SELL your character once you’ve achieved a desirable level! Hmm another intriguing way to make money online if you aren’t into the blogging or online store gig. In the past, avatar sales from RAN Online and Ragnarok have raked in five digit figures in pesos. Level Up was quick to recognize that this is indeed a lucrative business model – don’t ban it. Encourage it.
Yeah. Even if I knew, from the back of my mind that Windows 7 will NOT install under CrossOver (CrossOver installs apps, not OS’s!), it was still worth a try.
I guess I must do this the hard way.
This afternoon, a rediscovered friend by the name of Johnny Benitez gave me a short run through of Windows 7’s beta release. Johnny works for Microsoft (argh! I envy his super cool title there!) and he gave me a short demo using his kick ass tablet PC. No screen shots here, but oh well here goes:
First. In the same way that Mac OS X can quick view into documents by pressing the spacebar, Windows 7 has its own little innovation by being able to “peep” within minimized windows on the taskbar. For instance, if you have 5 open tabs on Internet Explorer 8 (!!!) and they are all minimized, you can peek into the contents of each by mousing over each individual tab on the sidebar. Way cool. As a Mac user, I’m glad they didn’t rip off what OS X does for previewing documents. The peek function is definitely useful.
Second. Windows can lock on to certain parts of the desktop. Drag a window onto the left and it resizes to occupy 50% of the left of the screen. Same goes for right. This allows you to work on 2 windows with an easy resize. Dragging the window to the top of the screen maximizes a window. Dragging and “shaking” the window to and fro minimizes all other windows except the one being dragged.
Third. Windows 7 is noticeably faster than Vista. I guess you can say that Windows Vista = Windows 7 Beta. We were all fooled! HEHEHE. TEEHEEHEE. HOHOHOHO!
There are many other features inherent to Windows 7. Apart from the ones I just wrote about, Internet Explorer 8 is bundled with the web developer tool built in, and there are new power saving features (dim screen instead of sleep) that comes in the system settings.
Obama inspired Hope to America, and a litttle bit of that Hope is rubbing off Microsoft’s new Windows 7. It’s no secret that PDC copies are already out for developers. Rafael Rivera and Ed Bottdiscussed about the new “super taskbar” that highlights Windows 7’s new GUI.
From what I’ve been hearing, the new Superbar draws a lot of inspiration from the Mac OS X dashboard launcher with a little bit of the Google Chrome shortcut icon feature. The new Taskbar isn’t just a launcher but serves the purpose of adding and remembering sub windows within applications. In other words, what used to take five clicks to get to now only takes two.
I’m excited for Windows 7. Id like to believe it’s a second wind for Microsoft.
