Code Retard

Wait for it… Decide tells you if you should buy that gizmo now, or not.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

No matter how many times I write that physical retail is the refuge of the dumb shopper, from time to time even I find myself in a Best Buy or CostCo, fondling the box of some new gadget, itching to buy it on the spot. I, too, am dumb.

Fortunately, there’s an app for that. Several, in fact.

In addition to the multitude of shopping apps covered elsewhere on CNET (see the Related Stories box), I recommend two that are custom-made for the undisciplined electronics shopper.

First, Amazon’s A9 Flow. Amazon already has another strong app for scanning prices in stores, but Amazon Flow is great for the casual in-store shopper since you barely have to hold still for the camera on your
iPhone to get a fix on the product or barcode you’re pointing at. It’s just too easy to see if the price of what you’re looking for on shelf in front of you is competitive with the online price. So get this app.

Second, Decide‘s new mobile app. Decide, which also has a good Web service, tells you if the price of an item you’re looking at is predicted to hold steady, go up, or go down. If you are in a store more than a day before the gift-giving holiday you’re shopping for, it will tell you the value of waiting. It will also compare online prices to prices at other physical stores near you. I like Decide, but it does require that you have enough time to make use of its feedback. If not, Decide can simply serve as a reminder to start your gift buying earlier next year.

The endorsement: Flow

Platform: iOS
Price: Free
Company: Amazon A9
Summary: Yet another price-check app, but with the best scanner around.

The endorsement: Decide

Platform: iOS | Web

Price: Free
Company: Decide
Summary: Smartphone scanner app that will tell you if the product you’re looking at is about to be available for less.

Are you planning to carry your World of Warcraft character into the mists of Pandaria? If so, you should probably have a look at how your talents will be changed when the expansion  lands sometime next year. Blizzard has released the first version of its official Mists talent calculator, giving you a chance to test a few builds out. Check it out right here.

Of course, talents, spells, and everything else you find in an expansion are always in flux, so don’t get too attached to anything you create. The calculator is just intended as a tool to familiarize you with class changes and prepare for your first few days – not as a concrete promise of what your character is going to be like when the game launches.

Before you get too excited, the talent calculator is sadly missing the new Monk class, so if you were ready to plan out your Brewmaster you’re going to have to wait a few more weeks. Other than that, the calculator is available for all classes.

Honestly, I hope there are some big changes coming. I just went through the Mage and Shaman talent calcs and they’re pretty awful. The new tier system has promise, but not if it forces you to take things you’re never going to use. The focus on Polymorph for Mages is curious – sheeping hasn’t been important since the pre-TBC days (unless something changed with Cataclysm?)

What do you think of the new talent system?

[MMO-Champion]

Japanese coder Plum has released version 2 of his PLugin Manager. Now its not just another plugin manager. Its different as it lets you enable and disable plug-ins on the go. No need to reset your PSP. It can disable a troublesome plug in without a reboot. Great for fault finding a conflicting plug-in that maybe messing with remote play for example.

Plugin Manager V2

v2 add a setting file to avoid conflicts with the memory being used, game is to allocate memory from the kernel space v1

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I’ve been playing around with Power View (formerly codename Project Crescent). I started with a simple PowerPivot file I’d created to analyse the transactions of a small dog grooming salon (I wanted something different from the usual Contoso demos). It was a simple matter to publish this PowerPivot file to a PowerPivot gallery in SharePoint 2010.

With the file saved to the gallery, I could click on the new icon to create my report (my screenshot still calls it Crescent, since I’m using CTP3 code).

This gave me a blank canvas from which to start creating my interactive report. I could quickly and easily create rich visualisations, including charts which move based on a timeline, with just a few clicks.

It’s also possible to save this visualisations as various views, making it simple to jump to different data representations to present conclusions from the analysis.

Black Friday is almost here, and if you’re the type who likes to avoid the shopping rush like the plague, I may have the perfect collection of
iPad apps for you.

Instead of getting up early and waiting in crowded lines for the doors to open, how about sitting on your couch with an iPad and a cup of coffee, and getting your holiday shopping done in peace? It’s true that you probably won’t get the super mega deals found by doing the leg work at your local retail outlet, but you’ll also run zero risk of being trampled by overexcited shoppers.

While this collection is focused on the iPad (simply because it’s easier to see the items you’re buying), you could just as easily get any of these apps for smaller iOS devices.

Amazon Mobile
No big-store shopping list would be complete without the online behemoth that is Amazon. Amazon Mobile works on all iOS devices and even acts as an excellent shopping companion if you decide to brave the lines. But on the iPad you get nice big images of items and you can sip your coffee between purchases. Read the full review.

Target for iPad
Have you ever been to Target on Black Friday? Here’s my official CNET editor’s advice: don’t do it! Instead, watch bad daytime TV in pajama bottoms and browse the Target catalog on your iPad. Maybe you could heat up a turkey sandwich from the Thanksgiving festivities with all the fixins while you shop…who’s going to stop you? Read the full review.

Zappos Mobile
The online store that got famous for shoes (and fantastic service) is not just for shoes anymore. An extremely intuitive interface lets you drill down through categories–like shoes, clothing, housewares, and more–all with big buttons on a touch-screen interface. Did you just buy your aunt a new coffee maker while sitting at the kitchen table without wearing pants? Don’t tell her, but yes you did! Read the full review.

Wal-Mart
Recently released for iOS, the Wal-Mart app brings the national all-you-can-consume store to your touch screen. This app lets you set your local store as “My Store” (to check inventory) if you need to make a run, but it works just as well as a gift browsing tool from bed. Maybe you should decide on what to get for your uncle before taking a cat nap…or maybe not. This is your day; you decide! Read the full review.

Sears for iPad
Tires, appliances, housewares, shoes, clothes, and just about anything else can be found and purchased with a few swipes of your finger at the Sears store. Are you looking for a new set of Craftsman tools for your significant other? Is it finally time to replace that refrigerator? Sears has a lot more-diverse items than its reputation might indicate, but you still came to the right place. Read the full review.

Nordstrom: The Catalogs
Well, well, well! I didn’t know we’d be shopping from the bathtub today, but I’ll avert my eyes while you browse through these top-shelf items very carefully so as not to get your iPad wet. You won’t get the full Nordstrom inventory here, but you can browse through recent catalogs for the latest items. Don’t spend too long looking at that $3,200 watch, though–that leftover pumpkin cheesecake isn’t going to eat itself. Read the full review.

Only the big store shopping apps we’ve actually reviewed made the list, but if you have an alternate to suggest, please leave a comment.

(Credit:
Mercury Mobile LLC)

Ever made plans or laid out action steps in your head while on a business call, and later wished you had taken notes?

Maybe you were on your Bluetooth headset while driving, or you couldn’t find a pen. Or maybe you just plain hate scrawling anything on paper at all.

Enter Tote Notes, a brilliantly conceived app that pops up after voice calls so you can dictate notes before you forget any important details.

Here’s how it works. Whenever you get off a call, a Tote Notes dialog box pops up asking whether you want to record a note. Say yes, and your note will automatically be recorded and e-mailed to you as an MP3 file, along with the contact info of the caller (if it’s saved in your phone’s address book), and a transcript of your recorded note in the body of the e-mail. In all of our trials, the app worked like a charm, and the transcriptions (powered by Google Voice) were more or less spot-on.

If you’re a busy professional who often arranges meetings, makes deals, or discusses other important details over the phone, Tote Notes might be just the app for you.

Tote Notes (download) is available now for free in the
Android Market. There’s also a Pro version available for $3.99. Whichever you choose, be sure to check out our full review before downloading.

Today Ubisoft announced that our favorite punk-haired legless hero will get himself an HD makeover. According to PlayStation Universe, Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havic will be remade for high definition.  The original game, released back in 2003 was a joy of platforming that pitted Rayman against the Hoodlums, creatures made of pure evil.  Eventually he had to take down Andre, the Black Lum leader, and save the world from general badness.

No doubt the HD remake of this classic will allow younger gamers to experience the game.  There is little word on exactly how much new content will be added to the game, but we can expect a graphical overhaul and possibly Trophy support, as that has been the standard for HD remakes of late.  We don’t yet have a release date for Rayman 3 HD, but my guiess is we can expect is sometime next Spring.  Let’s hope that Groove Armada is still available to do the soundtrack.

Fancy some Anaglyph 3D on your PSP? PSPWizard’s PSP3DPlugin has been out for sometime now. And version 2.21 has just been released. It fixes that horrid lag bug that sometimes popped up. And you can now play FIFA 12 in 3d using the FIFA 11 setting without it crashing. P.S remember your going to need some old fashion 3D glasses. You know they ones with the red and green lens filters…

PSP3DPlugin 2.21 changelog:

- fixed a bug with the logging which seem to always on and causes huge lagg
- FIFA 12 does work now with the same settings as FIFA 11 and does not crash while loading anymore

Source: PSPWizards release site

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The long-lost retrogame character Dizzy is about to make his long-awaited return, if a teaser image released on Tuesday by Codemasters is anything to go by.

Dizzy was a series of 2-D platforming games released for several old-school computer systems, including the Amiga, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in the late 80s and early 90s. Starring a cute little egg named Dizzy, the games tasked players with collecting a variety of different items and figuring out how to use them in order to solve puzzles and get past traps, whether it was extinguishing a fire with a jug of water or feeding a delicious apple to an angry troll.

Dizzy’s two most popular titles were Treasure Island Dizzy and Fantasy World Dizzy, but he hasn’t been in a game since 1992?s Crystal Kingdom Dizzy.

That 19-year wait is why Codemaster’s new teaser site and video, in which a screen playing what looks like a new Dizzy game can be seen, is such a surprise.

It isn’t yet clear whether this will be a remake of a classic game or an entirely new entry. But I, for one, am just eggcited for eggnother eggcellent eggventure. Egg.

Google launched WebP to outdo JPEG. Now a new version is designed to take on another dominant graphics format on the Web, PNG.

WebP is based on the open-source compression technology used in Google’s WebM video encoding technology, and with it, Google hopes to reduce Web page file sizes and thereby speed up the Net. There are plenty of challenges for the technology, but Google just made WebP a bit more competitive through the addition of two major features.

First is a “lossless” compression option that can image data without loss of fidelity. Second is support for an “alpha channel,” which lets designers designate part of an image as transparent.

That’s useful for video game graphics, icons in user interfaces, and other objects that aren’t simple shapes placed in front of a background. Designers today often must choose between JPEG, which doesn’t support alpha channels, and PNG (Portable Network Graphics), which does, but which in many cases doesn’t compress images as well as JPEG.

“Photographic images typically encoded as JPEG can be encoded in WebP lossy mode to achieve smaller file size. Icons and graphics can be encoded better in WebP lossless mode than in PNG. WebP lossy with alpha can be used to create transparent images that have minimal visual degradation, yet are much smaller in file size,” Google programmers Jyrki Alakuijala, Vikas Arora, and Urvang Joshi said in a blog post last week.

And WebP could appeal to a peculiar niche on the Net: the animated GIF crowd, who help keep the gradually fading Graphics Interchange Format alive because it can be turned into a crude multi-frame video. Animated WebP support, though, remains a work in progress.

But getting a new image format to catch on is tough. Microsoft has tried for years with a format first called Windows Media Photo and now standardized as JPEG XR. It also offers better compression than JPEG, alpha-channel support, and a lossless mode, but it’s a rarity in the real world.

One area where JPEG XR found a foothold is the Flash Player 11.

Curiously, Mozilla has begun kicking the JPEG XR tires, contemplating the possibility of supporting it in
Firefox.

Programmers who use the WebGL–a 3D graphics technology for the Web–apparently also would like a combination of compression and alpha-channel support.

Google is eager to spread WebP far and wide. Mozilla is more cautious, though, given the concern that “every image format that becomes ‘part of the Web platform’ exacts a cost for all time.”

WebP’s prospects also could be impaired by the fact that it isn’t a standard. A standard is a safer bet for camera makers and others considering the prospect of supporting a new file format.

Still, Google’s control over WebM video hasn’t stopped it from being included in Firefox and Opera browsers. And Google continues to improve WebP and WebM with faster encoding and decoding as well as better image quality.