Ilia Draznin Online

So this has been a pretty busy week. Of course the biggest news is me launch­ing this site… <crick­ets>… or maybe not. I guess it all depends on your per­spec­tive. As for the other inter­est­ing stuff — Google is send­ing out 100,000 beta invites to Google Wave in September; HTC Hero has been reviewed by every­one except me; Steam is hav­ing a sale on King’s Quest and Space Quests col­lec­tions, and you know I got it as soon as I saw it; and finally a small Firefox add-on that is going to change my life (not really, but it’s an atten­tion grab­ber, ain’t it).

Google Wave Beta Invites

Google Wave

Google Wave is Google’s vision for the future of com­mu­ni­ca­tions — it’s a web appli­ca­tion that com­bines email, instant mes­sag­ing, social net­work­ing, real time col­lab­o­ra­tion, and more, into one uni­fied, fluid inter­face. If you haven’t seen the pre­sen­ta­tion you should check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ, it’s 80 min­utes long but it’s riv­et­ing (if you’re into that sort of thing that is). This week Google announced that it will be send­ing out beta invites to those that signed up for Google Wave updates at the end of September. You can go ahead and sign up at http://wave.google.com/. While I’m hop­ing to get an invi­ta­tion, real­is­ti­cally I prob­a­bly won’t have any­one to “wave” to (only a few peo­ple I know use gmail and it’s unlikely we’re all gonna get invites) so my expe­ri­ence will be lim­ited. Really, I’m just look­ing for­ward to this thing going pub­lic and read­ing what peo­ple have to say about it.

HTC Hero

Images cour­tesy of Engadget.com and HTC.com

I’ve been look­ing for­ward to the HTC Hero because I thought it might finally put Android in the spot­light for the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, and it looks like it just might do that. The reviews are for the most part pos­i­tive and every­body is really lik­ing the new inter­face. Which I think for the aver­age per­son is the most notice­able, and thus, impor­tant part of a smart-phone. Especially since the iPhone showed every­one that it’s pos­si­ble to make a great inter­face on a 3 inch screen. The home screen is very strik­ing — large beau­ti­ful clock with weather, colour­ful icons, and a blurry, unfo­cused back­ground that makes every­thing else really “pop out” on the screen. I am a bit sur­prised at the lack of any flash for the cam­era, see­ing how it’s a 5MP cam­era — seems like a shame to waste a good cam­era with­out any flash support.

It’s just a shame it won’t be com­ing to Canada any time soon. I really need to get myself a smart-phone but unless Bell switches to GSM by the end of the year Palm Pre is not hap­pen­ing for me, I’m not get­ting an iPhone, and that only leaves me with HTC Dream, which is now a last year’s model.

King’s Quest and Space Quest col­lec­tions on Steam

King’s Quest VI and Space Quest Collections

I’m a huge King’s Quest fan, King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow in par­tic­u­lar — that was the game that intro­duced me to PC gam­ing proper, till then it was just your var­i­ous Pac-Mans, Super Mario Bros., Asteroids, and the like. I absolutely fell in love with that game and have been a big adven­ture games fan since then. I also played the 5^th, 7^th and 8^th game in the series (Mask of Eternity was a dis­ap­point­ment — not a proper King’s Quest game) but 6 always remained my favorite. As for Space Quest, I only played the 6^th one but really enjoyed it — it kinda reminded me of the Monkey Island series, with it’s humor and bizarre sit­u­a­tions. I am really look­ing for­ward to play­ing through both series and the only ques­tion is — how many cups of cof­fee will it take?

I also just dis­cov­ered that the first three King’s Quest games have been upgraded by fans to fea­ture bet­ter graph­ics, and even some voice work, and are avail­able for free. That was an extremely pleas­ant sur­prise. I haven’t yet down­loaded and tried them but I’m def­i­nitely look­ing for­ward to that. The first two are avail­able from AGDInteractive Studio, and the 3^rd one from Infamous Adventures.

Screengrab! add-on for Firefox

This is a lit­tle add-on that I should’ve dis­cov­ered long ago but such is life. It puts a small icon in FF sta­tus bar, which allows you to take screen­shots of a site you’re view­ing. You can either make a selec­tion or tell it to grab the whole page, and then you either copy it to clip­board, or save straight to a file. This kind of tool really speeds up web design work. If you missed it like I did you can grab it on the Firefox add-ons page.