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How much are we playing video games? Check out these stats from Halo 4

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Well here are some stats from the first week of Halo 4’s release:

Over four million people played Halo 4 on Xbox LIVE in the first five days, as well a lo t of people look for bonuses for online casino games at bonuses.co.uk.
31.4 million hours were spent playing Halo 4 in the first five days.
1,116,882 people completed the Campaign in the first five days.
4,590,416,285 kills were earned playing Halo 4 on Xbox LIVE in the first five days.

Source: http://blogs.halowaypoint.com/Headlines/post/2012/11/14/The-Halo-Bulletin-111412-.aspx

Unity 4.0 released!

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For those that have been waiting for the latest version of the game engine Unity well its out. Here is a press release (source) that has a breakdown of the features. For more details please visit Unity here.

“Unity 4.0 Launches

San Francisco – November 14, 2012 – Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and development tools, is proud to announce Unity 4.0 is now available for download. Unity 4, announced in June, will consist of a series of updates designed to improve the product through an extensive improvement of existing tech and the rollout of new features.

The first in a series of updates for Unity 4, this version includes significant additions such as DirectX 11 support and Mecanim animation tools. In addition users will have access to a Linux deployment preview and the Adobe® Flash® Player deployment add-on.

“Unity 4 will see the addition of an incredible number of new, highly advanced, features and continuous improvement across the tech to be released in smaller, faster increments than Unity has seen in the past,” said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. “It’s an exciting time for Unity and the 4.0 release marks the beginning of a great new era for our technology.”

Mecanim – Stunning Character Animation
Mecanim, Unity’s powerful and innovative animation technology, is setting new industry standards for tools in integrated development environments allowing the creation of complex state machines, blend trees, IK rigging, and auto retarget animations to characters of different sizes and shapes, all inside of the Unity editor. Developers will find a sizeableselection of retargetable animations available in the Unity Asset Store: http://unity3d.com/unity/asset-store/.

DirectX 11
With the ability to take advantage of full DirectX 11 support, including shader model 5, tessellation for smoother models and environments in game worlds, and compute shaders for advanced GPU computation, Unity 4.0 empowers developers. DirectX 11 support development was aided by development of the Butterfly Effect demo: http://unity3d.com/promo/butterfly/.

High-end Visual Capabilities for All Platforms
Unity 4.0 also features real-time shadows on mobile, skinned mesh instancing, the ability to use normal maps when bakinglightmaps, and a refined GPU profiler. It’s easy to make extremely high-end visuals that scale across the best of what’s available on modern PCs and the most advanced mobile graphics chips.

Adobe Flash Player Add-on
The Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on will empower developers to publish their new and existing titles to one of the world’s most ubiquitous gaming platforms on the web. With the wealth of incredible features in the 4.0 release, Unity is the most powerful development pipeline for creating high quality 2D and 3D content for Adobe Flash Player. The add-on is now available for sale in the Unity store: https://store.unity3d.com/.

Linux Publishing Preview
Unity 4.0 will also include a preview of a new deployment option to publish games to Desktop Linux, clearing a path for the Unity community to bring exciting new content to the PC market’s most voracious indie gamers. Desktop Linux standalone publishing will be available for allUnity 4 users at no additional cost.

Unity 4 introduces many additional features and improvements, including:
● Shuriken particle system supports external forces, bent normals, automatic culling, and environmental collisions
● 3D texture support
● Navigation: dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority
● Major optimizations in GUI performance and memory usage
● Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup
● Remote Unity Web Player debugging
● New Project Window workflows
● Iterative lightmap baking
● Refined component-based workflows
● Extensible inspectors for custom classes
● Improved Cubemap import pipeline
● Geometry data improvements for huge memory and performance savings
● Meshes can be constructed from non-triangle geometry – render points & lines efficiently

Unity 4 and the Adobe Flash Player add-on for Unity are now available for purchase at the Unity store (https://store.unity3d.com/).“

Is paper waste killing your business? infographic

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Thought this was awesome. I never print paper unless I absolutely have to. I do not print anything for my classes it’s all online. Please think before you print

You see trying to get the customer to pay top dollar at the store isn’t a good business model anymore. Its at the point where people just assume that the store will charge more so its easier to just order online without even comparing. This is where big box stores are losing out and why they are closing. Their theory is that people will come to the store and buy the product without price checking…and sure some people might do that, however, with all of these closings of stores like walmart, sams club, and target, its pretty clear that this line of thinking does not work. Its a bad model. Its not sustainable and if they want to stay in the game they need to change.

How can stores solve this problem? Learning from Andrew Defrancesco and other CEOs will help you create better strategies for your business. Start advertising that they have the lowest prices and that they are comparing with top online sellers to ensure their prices are the lowest. Then people like me would have no problem going to the store and feeling confident that what I was buying was the correct price. Walmart could easily start by just automatically having the same price online vs in store. Smaller stores can do the same too. People enjoy going to stores but they need to do a better job with their prices or they are done. Technology didn’t create this problem, technology is solving a problem that worked against the customer.

How to make an HTML webpage the correct size on a mobile device

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I have written about this a few times (just last week) and I wanted to add some details to the discussion. Basically when designing a webpage for the mobile device you want your page to show up as the correct size on the device so the user does not need to zoom. To do it you would use the viewport code. Today I am adding some more details to that:

General width. Keep in mind the ‘780’ changes depending on the size of your actual page:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=780">

This code just matches their device regardless of what you set:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

The following disables zooming altogether:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no" />

This sets the zoom level when the page is first opened:

<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1">

This creates no zooming and the user has to move the screen around:

<meta name="viewport" content="maximum-scale=1">

I encourage you to try them all out to see what works for your site and so that you get a better idea of what they all look like.