Thursday, January 25th, 2007
… If you use a Logitech mouse you already got it! The company now officially made it clear on their support forums that there will be no support for Mouseware for Windows Vista. Instead they point their customers to use the generic mouse driver that ships with Vista. But have they told you that the mouse movement is much slower with that one, even on highest speed? Or that the middle mouse button will not work? I like my MX310 and don’t plan to buy a new one just for Vista because this mouse fits like a glove. The same goes for my soundcard. M-Audio hasn’t made any official statement about a Vista driver so far.
One might thank Microsoft for this mess because of their ridicolous protection mechanisms but then again companies like Wacom prove that developing Vista drivers for existing hardware isn’t impossible. Seems like Logitech jumped onto the ‘all new and shiny’ banwagon by presenting their newest Vista supporting products instead of writing some drivers for their existing customers! Oh right! I forgot to tell them that some customers like me are left handers and don’t want to use an ergonimic right hander mouse!
No Vista for me until this driver mess has seriously improved, and definitely no Logitech products for me for a while, thanks!
Filed under Misc | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
While the whole world is hyping Rich Internet Applications, I’m sitting here in my lab and could not bother less! Flex is really neat and who says that it’s only useful for shopping- or flight-ticket booking systems?! Nobody? Good! I’m using Flex to develop my game development Middleware, i.e. editors like the TileSetTool that I’m working on (if I’m not working on the hexagon framework what I’m doing most of the time). When Flex2 was still really fresh I’ve pondered to use Java for this instead but as it turned out, ActionScript 3 is fast enough for most of my desired operations.
So for now this TileSetTool can be used to convert my (custom format) tileset XML files and their belonging tileset image files into combined tsc file which are compressed and saved to disk by the tool (using Zinc). This editor is probably just the first stage to a much more versatile tilemap editor. The tool uses parts of the hexagon framework which also will contain a tile engine to support the tilesets and maps.
It’s fantastic how quick you can knock an application out of the ground with Flex and AS3 while others are still fighting with their IDE.
You can click the image to see a full screenshot of the tool. In case you’re wondering … no, I’m not working on a Flash version of Uridium 2 (would be an idea though). The tileset is only for testing purposes.
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 7 Comments »
