Macworld Expo 2010 Best of Show | Macworld Expo | Macworld

Macworld Expo 2010 Best of Show

Depending on how you count, five to seven of the eleven are actually iPhone products rather than Mac products.

Classic D&D healing herbs

While I’m not a fan of much buying and selling of magic in classic D&D, I do want to try giving the players some access to accelerated healing beyond cleric spells. I was always a fan of the herbs in Rolemaster that could be used for healing and curing various conditions. So, my plan is to have some herbal treatments available for sale.

Let’s say a single dose heals the equivalent of one day’s rest: 1–3 hp. Based (perhaps only loosely) on the cost of living I’d come up with for the Keep, I decided an herbalist at the keep might sell a dose for 50 gp. Typically 5–10 doses (1d6+4) would be in stock.

Then I found the information about brewing potions from the (Cook/Marsh) Expert guidelines. A standard healing potion (equivalent to the clerical spell Cure Light Wounds: 2–7 hp) would cost a mage 500 gp and one week to make. An alchemist could do it for 250 gp in half a week.

So, let’s call the herbalist an alchemist who is selling to the public (rather than being on retainer like the alchemists in the book). So they’ll have to add a mark-up to that 250 gp in order to make a profit. I’ll double it.

I came up with this list of products:

• Minor healing herbs, 1–3 hp, 250 gp, 2–16 (2d8) in stock
• Major healing herbs, 2–7 hp, 500 gp, 1–7 (2d4-1) in stock
• Universal disease treatment, 1,500 gp, 0–3 in stock (d4-1)
• Universal antidote, 2,000 gp, 0–2 (d3-1) in stock

I priced the 1–3 hp version at half the regular “healing potion” cost. Also available are the equivalents of Cure Disease and Neutralize Poison. Treatments for specific diseases or poisons could be available at lower costs.

I might come up with some rules for foraging so that the PCs could find some ingredients to sell to the herbalist as well.

Do you really need Flash for the Web?

Do you really need Flash for the Web?
Originally uploaded by Kendall Helmstetter Gelner

Actual screen shots from an iPhone of the sites Lee Brimelow used in his “oh noes...the Internet on iPad won’t work at all without Flash” mock-ups. It turns out that six of the ten serve up Flashless versions of themselves to the iPhone.

Classic D&D cost of living

The question came to me: What would the cost-of-living be for an NPC living in the Keep on the Borderlands?

B2 doesn’t seem to list the rent for the private apartments. A private room in the inn is 1gp/night. That’d make about 30gp/month. On the one hand, a private apartment ought to cost more than just a private room, but hotel rooms cost more than apartments, right? I’ll just stick with 30gp/month.

The Basic Set price list (which happens to be reproduced in B2 for quick & easy reference) gives 5gp for 1 person-week of unpreserved food. So, that would be about 20gp/month.

So, 50gp/month for food and a place to sleep.

On the iPad/Flash brouhaha

In a comment to this Smarterware blog post, Mark Williamson asks:

I am so torn, do I support 94% of my customers? Or do I let the 6% with either a choice that they made to not have flash or a choice that was made for them by their device supplier dictate how my site might work?

What you do is simply this: You make sites that degrade gracefully. That means you don’t use Flash (or any other such technology) for stuff you don’t need to use it for.

For example, I ordered pizza from Domino’s online recently with Flash disabled. I didn’t get to see the fancy preview image of my pizza with the toppings composited onto it because it required Flash. The actual functionality of the site—ordering food—worked perfectly fine without Flash.

John Nack writes:

And today, more than 15 years after Netscape debuted, Flash remains the only way to, say, display a vector chart across browsers (i.e., such that you can count on every viewer seeing it).

Except that you can’t count on every viewer seeing it. See the Smarterware post above. Those figures don’t even count most iPhone and iPod Touch traffic. That is why nearly every feature that has been added to the web over the years provides for providing alternate content for browsers that don’t support that feature.

It also doesn’t count the visually disabled who can’t see the chart even if they have Flash installed. This is why the standards today provide ways to provide text descriptions of visual elements.

If you use Flash to show a vector chart without providing a raster alternative and a text description, some “viewers” aren’t going to be able to “see” it.

Apple doesn’t support Flash on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and won’t support it on the iPad. This is not about Flash vs. HTML5. This is not about Apple vs. Adobe.

Apple is not supporting any browser plug-ins on the iPhone OS devices. Why? Because browser plug-ins are the biggest source of Mac OS X crashes.

If you follow the advice of Lee Brimelow, as he wrote in the comments to his “The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?” post...

If you can do something in HTML then we recommend people to do that. Use Flash when you need richer interactivity. It’s not HTML OR Flash. They can coexist.

...then the iPad not having Flash won’t be a problem. Flash is for the butter, not the bread.

So, is Apple lying when it claims the iPad is “the ultimate browsing experience”?

sigh

Where to even start? The fact that this is opinion? (It’s not hard to find someone who feels that browsing without Flash is better than browsing with it, by the way.) The fact that it is marketing?

Bing? Really?

From Daring Fireball: Apple, Google, Bing, and Search:

Say what you want about Microsoft in general and Bing in particular, but the fact is, Bing is the only major competitor to Google left standing.

How is it that the last one to enter ends up being the only major competitor?

Bridging print and digital media

The day before the iPad unveiling, in What I Hope Apple Unleashes Tomorrow, Derek Powazek wrote:

I’ve spent my professional career doing basically two things: making websites and making print media. It’s my hope that what Apple unleashes tomorrow is the device that finally bridges the two.

I think the iPad may do some of what Derek hopes but only a little.

Print had value because there was no better way to deliver information. People were always paying more for the delivery than for the content itself. There is a better way now, and it is cheaper. Print is still holding value, but that won’t last. In the long run, people aren’t going to pay as much for digital delivery as they did for print. Moreover, they’re going to pay for print in fewer and fewer cases.