After the last few articles, I think I’m ready to discuss something, well, fun. Enough serious crap, it’s time for dessert! This isn’t really a review, but a brief overview of my latest Mac addiction.

Two days ago I downloaded Frenzic, a puzzle game recently released by The Icon Factory and ARTIS software. I burned through the one hour of play time demo period in no time. I’m not a big first-person-shooter or role-player-game person; most of the games I play tend to be of the strategy variety, from various simulation games (Sim City 4 on Macintels, please!) to puzzle games, so it’s no wonder I would be interested in Frenzic.

Frenzic’s tagline is “Addiction never felt so right.” Typically I take marketing with a grain of salt, but in this case, they may be onto something.

So how does one play Frenzic? As counterintuitive as it may sound, it’s hard to explain because Frenzic is so simple and straightforward. The game board has seven circles: six on the outside and one in the center. Each circle holds six wedge-shaped pieces. One by one, a wedge will appear in the center circle, with a timer. Your goal is to place this wedge into an empty space of the same relative position in one of the outer circles. When you fill a circle, the pieces in the circle disappear, giving you more spaces to place wedges. If you have wedges of matching colors, you get additional points, and depending on which circle…
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As some of you may know, in addition to my work here on Deep Thought, I also contribute to TheMacMind. Even though I am officially editor-in-chief there too, I am a good deal more involved in the operations of Deep Thought than TheMacMind, so much so that I am probably more of a contributions writer there than a full fledged editor (just look at the number of articles I’ve written for DT compared to TMM).

TheMacMind received some rather harsh criticism over a review that Anthony Cole wrote recently. The meat of the criticism is that Anthony’s review was little more than an attempt to scam software developers in order to get free software.

Anthony took over TheMacMind late last year after it had sat idle, proclaiming, “A new look coming soon” for over a year. Anthony is 16 years old. When I was 16, I certainly wasn’t running a web site. (Now that I think of it, when I was 16, it was last century. Yikes!) Anthony is still very green at this; TheMacMind relaunched just under three months ago. It represents his first real attempt at journalistic work. He is very much learning on the job.

As I tell some of the younger writers on staff here at Deep Thought, if you make mistakes and write a poor article, or an article that isn’t well received, you take that criticism into account and try to improve upon your writing so you don’t make the same mistake over and over…
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Okay, it’s the middle of February. Macworld Expo and CES are long over. Windows Vista has been out for more than two weeks. Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music has been discussed so much that it’s been beaten to a bloody pulp. That’s right, it’s the tech doldrums right now. What’s a techie to do?

Why, write an article about what irks him, of course! A good number of the coolest geek toys out there involve Web 2.0. Not surprisingly, elements of Web 2.0 come up on this list quite a lot! Let’s get started. Here are some of the most worn out, most obnoxious trends in the tech universe.

Beta, beta everywhere...

It seems like no site or product churned out these days can be considered hip unless it has a “beta” tag somewhere on the page. Flickr is a great example, and has actually gone above and beyond “beta” and is now “Gamma”! Whoa! I don’t know what Flickr is trying to accomplish with “gamma,” as the site seems pretty polished to me. Maybe they are parodying the “Beta” tags everywhere?

Speaking of Flickr…

Stp drppng vowls frm wrds

Okay, I’ll admit, RAZR was a cool name at first. Flickr was OK, even. These days, though, we have to contend with dropped vowels everywhere. I can pronounce ROKR. SLVR was a little difficult; where should the vowels go? And what vowels should be used? Is it supposed to be “Slover”? When multi-billion dollar corporations start dropping vowels in their product…
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This is the first in a series of articles looking at some of the key new features of Windows Vista. This article is based on a prerelease build of Vista (Release Candidate 1). Bugs and minor tweaks aside, the feature set discussed in these articles should be pretty much identical to the shipping product, since Release Candidate 1 comes at the end of the product development cycle and should be pretty much feature-complete. Regardless, due to that fact, this article should not be taken as an actual scored review. This particular article will cover the changes made to Windows Explorer, the Start menu, Taskbar, and associated elements of Vista.

And I’m sorry in advance for mentioning Mac OS X a few times in this article. When you write an article like this, sometimes comparisons are inevitable.

Anyway, let’s jump in, shall we?

Windows in, uh, Windows

So what has changed, you ask? A lot. Windows Vista may represent the largest overhaul of the Windows user interface since Windows 95, and I’m not just talking about eye candy, either. Let’s first take a look at the typical Windows Explorer window:

A typical Windows Explorer window contains back and forward buttons, a search field, toolbar (similar to the task pane in Windows XP), and customizable “favorite links” pane. Similarities to OS X’s Finder aside (search field in the upper right, customizable favorites pane), the window layout is much cleaner, and in my opinion, more efficient, than that of Windows XP. Additionally, Windows Explorer…
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As many longtime readers know, I am no big fan of Windows. It’s a solid OS, and I know that there are many people that like it; that’s great, but Windows just isn’t for me. The way I work is more suited for the Mac environment. It’s strictly a personal preference issue. As for Microsoft itself, I really only have one big problem with the company. No, it’s not that they have a stranglehold on the operating system market. No, it’s not that they are Microsoft, so therefore everything they do obviously sucks. My biggest problem with Microsoft is that they try to go in every direction at once and make things more convoluted for their customers than they should be. I’m not talking about the operating system itself, either. This all comes down to marketing.

Fuzzy Math

“Lies!” you say? Well, let’s look at some examples. First, let’s look at Microsoft’s endeavors in the digital music business. In the past two or three years, Microsoft has launched three music services: MSN Music, URGE (in conjunction with MTV), and Zune Marketplace. The first two use Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM scheme (Note: MSN Music no longer serves as a music store; instead it links to Zune Marketplace and Real Rhapsody). The other uses whatever DRM the Zune uses (I don’t think the marketing gurus in Redmond have yet come up with a name for it). Now why in the name of cinnamon sticky buns does Microsoft see it necessary to support two DRM…
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