After reading about a program called Mousepaths on Scott Hansen’s ISO50 blog I thought I’d give it a try myself.
Mousepaths (now called IOGraph) tracks your mouse movement in the background. When your mouse is inactive it builds a black dot, that grows as more time passes. Clicks appear as white dots.
click to embiggen
It’s interesting to see after 7 hours of work where my mouse spends most of it’s time. Apparently I rarely use my secondary monitor, mainly to move something back and forth. I also would like to state that the two big black dots are lunch and a meeting. Most definitely not me slacking off.
You can download IOGraph from Anatoly Zenkov’s site. It’s cross-platform and a fun passive activity while you toil away.
A game, where everything is truly interactive. You can pick up anything, move anything with enough force. Now, a game with such open endedness will have a huge problem. How will the player know how to forward the game?
Just imaging that you awoke one day in the very room you sit in now, but you have no memory of where you’re at. you’d start to look around for clues, but where would you start?
That’s where actor controlled NPC’s (non-playable characters) come into play. These actors would be hired by the game company to ‘posess’ NPC’s to help move the story along. Each time would be different, each reacting to your actions/responses to thier input. Since they are hired by the company, they have a vested interest in seeing the continuity of the story progress.
(I’ve had this in my draft folder for far too long. Post or get off the pot – as they say.)
Update #3: I was playing around with my smart playlists this morning and discovered an additional tidbit of information that may be useful for some. When syncing smart playlists, pay attention to which column you have the ordered the music by.
As you can see in the above screenshot I have my playlist sorted by ‘Date Added’ which is exactly how I want things ordered. Once I synced my iPhone playlist showed my music sorted by ‘Date Added’ as well.
If I were to have ‘Play Count’ selected as the column to sort by and then synced my iPhone, then that playlist would display the songs ordered by ‘Play Count’
I found this out while playing with the Apple Remote app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The selected column to sort by also effects how playlists are displayed in the iPhone Remote App.
Update #2: New updates that came out kinda fix this problem. Read more here.
I noticed the other day that Smart Playlists were not syncing correctly to both my wife and my own iPhone.
I found one fix that allowed the sort order to be correct, but disabled the Live updating function of the Smart Playlists. Which meant that every time an attribute of the playlist was updated (Such as rating a new song for my ‘5 Stars’ playlist) nothing was updated upon syncing with my iPhone.
This totally defeats the purpose of a playlist that automagically updates my iPhone with the last 100 added, or top rated songs. ARGH!
Alas, after following a suggestion from this discussion thread (Thanks Dave Jelfs!) we now have a solution. In fact there’s even a bonus side effect for those who only want to sync music, and not video within your playlists.
Update: Joel S points out that this is not totally accurate. “In my own testing, these playlists will still include Music Videos.”
First find your Smart Playlist in the sidebar.
Ctrl + Click on the playlist and select “Edit Smart Playlist”
A new window will appear with all the settings for that particular playlist. Add a new rule of ‘Playlist is Music’
Click to view
You’ll notice ‘Live updating’ is still on.
Now sync your playlist with your phone. TaDa!
While is is a workaround it does allow for the playlist to be synced, auto updated and appear sorted as you wish on the iPhone.
Like my previous troubleshooting articles I hope this post will be quickly updated when Apple roles out a fix. Until then, happy Smart Playlist syncing!
As with everything YMMV. I was using the following setup.
Macbook Pro 1.83 Ghz
Snow Leopard 10.6.1
iTunes 9.0.1
iPhone OS 3.1
If you have an improvement please leave a comment.
After reading about a program called Mousepaths on Scott Hansen’s ISO50 blog I thought I’d give it a try myself.
