There is a major issue I have with several MMO games. I have been aware of this issue since World of Warcraft was first released in late 2004. The way Blizzard structure their servers for WoW is in such a way that the United States and European servers were only accessible by people who had obtained a game key from the respective country whose servers they wanted to play on. So, for example, since I’m in Australia (and the Aussie retail of most MMO games uses a game key for the US servers only) I’m unable to play with my friend from Finland whose retail copy of the game uses a key for the EU servers.

Recently, it has come to my attention that the Age of Conan servers are also set up in exactly the same way. There are US servers and EU servers, and keys for the game are for either one or the other.

Whilst I understand that this is done on purpose for probably several reasons, I still think this is very, very wrong. Guilds that move from one game to another are being split into two separate guilds because they’re simply unable to play with each other. Basically, it’s like letting the game companies tell us which friends we’re allowed to game with and which ones we’re not.

From a networking perspective, it makes sense. You want players to experience the least amount of lag possible, so you set up server farms in each country and only allow people from that country to play on them. But shouldn’t it be the player’s choice if he or she wants to play on a EU server even of they live in the US? For many people, who they’re playing with takes priority over the lag time they may experience by playing on a server further away from their location. I’m one such person and I know of plenty more.

I don’t think Funcom or Blizzard are ever going to change the server setup, and we’re likely to see future MMOs with the same issue unless we speak up about it. For the majority of gamers, it probably doesn’t even matter, as their friends are likely in the same country and time zone as they are, or they go into a game not knowing anyone prior. But for quite a lot of us, it does matter. I read about it on game forums; about guilds with low numbers since they’ve been split in half, about people not being able to play with their friends who they’ve played MMOs with for the last three years. Sure, it can be easy enough to deal with; just get a game key for the US servers if you want to play with people from the US. But that’s only half a solution, isn’t it? What if you want to play with US and EU people? What if half of your friends are European and half are American or Aussie?

At the moment, it’s simply tough luck.

Finally, the time has come! reemixx.com now has its very own custom Wordpress theme. It’s the first theme I’ve built from scratch, so I’m quite proud of it and very happy with how it turned out. I went for a semi-minimalist style because I favour design that is clean and allows you to get information quickly and easily. There’s still a few bugs to iron out, and a couple of tweaks to be made (adverts, static pages, ’share this’ links, a few styling issues, etc) but for the most part it’s standards compliant and viewable in all major browsers (there’s a few I haven’t tried yet). However, if anyone does find any bugs, please let me know, just in case it’s something I have overlooked.

I’ve added the ‘Live Video‘ page for my Ustream.tv stream. I hope to do some live broadcasting a little more often, just for a bit of fun and interaction. I’ve also added links in the main menu to the major web services I use, so that they’re easier to find. My plan is to incorporate my content from those sites into this one so that it’s centralised.

What do you like or dislike about the new design? Send some feedback my way.

New Setup (May 19th 2008), originally uploaded by reemixx.

Testing the blog function from Flickr and showing off my new (temporary) setup. I’ll be getting a new desk soon, but for now this does the job.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about changing the direction of this blog. I considered making it more focussed on technology related areas, such as Apple, computers, software, tips and tricks, reviews, etc. After thinking long and hard about this, I’ve decided to do (almost) the opposite. This blog began as a personal blog, a place where I could write about topics that interested me. Somewhere along the way, it became a little detached and lacked the personal touches that I intended to place in my writing. As a result, I’ve begun to enjoy it less. Well, I’ve made some decisions about that to try to turn things around.

The first thing to note is that this blog is going to contain a broader range of subject matter in the future. It sort of already does, with stuff from TV and movies to Apple, gaming, photography, etc. But I’d like to mix it up even more. I realise that this may turn some people away as they’re interested in specific topics only. But this is a personal blog, and I’d really like the keep it that way by delivering personalised content about stuff that interests me. Tech is obviously a big interest of mine so there is still likely to be more tech related content than any other, but I’ll no longer refrain from writing about something because it doesn’t ‘fit’ the blog. It will be nice to write about anything that I choose from this point forward. In the (distant) future, I may begin another blog or website with focussed content, but this one will always exist for personal stuff.

The second thing is that I really wanted somewhere to act as a central hub for bringing together all my accounts from other web services such as Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, etc, that I use on a daily basis. Currently, I have links to the services that I use, but I’d like them to play a larger role and integrate more into this website, which goes hand-in-hand with my desire to make it more personal. I have no quarrels with losing some of the ‘professional’ feel to make it more personalised.

Lastly, while I do like the design of this WordPress theme, it isn’t the most accessible and doesn’t contain valid code. So instead of taking an existing theme and modding it like I did with this one, I’ve decided to make my own simple minimalistic theme that will be accessible from many devices. I’d like it to be very iPhone/iPod Touch friendly. Plus I’m a big fan of simple and clean design. So expect that to happen some time in the future (not sure when as I’ve only just started thinking about design, but I’m just putting it out there).

If anyone has any thoughts or comments about any of this, particularly about moving away from a more ‘professional’ focus in favour of a more personalised one, I’m definitely interested to hear them.

Like many other web geeks, I’ve found myself using a whole bunch of web applications on a daily basis, such as Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, YouTube, Digg, and Last.fm, just to name a few. I also use Gmail for multiple email accounts, and have a bunch of RSS feeds to manage. This is all well and good, but it can get a little disorganised and inefficient when you’re using desktop clients for some of them, such as Twitterific for Twitter and NetNewsWire for RSS, and your web browser for others such as Flickr and YouTube. Plus there’s the need to check updates on multiple web-based social services constantly, for example, FaceBook, Twitter, Pownce, etc. Surely there’s a better way?!

Indeed there is. Several, in fact. It just depends on how you personally like to manage things.

Going Completely Web-Based

Over the past week, I’ve been experimenting with doing as much as I can inside the web browser. This not only has the benefit of being neater and easier to manage, but I’m running less desktop applications which means more CPU and RAM for the applications that really need it. When you’re using processor and RAM hungry applications like Photoshop and Aperture regularly, every little bit of juice helps.

Before the development of web based lifestreaming and social aggregation services like socialthing! and FriendFeed, we would have had no choice but to open each web app in a separate browser tab and check each of them individually. Lately, I’ve been using socialthing! to check and make posts to several web services at once, including Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and Flickr. Currently, there are only a limited number of services available on socialthing! as it is still in private beta, but it will soon support several other commonly used web services. By no means are socialthing! and FriendFeed the only lifestreaming service, however. There are also several others out there. What I like about socialthing! however is its ability to grab my friends from each web service itself rather than forcing me to add my friends manually. Not only that, but I’m able to make posts and respond to other people’s posts from inside socialthing! itself, so there’s no need to fire up each web service in my browser just to respond to someone. This makes the entire experiment of doing as much as I can inside my web browser possible.

For my RSS feeds, I’ve dropped NetNewsWire in favour of Google Reader which I can also access from within my browser. This has a couple of benefits; it’s one less application to run, and I’m now able to access and update my feeds from any computer anywhere at all. For my calendar, I’ve also dropped OSX’s iCal in favour of Google Calendar. The big plus here is being able to make updates and view upcoming events from anywhere and across multiple computers - something I couldn’t do before with iCal without having a .Mac account, or using something like iSynCal, which has its own set of problems.

I now also use my personalised iGoogle page. I’ve customised it so that I have all my Google apps visible on the page such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Reader. I can interact with all of these apps directly from my iGoogle page which is extremely handy.

Of course, there are some limitations to doing everything web-based. I regularly use two Gmail accounts; one for personal stuff, and one for work stuff. Due to the way Google does things, you’re only able to sign in with one Google ID at once. This means that if I were to use my email completely web-based and not with an email client, I would only be able to see incoming mail for one account. For this reason, and because I also have several other non-Gmail email accounts, I still use OSX’s Mail.app to manage my email. This is fine however, as most email services I use offer IMAP, so they’re able to sync across multiple computers without problems.

The other main problem with going completely web-based is that I don’t have offline access to my calendar, docs and RSS within Google. For this reason, it obviously won’t suit everybody. But for my uses, this isn’t really an issue as I work online almost all the time.

In summary, I’ve been able to ditch several desktop apps in favour of using my web browser for everything. Not only this, but I’m able to access multiple web services at once using socialthing! and iGoogle, which save me from opening a dozen browser tabs at a time. I’m enjoying the increased organisation, less clutter in my workspace, and the noticeable improvement in computer performance with less desktop apps to run. There are now only two desktop apps that I use for web-based service; Mail.app for email, and Adium for instant messaging across multiple services (currently MSN and Google Talk).

Using the Desktop for Web Apps

The alternative to doing everything web-based is to use an application such as Fluid (for OSX Leopard only) or Mozilla’s Prism (multiplatform, in development). These pieces of software allow web-based apps such as the above mentioned Facebook, Google Calendar, Twitter, etc to be run on the desktop. They run in their own windows and have their own icons, just like any desktop application.

There are definitely benefits to running web apps this way. You won’t lose anything when your browser crashes. You can access the apps using alt-tab or command-tab or Exposé like other desktop apps. You can keep the apps open without interfering with your web surfing and having multiple browser windows or tabs open. You still minimise your use of multiple desktop apps because technically you’re only running the one app, be it Fluid or Prism, just with multiple windows for multiple web services.

I haven’t had any experience with Prism so I can’t really say much about it, but I do know that Fluid brings quite a lot to the table. See this screencast of Muxtape with CoverFlow using Fluid for example. Despite my preference with doing everything web-based, I would still use something like this for its simple convenience.

Web Apps and the Future

Web apps definitely aren’t going anywhere. With the increasing number of web startups that are happening, and the growing popularity of social networking, music and video streaming, and other related web services, we’re only going to see many, many more of them. Some of them will just be mixups of what we’ve seen before, but every now and then a real gem appears that many of us will feel the need to use, or at least try for a time.

What does this mean? Probably a few headaches for the average internet user, and a few more for the web geek. There comes a point when you can be doing too much online, and find yourself spending far more time than you originally intended just checking your RSS feeds and replying to your friends’ messages over multiple services. That’s why organising your online life is just as important as organising your offline life (that’s IRL for us geeks). These web services shouldn’t dominate our online lives, but compliment them and add a level of interaction to them that isn’t otherwise possible.