The first thing to note is that the app is a 30 trial version. After the trial period you have to pay for it, or switch to “Shazam Lite”. Given that this app will likely only hold novelty value for me, I doubt I’ll pay money for it.

Music detection seems to work pretty well. It successfully tagged tracks from The Offspring, Atreyu, Crowded House, The Vines and the Avenue Q soundtrack. It couldn’t handle one the Harry Potter soundtracks, Mephiskapheles or Heartsdales. I guess it will work fine for more common songs but will choke on slightly obscure ones.

The real test will be how it handles songs on the radio or broadcast in a public space – the ones I don’t already know. The Ovi Store also lists a couple other apps of this type so I’ll try those out as well. One even claims to be able to detect songs being hummed. Let’s see how that deals with my tonedeaf humming!

The basic operation is that you sign up for an account, install the desktop client on whatever device you want to synchronise files with and then start copying things into your dropbox directory. Anything in that directory will be synchronised with your files stored on the Dropbox server. This arrangement means that you don’t need all your machines to be on at the same time and that you can get around firewalls much more easily. The other major benefit is that you can access your files from the web, which is handy if you just need to get at a single file on someone else’s computer.

The web interface also has a mobile component (unfortunately intended for iPhone but it works on most mobile browsers), unfortunately it doesn’t quite work on the default browser for my phone – I can browse my files but am unable to download them. Thankfully Opera Mini is up to the task and can download the files to the phone.

The synchronisation process is fairly robust and has timely updates when files are changed. You can tell when an update is being done as the icon in the taskbar changed to a “processing” icon. The Dropbox clients for Windows and Linux also place fitting icons on files and folders when viewed in Windows Explorer or Nautilus.

Overall Dropbox is a great system and one I highly recommend using if you need to keep a small number of files synchronised between several computers. For the future I’d like to see some better mobile integration but at least it’s not something that is completely missing.

I installed MobilePress and it appears to working very well. My impetus was that I was sick of trying to access my blog on my Nokia E71 which, although it has a fairly full-featured browser, is still a small screen making it an utter pain to scroll around. Not to mention the pointless download of many superfluous kilobytes of data. So hopefully, if you happen to be looking at this on a mobile browser, it will be that much easier to read.

While I was at it I also had a go at WPhone and Wordmobi. WPhone is similar to MobilePress in that it presents a different interface for mobile browsers but, in the case, does it for the Wordpress administration area. I haven’t used it too much so far but it seems functional enough. Wordmobi is functionality the same as WPhone but is an S60 (Symbian) application so I don’t even have to worry about downloading unnecessary data or how the interface is rendered – only the data I need is retrieved and sent. Interestingly it runs on Python, which I didn’t even know was available for Symbian. That in itself may require further investigation in future as it could seriously lower the barrier to entry for programming mobile applications.

One final thing to note is that I installed the two extensions via the Wordpress plugin system available through the admin panel. It was stupidly simple and meant I didn’t have to mess around with FTP clients and the like. I’d say it was a very positive experience and practically worth an upgrade to 2.7 in itself! I’m hoping that having better mobile access to my blog will help me carry through on my new year’s resolution to post more frequently.

First of all, Ext really is just freaking massive. Although jQuery isn’t exactly minuscule it’s still a hell of a lot smaller than Ext. Loading my Ext application, even on a local connection, takes quite a while and freezes the browser while all that code is processed. Admittedly this is more to do with my browser being slow as a dog than with any inherent flaw in Ext. Still, if you want to have a lightweight site Ext is pretty much immediately out of the running.

One thing that I initially loved about Ext, that I am now starting to loath, is that it tries to be too much like Java or some other desktop programming language/library. Basically you can (and probably should) build the entire interface through JavaScript calls rather than use HTML and CSS. The problem with this is that, at the end of the day, it’s not Java and Ext just ends up doing fancy DOM manipulations anyway (for the layouts anyway) so all it’s really doing is obfuscating what’s going on and making sure you are forced to rely on the Ext interfaces rather than DOM manipulation or CSS or the like. Now, 98% of the time this won’t be an issue for you but I’ve run into a few cases where it’s tripped me up because I can’t work out how to get around all the Ext-ness.

In comparison jQuery provides almost nothing but DOM manipulation helpers, which is really useful if you already know what to do but if you want to build a layout like Ext does then you’re going to be messing around with HTML and CSS quite a bit. That said, it really isn’t that difficult to get the basics up and running but emulating something like SplitPane would be painful … unless you find an appropriate plugin. So, for what it does, jQuery is stunningly good. It makes enhancing web sites trivial and removes a lot of the sharp edges from JavaScript without attempting to fundamentally change how you use it.

As an example of how the two differ, here’s some code to run logic when a user clicks on a link and to disable the normal execution of that link.

For Ext:

Ext.select('#links a').on('click', function(event) {
    alert("You clicked: " + Ext.get(event.target).dom.innerHTML);
  },
  this,
  {stopEvent: true}
);

For jQuery:

$('#links a').click(function(event) {
  alert("You clicked: " + $(this).html());
  return false;
});

As you can see, the jQuery code is a bit shorter and easier to understand. To disable the normal browser action of following the link, Ext has a special option on the event handler whereas in jQuery you simply return false from your click function. This might seem counter-intuitive if you don’t know JavaScript so if you don’t, compare the above to how you’d do this without the libraries:

<a href="/foo/bar/"
  onclick="alert('You clicked: ' + this.innerHTML); return false;">
Click here
</a>

You can see that returning false is what you normally do anyway so, instead of encapsulating this, jQuery basically just lets you use the normal way of doing things. Ext, on the other hand, makes things more programmatic and Java-esque by having an extra configuration option to the event handler.

I am still developing web applications with both of them so I can tell you that both libraries are suitable for RIA development, it’s mostly just a question of whether you prefer developing apps entirely in JavaScript or using JavaScript for logic and a little layout, as well as whether or not you need all the advanced features Ext comes with. I think that I would normally pick jQuery because I prefer the simplicity of it and like more control when writing an application. Hopefully this little post has given you an idea of what the two libraries are like and encourage you to try them both out. I’d like to hear the experiences of others working with these libraries, as well as others like Prototype and Mootools, which I am also interested in.

First of all, getting Ext running is slightly more complicated than getting jQuery running. jQuery is a simple matter of including jquery.js in your HTML and then writing your script. Ext requires first it’s own CSS file, then an adapter which uses another library (jQuery, YUI or Prototype) but can also use the newish ext-base.js which doesn’t depend on external libraries, and finally you include ext.js itself. I went with the pure Ext solution but tried out the jQuery adapter and found it didn’t work for me – I’m sure I was doing something wrong but didn’t care enough to fix it and went back to Ext.

Secondly, Ext is rather huge. Not surprising considering what it can do but the whole thing (ext.js, ext-base.js and stylesheet) still comes in uncompressed at just over 512KB. Sorry, I should mention that that’s with Ext’s default minification – the debug versions are a bit over 1MB! In comparison, jQuery is roughly 70KB before any minification is applied. So what do you get for all this size? Quite a bit actually.

The customer info area of my application is designed with a list of customers on the left and an area for details on the right. With pure HTML and CSS a nice-looking layout here, similar to a desktop app, is really difficult to achieve. With Ext it’s almost trivial and you can use a logical declarative style of recursive JavaScript objects to define the layout – similar to how it would be done in Java Swing, for example. With Ext you can also easily get “bonus” features like resizable panes, content areas that adjust to the size of the viewport and a default style that looks pretty damned good (and you have to option of using different themes). Without any trouble I was able to get a simple list working which allows clicking on customer names to load their details asynchronously in the details panel, as well as allowing dynamic updates and the like.

The standard things that I use with jQuery – selectors and AJAX support – are also well supported in Ext, even if they are slightly more verbose. Ext also includes a nifty feature in it’s simplistic load() method that allows you to set a loading message, something that I believe you have ot do manually in jQuery.

Ext also supports a wide range of widgets and the like out of the box. Data grids are all the rage now and Ext makes it simple to get them up and running. Tree views, buttons, colour pickers, date selectors and a bunch of others are provided as well. If there’s something missing you might be able to find a plugin for it.

Overall, I’m really enjoying working with Ext. It makes some fundamental yet complex things ridiculously easy and provides enough of a framework to get almost anything working with a bit of lateral thinking and liberal application of nested layouts and the like.

So I guess the obvious question now is if I prefer Ext or jQuery? Honestly, the two are just aimed at completely different areas. If you’re making a web site that needs some fancy JavaScript effects, a bit of AJAX and you want it to be light and accessible, then I’d say jQuery is the way to go. If you want a RIA with lots of advanced functionality and don’t care about those plebs who don’t have JavaScript then I’d say Ext is definitely the preferred option. If I had to pick I’d say I like jQuery a bit more since I prefer writing enhanced web sites rather than desktop application wannabes but this is really just a personal choice. Both libraries offer the same basic functionality and jQuery can certainly be extended to do pretty much what Ext does so choosing either will probably let you do what you want.

The background to Code Geass is interesting in itself: it’s set in an alternative Earth where the British Empire never went into decline and has gradually conquered a sizable chunk of the world’s surface, in part helped by their giant robots called Knightmares. The latest country to be conquered in 2010 was Japan, which was subsequently renamed “Area 11″ and its people dubbed “Elevens”. The rest of the world seems to be divided amongst several superpowers, such as the Chinese Federation. Naturally not all the Japanese took this invasion lying down and have formed a resistance to fight back against the Holy Empire of Britannia. You can find more information on the background on the Wikipedia.

The main story begins 7 years after the conquest of Japan and revolves around Lelouch Lamperouge, a Britannian teenager who attends the prestigious Ashford Academy and seems to have a hobby of using his chess genius to embarrass minor Britannian nobility. After such a match Lelouch gets mixed up in a resistance operation that results in him gaining the power of Geass, which allows him to give anyone who looks into his eye a command which they are compelled to follow. Even if the command is “kill yourself”. Lelouch uses this ability, along with his tactical genius, to form the persona of Zero and take command of a group of rebels and use them to do considerable damage to the Britannians. Lelouch’s motives for this become clear over the course of the series.

Along with Lelouch there is a supporting cast of interesting characters, most of which manage to conform to some clichéd anime archetype or other. There’s the shy girl who’s not-so-secretly in love with Lelouch, the obnoxious best friend, the bossy student body president and so on. The characters manage to be just different enough to keep things interesting though, especially as the series progresses, or at least fun. In case you’re wondering why you’re getting flashes of Cardcaptor Sakura or Tsuabasa, the character designs were done by CLAMP, although the series is not one of theirs.

Like many other anime, especially those involving mechas and high school students, the show tends to have a mix of drama, action and comedy. The pace of the show doesn’t exactly start off slow but it still manages to pick up towards the final episodes. There’s plenty of twists and turns in the story as well, enough to make it a reasonably good thriller.

There’s quite a bit of character development for the leads during the course of the first season but Lelouch really steals the show in some of his more contemplative moments. His character is similar to Light Yagami from Death Note but where Light has only a few initial concerns about his path, Lelough struggles with it almost until the end. I think this makes him far more interesting to watch: he’s never truly convinced that what he’s doing is right and has to do a lot of rationalisation to get through all the terrible things he does. In a way, he’s even willing to sacrifice himself – or at least his humanity – to achieve his goals, which are surprisingly unselfish.

Although the show only recently finished airing in Japan it has already been licensed in America by Bandai Entertainment, perhaps due to its (apparently) large following. I’ve already seen it referenced or parodied on at least two other anime series. A second season has been announced as well, which is just as well since the first ends on a cliffhanger.

Now, there is one thing I’m slightly upset about already with the English dub: it was announced that Johnny Yong Bosch would be doing the voice of Lelouch. Now, I don’t actually mind Bosch’s voice work but he has a major strike against him in almost everything he does – he always sounds like Johnny Yong Bosch! Vash, Ichigo, Renton and Itsuki all sound pretty much the same (despite their wildly differing characters) and, at least in this case, I think his voice is not a good fit for Lelouch at all. I’m probably being a bit harsh here: we can’t expect everyone to have the range of Crispin Freeman. I’ll reserve final judgement for when I actually watch the show but I guessing I’m going to be watching this one with subtitles after the first viewing.

Overall, I absolutely loved this series and I can’t wait for the second season. If you enjoyed shows like Death Note or Full Metal Panic! then I’m sure you’ll enjoy Code Geass as well.

The centre of the show is a “psychic detective” named Shawn Spencer who uses his gifts to solve crimes. Except that he’s not actually psychic (and, in fact, doesn’t believe in them) but, due to circumstances outlined in the pilot episode, he needs everyone else to believe he’s psychic. Only his father, retired police officer Henry Spencer, and his best friend and partner Burton “Gus” Guster know that he’s not psychic. The powers that Shawn does possess are a photographic memory and a gift for solving crimes.

Most of the comedy in the show comes from Shawn’s interactions with various people. Usually the funniest moments are when Shawn shows off his psychic abilities, which will often involve some sort of gibberish and thrashing around. The interplay between Shawn and Gus is also great to watch – Gus is the straight man of the duo and is somewhat bitter about Shawn’s carefree attitude to everything and how he always gets away with everything.

As a detective show Psych is actually quite interesting and, while often formulaic, doesn’t really get boring and throws enough curve balls to keep you on your toes. It’s not the draw of the show but does provide a good backdrop for the comedy, as well as an excuse for Shawn and Gus to “sneak” into various places and question people – all the while giving Shawn more clues with his acute observational powers.

Psych is actually an example of the fundamental problem with so much Australian TV coming from America. The pilot episode aired tonight and yet the second season has been finished in the US for quite some time now. That’s an awfully long lag. Local DVDs aren’t available yet either, which I really hope gets rectified soon. The network broadcast also seems to have made cuts to the show as well, which is always disheartening.

Overall, I really enjoy Psych and highly recommend it to anyone. For now it’s airing on Channel 10 at 9:30pm on Tuesdays but we’ll see how long that timeslot lasts. I hope that DVDs will be available for purchase before long.

I’ll cover the technical aspects up first. The production values are at, or above, the excellent standard set by the TV series. The movie is in widescreen and features 5.1 Dolby Surround. The bad news is that there is no Australian release and one has not been announced as of yet.

As for the movie itself, I believe it could be best described as an episode of Futurama that’s four time longer than usual. Which is fitting seeing as it’s designed to be split up into four distinct episodes. Basically, if you love Futurama you’re going to go gaga over this.

One of the biggest highlights for me was the opening scene where the crew makes thinly veiled references to the show’s cancellation by the Fox Network. Professor Farnsworth explains that everyone was fired two years ago by the executives at the “Box Network”. Seconds later he receives a phonecall telling him that those executives were themselves fired and have been ground up into a product called “Torgo’s Executive Powder” (a product which is used throughout the movie). I think it is this eagerness to get straight to the issue of the cancellation, and subsequent mocking of Fox (common is Groening’s shows), that really give you an idea of what kind of show Futurama is. There isn’t much that is a taboo subject for the writers!

The opening title sequence gets a redoing as well. Characters are now introduced in between shots of the Planet Express Ship flying through New New York. The song was naturally extended for all this and I enjoyed hearing a longer version of it.

For fans of the show there are numerous references to the first four seasons but I won’t go into any of them here and instead let you find them yourself. People who are not fans should find the movie as accessible as any episode but be warned that the plot is a rather involved time travel paradox-fest so people who aren’t usually into sci-fi should probably find an early episode to start with.

Overall, what more can I say but that I loved every minute of Bender’s Big Score and am extremely grateful that we’re getting more Futurama after all this time.

Really, I think the opening title sums it up best:

For more screen captures from the film, go to the Amazon gallery.

As I mentioned before, Sony and Nintendo were doing most of the marketing – they each had large areas assigned to them and were showing off at least a dozen games each as well as their respective consoles and handhelds. Sony in particular went to great effort to put their games on large, 1080p HDTV screens to maximise the eye candy of the PS3. Nintendo, on the other hand, seemed content to let the games do the talking for them (Super Mario Galaxy had queues of people lining up to play). Microsoft had a huge inflated Master Chief helmet but they weren’t really showing off much in the way of games, only Halo 3 and Mass Effect running on a couple small screens. One of the interesting things is that, because you have both consoles makers and games publishers at the same event, it’s sometimes confusing as to who is responsible for what. For instance, Yamaha had an area and were using a Wii to show off their surround sound systems but from a distance is almost looked like another Nintendo booth.

The games of the day for me were Crysis, Heavenly Sword and Assassin’s Creed. Crysis looks gorgeous but mostly the same in terms of gameplay (no surprise there). Heavenly Sword I had to describe to someone as an “ocular orgasm” because it just looks that good. The gameplay did look a bit tame but I think the visuals alone would justify a purchase if it cost about $75 (it doesn’t unfortunately). Assassin’s Creed was, I think, the darling of the expo as I believe I saw it in three different places: running on both Xbox 360s and PS3s. I couldn’t really tell much of a difference between the two versions, but at one point it looked like the Xbox version didn’t have shadows turned on. Weird. The game seems to be similar, gameplay-wise, to Thief or Splinter Cell but the graphics are very “next-gen” and it actually manages to convey a living world, filled with people. Most parts of the game I saw had at least 20 people on screen at any one time in narrow city streets.

Super Mario Galaxy had a lot of people excited about it and the crowd around the three TVs running it were larger than most. I’m still trying to work out how exactly it’s played as there seems to be an odd two-player setup where two people control a single Mario. It does look like great fun though and the playing area is huge and seemingly allows for complete non-linear exploration.

There were a few competitions set up with Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament 3 and so on. Some even had commentators. I’m not really into those sort of multiplayer games so I watched for a few minutes and moved on.

The main stage had different events running throughout the weekend but I never ended up checking any out. It looked like the usual sort of stuff though: panels, presentations and competitions. I think there was even a cosplay competition on at one point – obviously an attempt to try and maximise the audience for the expo. Unsurprisingly, the cosplay competition had what I think was the most number of people watching it.

Speaking of all things anime, Madman Entertainment had a booth in the middle of the convention hall. I ended up spending an obscene amount of money updating my anime and manga collections. I worked it out and I ended up saving roughly $60 by buying the stuff there instead of online or in a store. From now on I should try to do all my shopping at conventions!

One of the highlights of the expo was seeing tons of people walking around in some shirts from the Swinburne gamers club. Basically the shirt was red, with a send up of the OFLC’s R18+ logo, instead having the text beside it: “This rating not suitable for mature adults.” This is an old issue but still one that I think baffles a lot of people – why does Australia not have an R rating for games? All the other ratings have been brought into line with the movie ratings but for some bizarre reason the OFLC has refused to allow 18+ games to be sold (legally) in Australia. A sea of bright red shirts was a welcome sign of passive protest.

Something that didn’t surprise me but I still found interesting was the presence of a toned down version of “booth babes”. Basically, half the booths there had at least one, but usually several, hot women dressed in revealing clothes (hot pants, low-cut tops) to draw attention. What I found hilarious was at one booth where a bunch of guys were sitting around ogling Assassin’s Creed running on a 102 inch Panasonic TV – the two girls wandering around weren’t even getting a glance! I must admit, I only looked once myself before turning back to the game. Since I’m sure some women will be reading this, rest assured that they also had (what I assume to be) hot guys wearing tight t-shirts. I can’t comment too much on this though as I wasn’t really paying attention to them.

So overall, I think the event was a success. There were plenty of people there and everyone looked like they were having a blast (sometimes literally, in a virtual sense). I definitely had fun and came away with a ton of swag so I’m happy, even though I didn’t actually spend more than a few hours there on Friday and Saturday. Did any readers end up attending? I’d like to hear what other people thought about it.