imVOX - Latest Comments

Re: What happened to the imVOX Mac client?

remove antivirus 8 — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 10:53:47 -0000

Your article is really well-written.

Re: Amazon EC2: Watch your Disk Space!

Brittocan — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 03:07:50 -0000

How do you move the installation of oracle from a default location considering space constraints ?

Re: What happened to the imVOX Mac client?

Facebook Marketing — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:25:30 -0000

Finding a decent mac developer is very difficult, my company has been searching for someone for over a year.

Re: Xbox Live Gold Price Increase in Perspective

tibbon — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:14:36 -0000

Inflation is the cause, but the symptom comes in the form of higher wages, health care, costs of doing business, etc... So they are really one in the same.

I agree, they are buying a product, but its the exact same reason that Ford can no longer sell their cars for the original $850 the Model T cost.

I feel they have added features. If you turned on your Xbox next and found the dashboard exactly as it was in 2002, I feel you'd feel that something was missing. They have expanded their online presence, and they are also increasing voice quality significantly with new codecs.

Re: Xbox Live Gold Price Increase in Perspective

Ddd — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:05:57 -0000

More employees, healthcare costs? Are you kidding?

You make a fine argument that the thing is worth paying for, but you are completely ignoring the fact that they are raising prices without adding any features.

Users don't care about the healthcare costs of the employees, nor should they. They are buying a product.

Your only good argument is inflation, which is about right on track with the price increase.

Re: Xbox Live Gold Price Increase in Perspective

sep332 — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:21:46 -0000

I understand most of your post, but buying new hard drives is not a reason to increase the price of a subscription.

Re: Xbox Live Gold Price Increase in Perspective

tibbon — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:57:38 -0000

I do realize that fully, as I have a Xbox Live Gold subscription, and have for some time.

Technology expenses aren't their only expenses. There is still inflation to the base price of an item, even if the trend is generally for the technology to get cheaper over time.

Re: Xbox Live Gold Price Increase in Perspective

sep332 — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:54:33 -0000

"Just because a new hard drive this year is half the price it was last year does not make it free to buy a new one."

You do realize that Gold is a monthly or yearly subscription, right? I'm paying more for their new hard drives than I did for the old ones.

Re: How to Update World of Warcraft on a Case Sensitive Volume

ugg boots — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:30:34 -0000

I like assassins, in the original World of Warcraft called thieves, stalkers were called after harmony.
Output is a good job ah, close attack, can stealth, can faint.
In a copy of the output could get the first good DZ. But also very easy to hang the job. . . Haha.

Re: OnLive Hands-on Impressions

tibbon — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:53:02 -0000

Hmm, I should try something more scientific I suppose for measuring input latency, but I was able to play and do rather well on my connection. Maybe it wasn't 'snappy' but it didn't hinder my gameplay experience at all.

We could always try a multiplayer game of it and see how each of us fare. Maybe i'm just used to having a non-optimal gaming system and this was about on-par with my Mac's performance anyway.

Re: OnLive Hands-on Impressions

Zenoxio — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:49:01 -0000

If you didn't notice any input lag on a fast paced FPS like UT3, I don't think you understand what input lag is. I have pretty much the same connection speed as you and it's very noticeable in UT3 and I could never play with it.

Maybe you should do some tests so you can show some actual results instead of just saying "I didn't notice any". Input lag isn't an opinion. It needs to be tested and shown if you're reviewing it.

Re: OnLive Hands-on Impressions

Brian — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:04:01 -0000

Great post David. I like three things about onlive:

1) The idea of not having to go throught he install process and try out different games is certainly very slick.
2) Haivng everyone on a single gaming platform will result in some pretty cool innovation. Their are some very cool things onlive and other companies can do (i.e. imVOX) with this.
3) It would be nice to see the game developers not having to spend as much time getting things working on different platforms. They could put that extra development time into the actual game content.

I think cloud gaming is going to move fast and this is the only tip of tip of the iceberg.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

mrojas36 — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:25:15 -0000

Yes it does - it works very well - that is the echo canceler we are using at the moment. We have wrapped it into an AudioUnit component for the OS X side and use a fixed latency delay to synchronize the audio played to the speakers to the incoming microphone audio. We want to implement a cross-correlation algorithm to create an adjustable latency.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

Nick Prudent — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:49:49 -0000

Great article. I've been working on my own cross-platform program (www.xecretcode.com) for awhile. However, I chose to use C++ instead of .NET. For the UI, I chose to do like most cross-platform games and video editing programs and use OpenGL. I mix Cocoa and C++ using OjectiveC++. Xcode handles ll this quite well.

To be honest, the results are not totally Mac-looking, so I'm looking at CoreAnimation to better integrate graphics with native Cocoa controls.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

Steven Wittens — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:23:55 -0000

I think part of the problem is how Valve approached it: they used the word "native" everywhere, had a closed beta and ran whimsical ads that referenced decades of Mac culture. But on the day of release, there's only a slow, buggy, crashing client that gets almost everything wrong.

When it comes to Apple, one of the most unique features is the "unboxing" experience, whether it be for a physical product or a piece of software. It is expected that the developer makes the first run as seamless as possible. In the worlds of the HIG, it should "delight and surprise".

The first thing a new Mac does when you turn it on is play music and play a cool video saying "Welcome" in over a dozen languages... and right after, it takes your picture for your avatar/user account. Every new Mac user I know is smiling in that picture... think about that ;).

As developers, we can argue over the technical implementation, but we must all remember that all of this is completely immaterial to the end user. All they care about is that it works and feels right.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

tibbon — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:18:30 -0000

Hey that isn't a bad idea. I'm going to have to look into that. Thank you so much!

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

vadim — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:14:49 -0000

I forgot to mension that speex codec distro contains an excellent FFT based echo canceller too. Which is independent of codec itself.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

tibbon — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:10:44 -0000

You're right! The iPhone has a built in one, but those hooks don't appear to be available on the OS X side. If you happen to know how to get to them, please let us know, but we couldn't find any documentation.

The only quirk for our codec selection right now is what our server-side supports in its conference/mixing engine. Right now its using something that is best left unnamed, but we'll be moving to Freeswitch rather soon which will give us the ability to mix in almost any codecs that we want from any platform (Speex, Silk, Celt, etc). We do look forward to having something better than PCMU for sure.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

vadim — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:07:35 -0000

About the echo canceller, Are you aware tha iPhone has an excellent built'in echo canceler
And about the codecs, whay don't you use Speex

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

Jason — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:19:43 -0000

I agree that having a separate UI for mac/linux/windows is the nicest choice.

That being said, QT does an *awful* good job of making something that looks decently native for windows and mac (and nobody knows what a native linux app looks like). If you develop planning to be cross-platform then QT is a decent choice.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

tibbon — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:08:34 -0000

Agreed. It was more of a "Hmm, we've built this, now what else can we build with this platform?" type of thing.

I think once we get past this major initial development we will see about porting to another language. Probably just C++ or something like that. It would be the right way to do it in the long run.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

commenter — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:06:58 -0000

I concur. A complete rewrite in an unspecified, but 'unbiased' language is what you want to do. I find that C# 'for' loops are just... windowsy, somehow.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

tibbon — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:05:12 -0000

Thanks for pointing to the World of Goo framework, I'll take a look at that later tonight.

You're right for hardware setup. We should have probably bought some Mac Pros, loaded them up and gone that route for sure. Hindsight is 20/20 and next time we think to do anything like this, we'll take that route for sure.

I think the thing that's standing out here is that the Mac product was (unfortunately) an afterthought and not our primary thing that we considered in our initial... well, anything to be quite honest. I think this happens to a lot of companies unfortunately.

We've got a Mac-centric shop helping us out now with some extra manpower and its really helping us get through this, although I wish we'd had something like that from day one. All of the killer Mac devs I knew were busy, no matter how much I offered to pay them.

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

JonT — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:59:31 -0000

You're developing on the wrong hardware. Mac+lots of RAM+ 2 monitors+Parallels Desktop = perfect development machine.

Take an image of your Windows machine with VM Ware tool, import it into Parallels and presto! you've got your Windows box in your Mac, running at 100% speed. Use a Parallels shared folder for source control or checkouts.

I guess it's a bit late now (and obvious) that you needed a Mac-centric coder to guide you both in best work practices and for the code structure. Mac-isms.

The conditionals are going to bite you. Better to abstract that difference out in a "platform" layer, especially if it's just binding or UI layer crap. Take a look at what 2dboy did with the WorldOfGoo framework. It's well-designed.

And yeah, DotNet4 is going to significantly muddy the water.

Cheers

Re: PC to Mac ports- not an easy process

Alain M. Lafon — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:35:17 -0000

Honestly, if you were going for portability you shouldn't have chosen a biased platform like .NET - any developer should know that portability is not a feature Microsoft embraces actively (for obvious reasons).

If it is a long-time plan to achieve parallel Mac/Windows development, I'd recommend porting your application to another language overall. This might be a lot of work, but it will pay off not to develop on two fronts - creating incompatibilities with every feature you (try to) add.

Best to you and your team,
Alain