HP Touch Note TM2 review

So this review is a little late in coming, but I’m kinda glad ‘cause now I’ve lived with this thing for several months so I’m starting to get an idea about how it actually is as a day-to-day device.

The HP Touch Note is a Tablet PC, not to be confused with a slate form factor tablet device such as the iPad. I got it mainly because I was interested in a very portable computer but I tend to hate touch pads, so a touch screen was appealing.   I saw a deal for it on Gizmodo and for $750, HP sold me one.  

This is basically a small laptop with a screen that flips around and closes so you can use it as a sort of “slate” or you can open it up and have a normal laptop with a touch screen.  The screen is both a touch screen and a pressure sensitive “pen” screen which comes with a stylus similar to a Wacom tablet.  In fact, it runs Wacom drivers for pressure sensitivity.

Otherwise the specs are pretty tame.  Run of the mill ATI graphics card, also an intel card for power saving mode.  4 GB of RAM, Core 2 duo cpu, a 500 MB 5400 rpm hard drive.  External DVD drive which I had to pay extra for.  It’s got a webcam and a touchpad, so it’s a pretty reasonable standard laptop when configured that way.   It’s a bit faster than most netbooks, but maybe slightly slower than other laptops in the same price range.

When I got it out, the first thing I noticed was that the hard drive was dog slow.  Took forever to boot, took forever to run apps, took forever to get out of hibernation.  Initially, I though the computer was slow, but I found it could run some fairly power hungry apps, such as Art Rage and Starcraft 2 pretty well.  It’s no racehorse, but the computer is reasonably fast outside of the hard drive. 

It also came loaded with a huge helping of HP bloatware.  I might have liked some of the stuff HP had installed if it weren’t such poor software.  There was a ton of touch specific apps that HP had installed, but nothing I was interested in.  First order of business was installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate from my MSDN subscription. 

This turned out to cause not a few problems.  Basically, it turns out that HP installs a lot of their own custom drivers to make all this pen and touch magic work.  It took me quite a while to finally install everything needed to get the thing back up and running again.  Protip if you get one: Bing  HP Touch Note TM2 drivers and you should find a big page that lists tips on how to get the thing working well. 

This is actually my biggest beef with the device.  It really shows how nice it is for Apple to control hardware and software (especially from a consumer perspective).  The hardware is OK, but the software is pretty bad, HP is not exactly a powerhouse software company.  The device looks pretty cool and has cool features, but a lot of the touch and pen functionality takes an inordinate amount of tweaking.  And as much as it pains me to say it, Windows 7 is not a good touch OS, so using the device as a slate only is practically out of the question.  It always “sort of” works.

For Christmas, I asked for and received a SSD hard drive, which solves basically all the speed problems on the device, it boots fast, runs software fast, wakes up fast.  Huge improvement.  This helps a LOT, of course it significantly raises the price of the device, but I’ve found it to be worth it, in spades.

So all these complaints, does the thing suck?

Not exactly, as a portable art device it is FANTASTIC, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is absolutely a killer app for this thing, and despite hours of painstaking debugging to get the pressure sensitivity to work properly (you need to set up a batch file that disables a service, and make sure you have the right drivers), it is an absolute joy to draw pictures on the tablet.  It’s not exactly light at 5 lbs, but it’s manageable, and it’s a HELL of a lot cheaper than a Cintiq.  It does run Flash and if you’re only using it for Kindle and Internet Explorer, it is passable as a slate device, though not ideal.  The battery life is also pretty good, lasting about 6-7 hours of light to medium use without a charge. This has improved with the SSD, also.

Basically, the bottom line is this.  If you don’t mind playing around with drivers and software for a while to get something to work, this might be a great device for you.  It doesn’t work well out of the box, but it can be tweaked into an amazing little device. If you want a shiny new toy that is just awesome from power-on, this probably isn’t for you.

Samsung Focus

One of the recent perks for working for Microsoft is that all employees recently received free Windows Phone 7 handsets.  I opted for the sexy AMOLED of the Samsung Focus.  I figured I’d put a few thoughts down about it preliminarily.

As far as the OS is concerned, I’m actually a HUGE fan.   I haven’t used an android phone, so I’m not sure how that would be, but this is the first phone I’ve used that feels like a legitimate upgrade to the iPhone. 

The keyboard is basically perfect, IMO.  I love the way it suggests words and I really find it as easy to type on as the iPhone, slightly easier due to the superior word suggestion feature.

The people hub is taking some getting used to. I like it for “quick” facebook checks, but I still downloaded the facebook app anyway.  I like the photo hub quite a bit also.  It is doing a GREAT job at picking images to use for the background and on my tiles page.  I am actually loving the whole tiles interface and how you can stick frequently used tiles to the homescreen but also have a list of apps.  I find this works fantastically well.  I actually can’t see myself having so many apps that the applications list gets unwieldy, particularly since games go in the XBox Live tile. 

One Note is really cool, I’ve already used it as a shopping list multiple times.  it’s really cool how you can stick a page to the tiles list.  It would be cool to have multiple one notes on the sky drive, however.

Zune is cool, but feels a little half baked.  Using the Zune pass is weird and unsatisfying.  Where is smart DJ?  Why does it feel like I’m sampling music when I’m just streaming with my Zune pass, and why didn’t streaming with my Zune Pass work well over 3g the one time I tried it?  There’s also no way to sign up for Zune Pass from the phone that I could fine (without going to IE), and it isn’t clear why you’d want to, when I think zune pass is one of the phone’s coolest features.  Hopefully some of these concerns are addressed in future zune updates.

I LOVE the email app.  not combining the inboxes is actually preferable to me, but I can see why people would want to blend multiple mailboxes.  I love that it tells me how many new messages there are since I last checked the inbox on the phone, and not how many unread messages are in the inbox, and I LOVE the way the pivot works to see unread or flagged messages.  I would like to see more support for gmail features, but otherwise I really love the interface.

Internet Explorer is functional but unimpressive.  I think I like it slightly better than safari, and I really like the way multiple instances are handled.  The only flaw so far is that some pages still don’t know it’s a mobile browser so you have to load full web pages instead of optimized for mobile ones.

Oh, and possibly my favorite thing about the phone?  The back button.  FANTASTIC.  I love going between apps with it.  I just find it totally game changing. It makes the phone SO much easier to navigate in my book.

A few missteps aside, I really love the first party apps on the Windows Phone.

The third party apps so far leave something to be desired.  As far as I can tell, the Yelp app is just broken, the facebook app has weird issues where sometimes I can’t select links.  The foursquare app is better than the iPhone one, but they’d have to work pretty hard to make it worse.   The built in weather and news app is pretty good, I think it’s from Samsung.  I’m bummed about no Kindle app, hopefully soon.

As for the hardware, I actually find it a pretty mixed bag.  The screen is mind-blowingly incredible, IMO.  I LOVE it.  Super sharp, awesome color, deep blacks, superb touch response, all in all INCREDIBLE screen.  Hands down the best thing about the phone.  Love the size, too.  The weight is also great, it’s a fairly light phone.  Very light for a smartphone.

I find the capacitive touch buttons somewhat annoying despite the “cool” factor.  I like the little vibration when you hit one.  But that awesome back button I talked about?  Less awesome when you hit it accidentally after typing in a URL by hand.  That’s the problem with capacitive buttons, all to easy to hit accidentally.  With the other buttons it’s fine, but with the back button, it’s particularly annoying because you can’t go “forward” at all. 

I’ve also had some oddities charging my battery and connecting and disconnecting my phone to my windows PC.  I’ve read online about a few other people having similar problems, it seems specific to the focus, which is sort of an odd thing to have to deal with, this kind of stuff was NEVER  a problem on the iPhone.

All said, in the first few days of use, the windows phone 7, the Samsung Focus in particular, is very close to greatness, I do see how powerful apple’s hardware/software combination can be and why it makes the iPhone so great when I see a few of the disconnects between Samsung and Microsoft on the phone.  That said, I am really hoping the phone remains as whiz bang snappy as it is right now (it feels SUPER FAST) and doesn’t get all iPhoned up.  My biggest problem with my iPhone is how terrible my 3G got when I “upgraded” to IOS 4.

I’m liking it so far, but there are caveats.  I do, however, consider it in most ways to be an upgrade over the iPhone.  Check out a few of the other hardware models though, I’m not 100% sure about the focus, despite the sexy AMOLED screen.

Iteration

Game development is all about iteration.  It’s very clear that the best games are almost always the most iterated.  This is accomplished through tools and engine tech that enables iteration.  The more times you get to touch a level or  a mechanic, or an asset, the better it feels, plays or looks.  I’ve talked before about how if someone can’t iterate something, they can’t own it. I’ve recently realized that there is more to it than that. 

It is true, that if you can’t iterate something in the game, you can’t own it.  But even more, if you can’t effectively iterate something then you can’t own it.  I don’t mean you shouldn’t own it, from an organizational perspective, or a philosophical perspective.

I mean, literally, that you can’t own it.  Whatever the agreement within the group, whatever people tell you, you actually cannot own the piece of game you think you own if you can’t effectively iterate it. 

What do I mean by effectively?  This is the “fluffy” part of the idea, I will admit, and it will change from team to team. Basically the more expert the team, the more high quality the team expects the product to be, the more effective each member needs to be at iterating their part of the game.  If you’re a bunch of high school students messing around with Unity trying to make a first person shooter, then no one is going to be that effective, unless you have some kind of super genius in your group.  If you’re a level designer at Infinity Ward, you’d better be able to make intelligent changes quickly in a positive direction to your level, since that’s basically your job.

For instance, I can’t really own a mission in a  AAA open world game.  I don’t really have the skills to be effective when making changes to the mission.  I can observe and make gross changes that keep the player from getting lost or dying over and over, but I won’t be able to make smart subtle changes that quietly guide the player to success or properly leverage whatever sandbox mechanics my open world game has.  I’m a good programmer.  I think of myself as a reasonably good game designer, but I’m not a professional mission designer, and while I might have some talent in that area, I don’t have enough skill to be effective right now.  Not to say I could never be effective, but if I’m a member of a AAA team, I need to be effective immediately.

So this seems pretty good, if you can effectively iterate part of a game, then you can own it, right?  Not so fast.

The problem with game teams is that they’re full of people.  And just because you can  do  a job, doesn’t mean everyone agrees that it’s your job.  So if you don’t have buy-in from the team that you’re meant to own the part of the game you’re trying to iterate, all the work you’ve done will likely be thrown away because someone the team considers to be the “owner” of the feature might not like what you’ve done, or might even be offended that you were working on something they considered that they owned.  So in order to own something in a game, you need to be able to effectively iterate it, and you must also have agreement from the team that you own it.

So what happens when the team thinks that someone owns something, but they can’t effectively iterate it, who owns it then?  No one.  Which is a pretty crappy place to be on a piece of game.  If the effective iterator isn’t allowed to own the game, it can be incredibly frustrating. Similarly, if the person who supposedly owns the feature or piece of the game isn’t able to be effective in iterating it, that can be incredibly disheartening for the individual and anyone else touching that piece of game.

So who’s the gatekeeper on this?  Who makes sure the right people own the right work?  Mainly management.  Each discipline’s management should ensure that the people working on the parts of the game are being effective in their iteration, and production needs to ensure the right people are working on the right things.   This isn’t generally a problem one finds in art.  Usually the difference is clear when it comes to artwork.  Though even in art there are points of contention.  Who writes shaders?  The technical artist?  The graphics programmer?  Obviously it depends on the team and the engine, but even this seemingly clear distinction can get a little muddy.  What if you have a super genius graphics programmer who can write any shader, but has no sense of what looks good?  Get the programmer to build a system that can be iterated easily by artists.

When it comes to design and code it gets incredibly muddy.  Partly because so much of design basically is programming, even if it’s not in the native language the game engine is using, and also because “design” as a discipline is poorly defined and understood throughout the game industry.  The current rule of thumb I’m trying to go with is if a programmer is unable to effectively iterate the mechanic, a programmer must provide tools for a designer to do so.  When the programmer is iterating the mechanic him or herself, then the programmer is basically a programmer/designer, and I think that should be fine.  If you have an incredibly fast hotshot programmer with zero design sense or desire to understand game design better, that programmer needs to provide clear, usable interfaces for a designer who has the necessary skills to be able to effectively iterate the game.  The iteration loop needs to be tight.  The designer should not have to come to the programmer for iteration, the designer needs to be able to iterate him or herself.  Long iteration loops can completely kill momentum or prevent it from ever starting in the first place.  Clearly there will be some give and take, and the programmer has to implement new features the designer needs when the designer needs them, but this can’t be things like tweaking constants, this has to be the programmer actually adding a real feature.

If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations!  Granted I’m probably only congratulating myself.  I love talking about game development, and I was thinking about this stuff so I wanted to get a bit of it down. Thanks for reading!

Back again, who is he?

So I was looking at Windows Live Essentials and I noticed “Windows Live Writer”, which, apparently,  is a blogging app for Windows.  After setting up my blog in it, I realized I hadn’t posted on my blog in like 2 years, which is a little crazy to me.  I realize I don’t really have any readers and the ones I do have actually know me and have some idea where I am and what I’m up to.  Also Facebook sort of makes blogging feel a little pointless, but I hardly update my status in Facebook either.  I guess this blog is really more of a record for myself of how things are and what I’m thinking about at a given time.

My life is wildly different since I last updated.  Now I live in Washington, and work for Microsoft, since the untimely, or perhaps timely, demise of Pandemic Studios.   I’m working for 343 industries, and things are going OK there.  Danielle is doing fantastically well over at Natural User Interface Publishing, also in Microsoft.  She’s been producing (from the publisher side) Alan wake Downloadable content  as well as working on another unannounced, top secret, project.  A bunch of my friends also moved to Washington, so socially it’s not so different from Los Angeles.  The climate is totally different, it’s much colder here and it does rain quite a bit more, but I really like it.  I haven’t had a real Fall in years and it’s fantastic.  I love seeing the leaves change and feeling the crisp air.  I’m actually half getting into sports since the weather is so fall-like.

Microsoft is a great employer with fantastic benefits.  It’s crazy to work for such a huge company but I also really like it.  They make so many products and do so much stuff it’s almost a little intimidating.  The company meeting was totally crazy.  But pretty cool.  I’m looking forward to my free Windows Phone 7 quite a bit.  I think it looks like an awesome phone and I’m really tired of my horribly slow iPhone 3g.

Halo Reach came out and I really loved it.  I’m still playing online quite a bit, and it’s the first online multiplayer game on console I’ve ever gotten into.  I’m really enjoying it.  My friend Mike worked on it and his levels are some of my favorite Halo levels of all time.

I guess that’s enough for now.  I might try updating this more as I remember.  This software is kind of cool I guess but doesn’t seem that much better than the actual Blogger website.  If anyone’s reading this, I hope you have a nice day!