Saturday, March 12, 2011

Nintendo's next gen Wii-sh list

The Wii is a lot of fun, but it needs to be much more to sell a next gen product. Total home entertainment is the goal. Here's how.

Faster processor. Duh.
Wireless N. Streaming HDTV, anyone?
1080p graphics for gaming and Internet browser
Better internet video support- no Hulu, no Espn. What's up with that?
Need a wireless keyboard/mouse accessory (preferably from nintendo)
Platform should essentially be a google tv
Disc player should play movies (DVD, blu-ray)
More channels- where's music? Pictures? Facebook? You get the idea.
News channel is weak- suffers from very poor editorializing. Top 'tech' story (out of 2) was the Pope now has a Facebook account. That is not tech, that is pop fluff.
News channel uses NASA for map images, while Google Earth is the standard. NASA graphics suck.
The news channel cat must die, too. What kind of hold over from alpha code is that, anyway?
You must be able to print an email photos/pictures from the Wii. I have a Udraw. Makes great pictures no one will ever see unless I save to sd card and move it to a computer.
Other channels, like weather, need an overhaul, too. Better weather reports, too. I don't even trust it.
Fan inlet clogs up too much causing overheating and freeze of the Wii. Should be located higher on the case.
Decent games for the motion plus would be nice.

Wow. I think this just means I need a ps3 with better games for kids.

So what will nintendo really do? Let's get crazy.

Play your mii in everything- that would be funny
Inject your face into the mii creator or ANY game
Support face and voice recognition
Really good body movement sensing- must support a karate style game.
Open system for developers to work on. No more home brew required.
mmorpg support
Introduce creativity enhancing software with special controllers
Augmented reality games
Built-in video conferencing
in game audio chat for mmorpg
real world mii toy that looks like you and integrates with the Wii (adventures with Mii games)
music creation vice dumbed down music copying/fake play back (through Wii adapter to synth module)
Wii publishing to social networks

Friday, March 4, 2011

Maven Archetype Usage with SVN

I've been creating Maven2 archetypes for use with projects involving Spring3 and JBoss AS 5.1. They are not trivial to configure, so creating a reusable archetype improves developer efficiency. The archetypes are hosted on google code. Go here to get the URL needed for accessing them: https://code.google.com/p/clear-maven-archetypes/source/checkout (no, I haven't added to a regular maven repository nor do I intend to).

An archetype is just another maven project so installing a new one and using it is simple. The name of the archetype for this example is "shellJBoss-archetype".

[This is all geared to Eclipse, so you need m2eclipse installed and subclipse for working with SVN]

You need to checkout "shellJBoss-archetype" from the trunk. You will need to add a new location to your repositories; namely,
https://clear-maven-archetypes.googlecode.com/svn/trunk.

Once you have done this, explore the new trunk and you will see the projects below. You need to right-click "shellJBoss-archetype" and choose "checkout..."




This creates a new Eclipse project for you called"shellJBoss-archetype". Switch to a Java development perspective in Eclipse. Now you need to add the new archetype to your local repository. Right-click the new project and choose "Run As". Choose "Maven Install" and that will do it for you.




You will notice in the console output this key line just before Build Success:

[INFO] --- maven-archetype-plugin:2.0:update-local-catalog (default-update-local-catalog) @ shellJBoss-archetype ---

The "shellJBoss-archetype" is now usable by the Maven new project wizard. Choose File:New:Other:Maven Project. As you work through the wizard you will get to the archetype selection screen. Choose the "Default Local" catalog and you will see the new archetype.



Critical Step
Maven does some stupid text find/replace operations that can really mess a project up. You need to set version equal to 1.0 as shown below when using the wizard. If you don't, your XML files will all be invalid.


After you have made the project, you can go into the POM.xml file and change the version to whatever you like. Also note that the archetype will name your new project and the resulting deployment *.war file using the artifactId you specify in the wizard. You can also change this in POM.xml if you like.

After you create your project, take a look and see what is in it. There are sample files showing a simple webflow with spring security and some tests written using TestNG. In fact, the project is ready to deploy to JBoss AS 5.1 (using the maven command "jboss:hard-deploy").


Selecting "Maven Build..." lets you type in whatever maven goal (command) you want. Assuming a default JBoss install, go to this url (but using your artifactId) to see the project in action:

http://localhost:8080/your-artifactId