I’ve sort of been slacking with my Wii Fit schedule, but I just got Wii Fit Plus to see if I could inject some freshness into the routine. Wii Fit Plus is the pseudo sequel to Wii Fit, which includes a few extra activities and some new features as well.
One of the first things I noticed was that the female trainer (which I usually use) is showing a bit more skin! Take a look at some comparison shots:
Before:
After:
I also like her new hairsyle. I wonder. If Wii Fit Plus means that the female trainer shows some more skin, will Wii Fit Plus Plus have the female trainer go topless? I guess we have to wait to find out.
One new feature that I was excited about was the ability to set up your own routines. So instead of picking each activity one by one, you can save a bunch and just go through them quickly without interruption. This should have been a cool feature, but it was ruined because picking an activity automatically selects the lowest number of reps, and I do the higher number of reps for almost every strength training activity. For example, I do 10 push-up side plank reps. But selecting it in the routine menu automatically picks 6. You could theoretically pick the exercise twice, but that would give you 12 reps. Plus you have to stop and start again (I thought initially the program would be smart enough to just combine them into one exercise).
Nintendo lost a lot of my respect for how badly they handled this feature. There are a lot of different ways they could have designed this, all better than the way they did design it. They could have just combined reps as I figured they should. They could also just ask you how many reps you wanted when you picked an exercise. The added complexity would be justified by the fact that you’d only have to do it once. They could have asked for default rep values somewhere else.
But instead the interaction designers (I’m assuming they have them, but now I wonder if they really do) at Nintendo decided to pull this shit. Maybe you can tell that I’m pretty unhappy about this feature. In the end, I think Nintendo err’ed on the side of simplicity, which ends up pleasing nobody. I usually like the way Nintendo products are designed, and for the most part I think Wii Fit Plus is designed well, but this feature was just not fully baked. I think I am going to email Nintendo and try and get an actual response on why this feature was done so badly.
Overall, Wii Fit Plus is better than Wii Fit because it just adds new features. I’d question whether they are really worth the extra $20 that the upgrade costs.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about proprietary platforms. Apple has been rejecting apps left and right due to various reasons. For example, they rejected the Google Voice app using their generic “duplicates iPhone features” reasoning. Isn’t that kind of reasoning grounds for an antitrust case? They also rejected a dictionary app for potentially bad words! Someone think of the children!
While I think Apple deserves some credit for popularizing the whole app store notion, they also kind of suck for holding such an iron grip on it. It’s nice to find apps in the store without having a third party directory or searching for apps all over the mobile web. But it sucks when honest developers get screwed because of totalitarian control.
I wonder if there can’t be a nice, happy medium. Maybe an app store combined with a way to legally (without jailbreaking) install apps via a third party. For now, the iPhone’s App Store is great for customers, but I have a feeling that abused developers will eventually learn their lesson and go elsewhere.
I made the switch from PC to Mac a pretty long time ago. It’s been about two years since I started using my first Macbook and a few months since I went exclusively to using OS X (when my PC crapped out). I recently got bored and decided to fix up my PC and put Win 7 RC on it (I think the thing flipped out when I got a new hard drive and it somehow got two Win XPs into the boot registry thing).
I already tried installing Win 7 Beta on my Macbook Pro a few times via Boot Camp and VMWare Fusion. They were both pretty bad solutions. It’s just too much to try and virtualize a modern operating system, and the Boot Camp drivers are just kinda crappy. My main thing was that Win 7 kept crashing in Boot Camp, losing wireless connections and having a really laggy touchpad interface.
You may recall that my opinions of Vista were not the most positive. About a year and a half (and an operating system) later, I think the thing is finally pretty good.
The user experience is nice. I like the fact that I can hit the window key, then type whatever I want and get a list of programs, etc. It’s really useful because the control panel is so insanely organized that it’s impossible to find anything in a hierarchical manner. I guess that’s a mixed complement/critique. I like the desktop backgrounds, and all the apps I’ve installed so far work pretty well. I didn’t have to scavenge for a single driver, which was really nice. When I installed Win 7 on my mom’s laptop, however, it was quite a task getting the video card to work (it was an old Dell 300m).
The only real complaint I have is that file sharing is still really confusing. I found out how to access my shared folders from OS X, but I haven’t figured out how to access my Mac from Win 7. Overall, though, Win 7 is actually looking pretty good. If I actually had a need for this desktop, I might actually use it more often (besides for playing games). For now I’ll stick with my trusty Macbook Pro. I’m thinking the upcoming Snow Leopard upgrade will keep OS X interesting.
I understand that Blockbuster must get a lot of complaints from users about Blu-Ray discs not working in their DVD players and whatnot, but that’s no excuse for them to treat me like a complete idiot…
I had to check all three boxes to continue. Jerks.
I’ve been messing around with iTunes and the DJ functionality. It seems like all it does is pick random songs out of the library and shows them in the order they’ll be played (unlike shuffle, which just randomly jumps around). Typically, I like to put my iTunes library on random when I’m listening. This allows me to hear a bunch of different music in my library. If I don’t like a certain song, I’ll skip it, unless I’m not really paying attention.
I find that the most important piece of metadata in my iTunes library is probably “play count.” This is a pretty good indicator of how much I like a song. It’s a bit off sometimes though, since I might really like a new song with a lower play count because I haven’t had a chance to listen to it 80 times. I use a smart playlist that sorts on “play count” to determine which songs to stick into my iPhone on sync since the phone can’t hold my entire music library. Generally it works well. Perhaps there could be another measure like “normalized play count” that takes into account how long the song has existed in my library.
The iTunes DJ is pretty lacking in terms of how you can weigh what will randomly show up next. You can basically click a box that says “play higher rated songs more often.” I don’t rate my songs (the metadata gets thrown away pretty quickly as I move from computer to computer or Mac to PC, etc), so this feature doesn’t do a lot for me. I prefer the implicit rating (play count) versus the explicit rating (star rating) because the implicit way to do it is natural and doesn’t require me to do anything extra.
I’d like there to be a “play songs with a higher play count more often” feature. This could be bad, though, because it’d lead to a sort of rich get richer deal. So weighting would be important. I’d say it’d be a good heuristic to give each song a probability of “(playcount + 1)/(total number of library plays + # of songs)” to be played. That way the more popular songs (the ones I like more) are played more often, but other songs still have a chance to be played as well (and skipped). There might be other better algorithms for weighing songs based on play count that don’t lead to an unnatural skew (which would mess up the point of having the feature in the first place).
Another thing I could do is prune all of the songs I skip most out of my library. I’m too much of a digital packrat to do that, though, so I guess a smarter algorithm will have to suffice.
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