As we hadn’t updated our recommended iPhone apps compilation in some time, we thought that a quick refresh was in order, especially with iPhone OS 3.0 out, and a new iPhone just days away. With the iPhone 3G now a mere $99 (albeit with a two-year contract), many holdouts will undoubtedly be giving up their souls to AT&T, and will, in short order, seek out must-have apps to fill their new smartphone. If you want to get right to our complete list, take a look at mendax.iphone, but if you first want to see what changes we made to it, keep reading.

Replacements.

First up, let’s take a look at the apps we removed. iTalk was a nice audio recording app, but since Apple bundled one along with iPhone OS 3.0, iTalk is redundant.

We also gave ByLine another look, as it received a couple updates since we replaced it with Feeds, and surprisingly, Byline’s performance put it back in the lead. Both apps are priced competitively, but since Feeds’ integration with Google Reader appeared worse than quirky for us, we went back to Byline, which has thus far worked solidly both online and offline. As far as RSS readers go, ByLine definitely stands ahead of the rest (admittedly, there are few that support Google Reader integration, but we consider this a must-have feature).

We pulled another retro-glance with i.TV, which we initially supported as a great television programming guide before it started to suffer unbearable crashes. We gave it another look recently, and since it integrates television programming, theater movies, NetFlix, and remote TiVo programming, we decided to dump both Now Playing and What’s On in lieu of i.TV. It’s a real twofer, and so far, stability hasn’t been much of an issue.

On a recent trip across the country, we found ourselves scanning for wireless hotspots, and as anyone who’s used the built-in wi-fi tool under Settings can tell you, the out-of-box method is annoyingly poor, even if one resorts to the auto-alert pop-up when walking around. WiFinder was our previous winner for this function, but it didn’t let us join open networks despite advertising the feature – the join network button simply didn’t do anything. The icon for WiFinder was horrible besides, so we finally found a replacement, even if it’s not for free. WiFiFoFum handles wi-fi scanning admirably, and appears to be a great wardriving tool if that’s one’s purpose for this type of app. Even if it’s not, being able to triangulate the source of local wi-fi signals makes troubleshooting a local wi-fi network a much easier task.

Newfish.

Since our last update, we also added some apps that are simply fantastic, especially since we weren’t happy with previous apps that may have claimed to have similar functionality. For example, Bento is a great database app, which is cheaply priced and syncs with the desktop version. With a little time to set up database templates, Bento itself is a replacement for numerous apps in the AppStore that claim to handle inventory management, tasks, and other projects built around a database that users can’t edit. It took awhile, but there’s finally an awesome database app available.

We finally added Air Sharing to the list even though we’ve had it for awhile. Way back, we picked it up for free, but lost it and didn’t re-download it until recently. In short, Air Sharing sets the iPhone up to be discoverable, such that it can be used as a portable hard drive. The main benefit to this is that one can copy various document files to the iPhone via Air Sharing, and use the app as a document viewer when on the go. We’ve found that it can’t handle PDFs that are fairly large (at least 100MB), but does well with smaller documents. (Anyone know of Air Sharing Pro addresses this limitation?)

DVR Remote is an app we added to compliment Apple’s own Remote app. Rather than control apps on our computer, however, DVR Remote is used to control our TiVo, effectively acting as a replacement for the TiVo remote, and also letting us browse what’s on our TiVo as long as we’re in range of our home network. Flashlight is another utility app that we’ve used for some time now, and though all flashlight apps in the AppStore are similar, we’re happy with it’s zero cost and decent features.

Since the first iPump apps were available, we got ahold of a couple just to see what all the fuss was about, and we quickly decided that they were quality apps for the home workout (we bought the Kettlebell app, and picked up the Yoga and Stretch versions later on for free). Since, we decided to give in and pick up FitBuilder, which consolidates all of the iPump applications and allows one to set up great workouts. We think the app could be streamlined a bit more for usability, but the feature-set and number of exercises makes FitBuilder the best workout app out there.

Finally, the last AppStore app we picked up was Geocaching, which is the “official” app for the hobby with the same name. This purchase was more to prepare us for the iPhone 3G S, such that we can get our Geocaching groove on with full force, but with only one other real competitor in the mix, this app has an excellent feature-set for an excellent outdoor hobby.

Black sheeps.

As far as Cydia apps go, we decided to remove CyCorder as a recommended app, not because it isn’t a great tool, but because it’s unnecessary for iPhone 3G S users. If you’re still using an iPhone 3G or 2G iPhone, however, CyCorder is a reasonable stand-in. Obviously, the video quality isn’t the same as with the iPhone 3G S (it pulls approximately half the frames per second), but since video recording is otherwise impossible, CyCorder is a nice tool to have along.

We also pulled MobileFinder and OpenSSH from the list, because we simply never used them after our initial iPhone setup. Both apps, along with Mobile Terminal, are nice tools to have, but just as we rarely need a command prompt, messing with iPhone files at all is rarely a task we need to undertake. In circumstances where they are necessary, such as with moving Winterboard theme files around, they’re easy to install, but otherwise the icons just take up screen real-estate that we’re happy to use for other apps.

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When we began mendax.org in 1996, we had reasonably concrete aims for the site, but as with all things, situations change and end-goals shift accordingly. Where mendax.org was launched as the public face of a multi-person operation, we’ve been in a very different place for years, with content now produced almost exclusively by one author. This is especially true with today’s ease at placing online a personal vanity blog, making the undertaking of an e-zine, as in mendax.org’s original vision, a somewhat moot point; many earlier contributors have gone their own ways to launch their own sites, and as a part-time endeavor without the resources to launch in the “pro” blogging space, mendax.org has become a reflection of the thoughts and interests of its one-man post-writing machine team.

Yet still, we’ve had clear goals for mendax.org’s evolution, which we hoped to roll out in stages throughout 2009. Steering these ideas in the right direction, time considered, has still been a heavy task, however. This lack of time, compounded with the realization that we have other ventures we’d like to put a stake into, has made us realize that letting mendax.org continue on its enormously slow path to becoming what we intend it to become, however creative that product may be, is almost a moot endeavor. Why half-ass a project for years when we can reduce our goals considerably for a passing product now?

In other words, we’ve pretty much decided that we’re not going to keep pushing mendax.org on the direction we hoped to take it, and are instead leaving it where it is. That’s because looking at the state of the site, we see a decent personal blog and little else. Why mess with that, if we’d rather expend our energies on new projects, while leaving mendax.org in a relatively happy state?

To this end, readers will see some subtle changes at mendax.org to reflect its un-new direction. For most, the upcoming changes will barely be noticed, especially in regards to content and frequency of posts. In a nutshell, mendax.org’s purpose, if such a thing is notable, has merely been redefined on the author’s end. And that purpose, as we move forward, will be to continue with the same level of content from the clearly-stated perspective of the one-man writing team that’s kept mendax.org afloat for some time now. And what’s why as time goes on, even with “mendax.org” remaining as a legacy foundation, the site will probably, one day, be referred to only as the website of WyldKard.Similar Posts:

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• For the Boleyn story, watch Tudors.
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  After slowly making our way through the available episodes of Showtimes’s Tudors, and nearing the end of the second season, we decided to take a brief break and watch The Other Boleyn Girl. How could a movie starring both Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johansson fail? Well, epically.At least compared to the story told in Tudors. While the movie has some great, arguably more historically accurate costumes, that’s about where the movie’s merits end.
• Further proof that print-publications are a dying breed.
  Posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 in Prolefeed – Views: (117)
  As far as gaming rags go, the past several months have foretold doom for the magazine industry. It turns out that this mighty thing called “the internet” was finally realized by hordes of gamers who recognized that online publications are simply more timely than print publications. After all, with blogs reporting news in near real-time, who wants to wait for a corporate entity to report on the news when their take is neither timely, nor objective?
• Mac viruses? What Mac viruses?
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  We confess: we only installed an anti-virus utility on our Mac nine months ago, after years of using OS X. Even then, we only loaded the application once, because a friend declared how awesome it was. Only, by “awesome” we mean to suggest that the application only appeared awesome, because it, and other applications like it, are wholly useless on Macs.
• mendax.iphone
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• Most self-described “hardcore” PvP gamers are likely full of shit.
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  Scott Jennings makes a great point about why Darkfall won’t make it in the end: …people enjoy hardcore PvP in the abstract. Or, to put another way, many more people believe they are ‘hardc0re’ then actually are. And they dislike being proved wrong pretty powerfully… The Mordred problem is simply that a great majority of the people who believe they are hardcore are not, and after being violently disabused of the notion, will leave.
• Pepsi beats Coca-Cola to retro-soda?
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  Apparently, Pepsi realized that people love soda made with cane sugar, and would rather drink these types of variants than the mass-market versions made with high-fructose corn syrup. While more expensive to produce, there’s clearly a market for this, which is why people seek out Mexican Coke in the States when possible, despite the cheaper canned or plastic versions being more widely available.
• Reassessing EVE. Or, Our EVE Experiment (mendax.eve?).
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  Our take on EVE Online has fluctuated worse than a woman’s pregnancy mood. Let us summarize: When we were first exposed to EVE through a friend, we didn’t think much of it. Giving it some more thought, however, we loved the idea of a graphical Trade Wars MMO. EVE even brought back memories of what we hoped Starshield could turn into (sans the quantum weather bit), and by the time our fascination with World of Warcraft (WoW) was coming into steep decline, EVE jumped back on our radar as the game to play.
• Sexy acorn mp3 player is probably very shitty.
  Posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 in Technocracy – Views: (106)
  We can’t help but love the aesthetic of this acorn-shaped mp3 player complete with wooden enclosure. Sadly, this baby only sports 1GB of data, and it’s not an iPod. Still, the concept is very cool, and one could imagine a pretty cool interface for this baby by changing the track, or volume, with a twist of the top.In any case, this mp3 player certainly beats the Shuffle’s form factor, and could be a viable alternative to Apple’s products.
• There is no financial Apocalypse.
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  On a daily basis, it seems that the media wants everyone to believe that the American way of life has ended. There are even comparisons, frequently so, about the state of the U.S. today and the state it was in during the Great Depression. There are even some who are convinced that we’re in a depression, and not a simple recession.
• World of Warcraft’s success is greatly because of luck.
  Posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 in Newthink – Views: (254)
  One of the primary reasons that World of Warcraft (WoW) managed to make MMOGs mainstream is because of timing. That’s not to say that WoW isn’t a good game in its own right, but chances are, if the stars weren’t in perfect alignment, WoW wouldn’t have amazed observers with its vacuum-like prowess at sucking in millions of gamers. Hardcore Casual’s syncaine wrote a great synopsis of these events: In short, late 2004 was a ‘perfect storm’ of sorts to launch an MMO.

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We finally got around to updating our recommended list of OS X applications, bringing the virtual “distro” of mendax.mac to version 1.16. Changes include the removal of ClamXav in light of the fact that we rarely used it. That fact brings us to the second reason for ClamXav’s removal: anti-virus apps for OS X are pretty much pointless. (And, it doesn’t help that many users of ClamXav have experienced some major issues with the program.)

While Remote Buddy still has many uses, the main reason we adopted it was for controlling iTunes from our iPhone. The iPhone Remote application has made this redundant, however, so we’re sticking with the newer, simpler solution. In the meantime, Remote Buddy no longer makes the cut. Besides, lots of people gawked at the 19.99 € price tag.

Azureus treated us well for some time on both the Windows and OS X platforms, but Transmission for OS X is simply simpler, with may features still packed in for handling all one’s BitTorrent needs. So, out with Azureus, and in with Transmission.

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• Blogo needs work.
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  It’s bloody amazing that though TiVo has been around for almost a decade, no one else has managed to duplicate TiVo’s experience. This leads us to many more questions, such as how, not long ago, was TiVo considered a company that almost went under? Let’s ignore that historical anecdote, however, and instead focus on the crux of the matter: TiVo is not only better than competing DVR products, but is light-years ahead of them.
• Gamers agree: Fallout 3 > Fable 2.
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• How Blizzard can fund a longer leveling game.
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• Portability alone does not a laptop make.
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  Asus has prototyped a future laptop design that sports a trackpad that also acts as a screen. The idea is great, as it allows users to display widget-like information on the trackpad instead of taking up valuable screen real-estate. Interestingly, this is exactly the idea behind the OLO netbook and our own proposed iPhone-driven netbook.Adding a “data” screen is a natural evolution for notebooks, especially if it the screen doesn’t add bulk and is instead integrated into an existing component – in this case, the trackpad.
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  At TUAW, Mike Schramm muses over the idea of a Mac App store, akin to the App Store most iPhone users are tied to. The idea is that Apple could create a section in the iTunes store for OS X apps for desktop use, just as they have a section for iPhone software. While the idea is a nice one, it’s not about to happen.
• Why delete articles from Wikipedia?
  Posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 in Two Minute Hate – Views: (186)
  A number of people in the MMOG blogosphere talked about the deletion of MUD articles in Wikipedia this past week, after folks like Richard Bartle and Raph Koster voiced their complaints on their respective soap boxes. We quite agree with the two of them that deleting these kinds of articles, despite arguments about citation, do nothing but deplete the public record of a huge part of online gaming history.

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The World of Warcraft (WoW) highway is riddled with potholes. They’re not exceptionally big, but they’re not comfortable to drive through, either. A player can miss a few of them on their first travel down the highway to the level-cap, but the potholes become ever more apparent the more often one takes the WoW highway. For some legs of the trip, the potholes are a large enough problem that even fathoming a second trip down that leg is unquestionable.

That, in a nutshell, is our take on WoW. We keep up with WoW news only because WoW is the largest highway of them all, and the precedent its builders set influences the design decisions of all its emulators. And sure, we occassionally muse about what it would be like to delve back onto the WoW highway, but when we remember how annoying those potholes can be, and what damage they can do to the car that is our sanity, we shirk the amusement off and move on with our lives, hoping that a greater highway will ultimately be built.

One of the loveable lads at Penny Arcade recently mentioned in their podcast that there’s enough to do in WoW that he can avoid the parts he dislikes, but we’re obviously more discriminating. The mere idea of returning to Outland pains us, as does the horrible grinding required to max one’s professions, or obtain the gold necessary for an epic flying mount. Nevermind that once we’re at the end of the highway, there’s nothing but a painful cul-de-sac of daily quests to occupy us while we hope a garage door of an instance opens up so we can pray for epic drops or sad tokens. Oh sure, there’s the nearby PvP off-road trails that we can drive over to, but it’s poorly maintained and we’ll inevitably run out of gas before we’ve had our fill of fun.

That’s not to say we’d recommend a newcomer to the land avoid the WoW highway altogether. It’s like Niagara Falls – cool to visit once, but not so exciting that you’ll ever want to go back. What we wish we could do, though, is tell our past-selves what race and class to roll, and then live vicariously through the fresh journey ahead, because much of our chagrin towards WoW is due to the devolution evolution of character races/classes over the years. If we had only rolled one character who was supremely to our liking, who we knew would play the way we wanted him to at the end of the road, and if we only had to travel that great highway once, perhaps we’d look back now and say, “Heck, that journey wasn’t so bad.”

Alas, we’ve been on that highway plenty a time, and we’re tired of all that traveling, and all those potholes. Fundamentally, the highway is a solid, beautiful ride, but the longer you’re on that road, the less you want to tolerate as the trip goes on. From a distance though, the highway is worth studying, even if just to see the car-wrecks.

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“Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.” – W. Somerset Maugham

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Sorry for those who’ve been hanging on, but it should have been clear by now: we stopped playing World of Warcraft (WoW) some time ago, and with that, mendax.wow was effectively killed. Should someone wish to resurrect this WoW add-on compilation, we’d be happy to continue hosting it, but unless that happens, expect mendax.wow v2.41 to be the last one published.

In the heels of this announcement comes word that InsomniMax, which initially shared roots with mendax.wow despite their drastic differences in the end, will also be discontinued. Maxator hasn’t mentioned such on the InsomniMax web page (which we only spotted today!), though it sounds like he will not be moving ahead with WoW either.

Looking back, the birth of mendax.wow is a testament to the gaming community, from the players themselves, to the motivated LUA coders, to those managing the distribution of the respective add-ons. From the simple out-of-box UI that WoW shipped with, to some of the first add-on compilations, and later the excellent Ace libraries that made developing WoW add-ons significantly easier, future MMOGs are poorly designed if they don’t support user-enabled UI packages. Blizzard has shown that not only can opening up UI tools to the community greatly increase gameplay, but that opening up these tools doesn’t mean that a developer is enabling botting, automation, or other vile methods of gameplay. Blizzard, in support of LUA, struck a great balance in usability and restricting certain methods from players, and we wholeheartedly expect Mythic to follow Blizzard’s example in Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR).

In conclusion, thanks for the support, and please keep supporting the add-on developers who spend countless hours making the magic of MMOGs even more magical.

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After reading Maxator’s post about his go-to Mac applications, we decided to give ClamXav a spin. Content with ClamXav’s memory footprint and happy with the fact that it’s anti-virus engine is open source, we decided to add the application to our own list of must-have OS X applications. We’ve also added Ulysses to our list of writing apps, on account of it’s excellent organizational functionality. These two changes are reflected in our updated OS X applications list, mendax.mac.

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• mendax.wow v2.34. – We finally found an Ace-based inventory system that we like, and so with this new version of mendax….
• Writing stuff on OS X. – When it comes to writing and organizing one’s written works, the type of software required is very d…

We swear we fixed this problem in the past, but apparently we ran into a problem in which we couldn’t leave multiple comments in a given session at mendax.org. The fix we found pretty quickly, but it’s further evidence that Redoable theme is not getting the support it fully needs, and why we desperately need to find a new theme that’s being updated routinely. That is, unless a new version of Redoable is within sight, but we’ve seen few clues about this from the author, Dean Robinson.

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