Review of featured applications

[Robert Ancell]

On 02/03/10 10:28, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 09:40:46AM +1100, Robert Ancell wrote:
>    
>> Sure.  It was hovering at the top of the B-list for me :)
>>      
>>>> yofrankie (3d platform, no clear objectives - boring!)
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> This game has been pretty popular when it was out and I think we
>>> should really include it in the first link. For those not aware, it's
>>> the game from the blender fundation which released this game some
>>> weeks after "big buck bunny". The game is short, but it shows that you
>>> can do some nice 3D effects on GNU/Linux
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>> I was really disappointed when I tried it!  I'd never got it working due
>> to the 3D requirement (yay now for Lucid graphics drivers!) but my
>>      
> For evaluation of 3D games, it would probably be wise to specify what
> set of drivers you expect to see good rendering results in.
>
>    
I'm picking my laptop as a relatively standard system.  It's a mid-range 
recent model Dell laptop running the default Lucid drivers.  Most OpenGL 
applications work fine.  (Any 3D application that can't run on 90% of 
systems out there with standard drivers and 3D support would be a bad 
choice in my opinion).
>> impressions were:
>> Ran it - really professional looking menu, nice starting world to choose
>> which level.  Walk into first level.  Not obvious what to do.  Walk
>> around a bit, nowhere much to go, just a few creatures running around
>> which you can kill, but no reason why to do. Some textures seem to be
>> missing.  It feels like it has all the graphics but no gameplay.  I
>> think Yo Frankie 2 is what we want...
>>      
>>>> miro (media player, don't see the value over totem+websites)
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> It's approximately the same than if you say "I don't see the added
>>> value to an RSS reader VS firefox + going over all my blogs/planet". I
>>> completely disagree for that one.
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>> Is it applicable to a wide audience?
>>      
> I've found miro handy for viewing various free content like Ted talks,
> BBC/PBS, Hulu, Youtube, etc.  I can't really use mythtv (due to digital
> cable), so miro was what I settled on.
>
> I tried to set my dad up with it, but he's really only interested in
> Hulu and we had some issues with flash so he stuck with firefox for it.
> (I'm blaming video drivers rather than miro, as it's been problem-free
> on my Intel box.)
>
>    
Note that Moovida allows you to watch Ted and YouTube (I'd expect the 
others will become available in the future through the plugins).  The 
big/novel feature in Miro seemed to be the queuing of large file 
downloads as opposed to streaming and the subscriptions.