BRH.numbera.com

In my post introducing the Bungie Card Windows Sidebar Gadget I mentioned that I was making one more gadget that would be of somewhat more limited interest. Well, I’m finally finished with it: the 360Voice.com Challenges gadget! 360Voice.com is a fun little site that started off by giving your Xbox 360 a blog that would summarize each day’s gameplay. It’s since grown far beyond that, but the feature I like most is the “challenges“. Challenges are a little meta-game where you get some friends together and see who can win the most gamerscore via unlocking achievements over a set period of time.

I do a lot of these challenges, so I wanted to be able to keep track of their progress on my sidebar. The gadget shows you the time left in the challenge, the current standings, and the “live score”, which is the gamerscore each player has earned that day that hasn’t been counted in the official standings yet (gamerscore is sampled by 360Voice.com at midnight PST each day). Once the challenge is over, the winner is given a little crown and the gadget waits for the next challenge.

Fortunately, the 360Voice.com developers had the good sense to provide an XML web services API to their challenge data (and a lot of other stuff too!) so it’s not too hard to make cool things like this gadget that tie into their site. For this project I went ahead and included my favorite JavaScript library, jQuery, and a neat jQuery-based databinding library called chain.js. Using these made development a lot smoother - the old familiar Sidebar bugs and Internet Explorer weirdness was still there, but overall it wasn’t too bad. I’ve specifically designed it to be as light as possible on 360Voice.com’s API too, so hopefully it won’t impact their service.

I think this is the most attractive gadget I’ve made - it’s certainly the most data-rich. I’m really proud of how it came out. I hope everybody enjoys it, and if you haven’t ever done a 360Voice challenge, go start one! Also, if you like it, please rate it at Windows Live Gallery.

P.S.: While I was monkeying around with gadgets, I’ve made some minor changes to my Top Process gadget - the text-fade option is no longer there since it really didn’t add anything, and I may have fixed a couple minor bugs.

I suppose I’m a glutton for punishment. After writing my last two Windows Sidebar gadgets, I really meant to swear them off entirely. They’re really a pain to develop. But when my favorite video game developer, Bungie (recently of Halo fame) launched their new “Bungie Cards“, I knew I had to support them. Bungie Cards are basically like Xbox Gamer Cards, but for Halo 3. I assume when new Bungie games get released, they’ll feed into the Bungie Card system as well. My new gadget is not terribly complicated - it just displays your Halo 3 Bungie Card, in either the small or wide form.

When it’s floating, you can choose either form of the Bungie Card. It’s a little weirder when it’s docked to the sidebar. First, it scales down to fit the sidebar. Then, to see the wide version, you just click on the gadget and the wide card shows up in a flyout. It’s a nice way to keep track of things without taking up too much space. As a bonus, double-clicking on either form will take you to your Halo 3 stats page.

Like the other gadgets I’ve done, this was much more difficult to develop than it should have been. The hardest part was getting the scaled-down card for when the sidebar is docked. At first I just zoomed out the page, like I had done for my Xbox Live Gamercard gadget, but it looked absolutely awful. With the exception of newer browsers like Firefox 3 and Safari, “resizing” an image by just changing the HTML element’s dimensions has always used nearest-neighbor filtering, resulting in a truly horrid image. My first instinct was to try and use the MS-proprietary “filter” CSS property to apply a Matrix DXImageTransform that would do the scaling, since that transform has an argument that’ll get it to use bilinear filtering, which is at least decent. However, Sidebar seems to think that that is a dangerous “active content” operation and blocks it. I tweaked it around for a while before stumbling on a workaround - the BasicImage filter was not blocked, and if I applied any transform at all, the basic zoom scaling would filter the image in a more pleasant way. So right now I’m using an opacity filter set to make the image completely opaque. It’s silly, but it works, and I guess this is what I should expect at this point. Trust me, you wouldn’t have liked it before - the image on the left is the way it looks now, the image on the right is with the original smoothing method:

I actually have another Xbox-related Sidebar gadget in development which is more complex but of limited interest. I hope everyone enjoys the Bungie Card gadget - feel free to send me feedback directly, and please rate the gadget at Windows Live Gallery.

Like most Americans, I’ve been using the AOL Instant Messenger IM network for the last 10 years or so. As I’ve made more friends who prefer other networks, I expanded to multi-platform IM clients that let me sign into all the major IM networks at once. I’ve used Trillian, Adium, Meebo, and Pidgin over the years, and I have active screen names on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, and various Jabber services. So when it was announced that the Xbox 360 would include an MSN Messenger client with the Spring update, I was excited. I’m already signed in to MSN all the time, so I thought this would just be another great way to stay connected.

Unfortunately, MSN has a pretty big problem. Whenever you sign in to your MSN account from one location, it signs off, all the other locations. If I’m running Pidgin on my desktop and I open Meebo on my laptop, my desktop gets signed out. And when I start my Xbox, it automatically signs on and knocks everybody else off. The end result is that I’m almost never signed in to MSN, which pretty much defeats the purpose. My buddy list reflects this - my friends are online only when their Xboxes are on. It’s worth pointing out that Yahoo Messenger suffers from this problem too, but it doesn’t bother me as much since I don’t have many Yahoo friends.

With more and more devices getting IM capability, I can’t see how this restriction can continue. My desktop is always on and signed in to my IM client. My phone will have an always-on IM client. Another one on my Xbox. Another on my laptop. Another at work. And I’m switching between them all the time. And with more and more people using multi-protocol clients, they’re less likely to notice the one account that’s decided to sign itself off. It’s especially frustrating on the Xbox, since it means I can’t just use my laptop to send IMs to my friends while I play and still get notifications on my TV. IM has the potential to be awesome on the Xbox, but not as long as it’s stuck with a one-device-at-a-time protocol.

I guess I didn’t learn my lesson with the TopProcess Sidebar gadget, because today when I got home from work I was itching to make another. This time I figured I could stick to something much simpler. I had looked around for a Sidebar Gadget that would display an Xbox Live Gamercard, but none of the ones I wanted fit the bill. So I quickly whipped up my own.

This one is pretty standard. It lets you set which gamertag to use, and you can drop any number of them on your sidebar. When the gadget is docked, it scales down to fit into the sidebar, but when it’s undocked it displays at full size. Really, there’s not a lot to it. Once again, please check it out at my Sidebar gadgets page and go rate and review it at Windows Live Gallery.

The new Blastacular map pack for Halo 2 launched today, and being a huge Halo fan I raced to pick them up. I’m happy to see new content coming out for a game that’s over two years old, and Hang ‘em High (remade as Tombstone) was easily my favorite Halo: CE map. I’m also really glad that Bungie decided not to make the maps Xbox 360 exclusive, a move that would have greatly simplified purchasing and downloading the maps at the expense of fragmenting the player base between Xbox 360 players and original Xbox players.

I chose to download the maps to my Xbox 360 (I love the 720p upsampling), but the purchase process was not particularly smooth. When I tried to buy the maps, I got this message: “Premium purchases are not enabled for this Xbox Live account”. This was a confusing error since I’ve bought plenty of things through Xbox Live Marketplace before without any problem, and I knew I had no parental restrictions in place. My friend Mark figured it out though, and clued me in. Like many Xbox 360 users, we’d created Xbox Live Silver accounts in non-US regions to get access to foreign game demos. This came in really handy back when the Chromehounds demo came out everywhere but in the US. However, for some reason it messed with the backwards-compatibility-mode Xbox downloader. I’m not sure if it’s because the accounts were from a different region, or because they were Silver accounts and the original Xbox has no concept of Silver accounts. Anyway, the solution was to sign in with the Silver account and attempt to purchase the maps. This will fail, but then you can sign in with your regular Gold account and download the maps. Hopefully this fix will let more people enjoy these great maps.