Marcus McCurdy's Blog

I can understand Apple’s desire to put a NDA on iPhone app development, but this seems to be taking it too far. I can guess why they did it, namely to avoid negative press, but I think it will do quite the opposite. The community on Digg already seems to be frothing at the mouth over this and not entirely unjustified in their reaction. It upsets me that they chose to do this because it makes them appear to be covering up the fact that they reject certain apps. It could be they don’t want anyone to know what apps they reject because competitors could use this to try and discover what types of apps Apple doesn’t want on the iTunes store and then leverage this against them. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how how far Apple is willing to take this. [Photo credit GiniMiniGi]

Via Digg | digg story

I’ve been excited since I learned about the 2.1 iPhone update that Apple dropped this past Friday and I wasn’t disappointed. The update fixes several issues including:

• “Significantly” increased battery life
• less dropped calls and call setup failures (I had lots of setup failures)
• “Dramatically” faster iTunes backups
• Create genius playlists on the go (awesome)

These are juts some of the fixes and the link above will take you to Apple’s announcement so you can read all of the changes.

So far, one of the first changes I noticed is that there are new icons at the top of the iPhone screen for 3G or Edge network connectivity.

And here is the new icon for Edge connectivity

They weren’t joking about the battery life either. My battery lasts at least twice as long now. Previously, I could almost watch as my battery life indicator dwindled down, but now I can use the phone all day and still have at least half battery life left. It was so bad I would turn off 3G and WiFi to try and save battery life. I still keep WiFi off unless I want to use it, but I can leave 3G on now and still have plenty of battery life left.

Apps install and update way faster now, which is a welcome change because before 2.1 even on WiFi it would take several minutes to download and install an app. This wasn’t that big a deal if I was sitting at home, but sometimes I would want to grab an update really quick while connected to a WiFi hotspot only to have to wait 5 or more minutes for the app to load.

Backups, as promised, are also much faster. I can sync much quicker now.

If you haven’t updated your iPhone to firmware version 2.1 I highly reccommend doing so as soon as you can. It makes the iPhone work so much better you just have to try it to really appreciate it. I just wish they would have released the 3G model with this firmware because before the battery life was just atrocious.

Today Apple released iTunes 8.  Here are the new features:

• Genius: A sidebar that will suggest music from the iTunes store that is similar to what you are currently listening to and will also automagically create playlists for you.
• HD TV shows.
• A new way to view your music called grid view that displays the cover art of the albums. (I don’t know about this I have problems with cover art in my library since I don’t buy all my music from iTunes.
• A new visualizer.

I just hope they fixed all the bugs in iTunes 7. Probably 90% of the time I load up iTunes it loads up in all black and I have to minimize it then maximize it to correct the problem. NBC programs are also available again via iTunes store.

You can download iTunes 8 here

Apple also changed the iPod Nano’s design from the fat squat version back to the skinnier version (which I like better) and it now comes in 9 colors according to the graphic on Apple’s website.

There will also be a new iPhone update on Friday that will supposedly fix drop calls, improve battery life, and make it easier to backup your data to iTunes.

[photo via flickr]

As I mentioned in my last post about the huge crits with the new Death Knight Scourge Strike I have a brand new video that shows a monstrous crit of 6907 against the 64 elite Deathskitterer in The Bone Wastes.

Without further ado here is that video:

I signed on to Wrath of the Lich King this morning and had to download a 488 MB patch. I was eager to check out all the changes, but for some reason the patch notes are several builds behind so I have no idea what has been changed.
As soon as I logged in I noticed I had an available talent point so I check out my talents and noticed in the Unholy tree that scourge strike had been changed. Previously, it was exactly the same as Plague Strike, but did all the damage as Shadow Damage vice physical damage. Now, it has been buffed to extreme levels.
I was fighting some same level mobs in Zangarmarsh and I my normal hits were around 2K+ with crits getting as high as 5.2K!

To me, this seems to be a bit too powerful now. The only way this wouldn’t be over powered is if there is only one rank of this spell. 5.2K crits at 80 probably won’t be very noteworthy, but at level 63 it pretty much tags out any non-elite mobs I’m fighting.

I’ll update this post with some screen shots later today after I do some more testing.

update: Here is a video of Scourge strike doing 2.7K

[photo via flickr]

I had to change my contact page because my cfoms plugin is throwing tons of 404 errors for some gifs that I know are there so I disabled it. If you want to contact me feel free to email me: marcus (at) marcusmccurdy (dot) com