I was busy working on the Technobabbles forum the other night when my hard drive started making this slight scraping sound.  I thought I should probably get a copy of the code I spent the past month working on over to my external hard drive, but I put it off since everything was still working.  This scraping noise came and went for several days with no intelligent action on my part until finally my laptop refused to start up.

It was at this point that I began to realize what I’d lost: a solid month of web development code and the past month of my financial data.  After frantically re-starting my laptop several times, then pulling the drive out and trying it in another computer, I started looking for some data recovery options.  I found several companies offering to perform data recovery for completely exorbitant sums of money (usually it’s not even listed, you have to submit your details and wait for an estimate).  What it typically involves for a hardware failure such as mine is the data recovery company performing a platter swap in a professional clean room (removing the sealed physical recording media from one drive and putting it into another functional drive).  Since I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy and unwilling to pay someone such ridiculous amounts of money for the service (we’re talking upwards of $1000 here), I looked into whether or not you could even do it outside of a clean room.

In the process I came across all sorts of arguments for both sides, and while it is definitely possible to do on your own outside of a clean room, neither drive will likely survive for an extended period after being opened up.  Fortunately for me I didn’t even have to go through that process, because I also ran across an old “try putting your hard drive in the freezer” trick.  At first I thought that idea would never work, but after seeing a few explanations for why it seems to work for some people I decided it was definitely worth a shot.

I put my drive into an external enclosure, then three hours and an ice-cold hard drive later I was off and running with a normal sounding (but very slow) hard drive.  Since I wasn’t expecting to have much time I was already prepped to move the data I needed over to an external drive, and sure enough it lasted long enough to get everything copied over.

Lesson learned:  always backup your data (and keep your fingers crossed that a freezer might be able to help).

Installation

The installer is pretty much standard fare, with the option to import settings (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) from browsers currently on your system.  I wanted to start with a nice clean install, so I chose not to import anything.  After that, the installer runs, the browser launches, and you’re greeted by the Chrome welcome screen.

Interface

I was immediately taken aback by the sheer simplicity of the Chrome interface.  At first it almost feels like there isn’t anything to click on at all, but perhaps the biggest difference that really makes Chrome stand out so much is the placement of your tabbed windows.  Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all place the tabs below the address bar, bookmark buttons and options menus; but Chrome puts the tabs above all of that.  Google even went so far as to completely get rid of the Windows title bar.  It seems odd at first, but makes sense given that in a browser, all the title bar does is duplicate what is already displayed on the tab.  Removing it and placing your tabs at the most prominent location was a bold and intelligent design choice.

Google Chrome's new tab page

The tabs can be dragged and dropped to rearrange them as one would expect.  Or, you can drag a tab completely out of the window to start a new window with just that tab.  Perhaps the biggest improvement to browsing that Chrome offers however, is the new tab page.  Anytime you open a new tab the new tab page displays a multitude of content to navigate from.  Your bookmarks toolbar, a grid of thumbnails of your most visited sites, recent searches, recently closed tabs, and recent bookmarks are all displayed on any new tabs you open.  It is a great use of space and makes getting to the content you want quick and easy.  The new tab page loads really quickly as well, even after opening up a ton of them at once.

dragging a tab to a new window

The address bar, or “omnibox,” is another area where the browser shines.  The autocomplete in the Chrome address bar combines not only history and most recent sites (as Firefox 3 does), but it also performs searches if it can’t find any matches.  If you have ever performed a search at a site, Chrome will then let you perform a search from that site by starting to type the site name then hitting tab and typing your search.  It’s very useful and negates the need for a search box, everything is done from the address bar.  The left of the address bar contains the one-click bookmarking button.  Just click the star and the current site is automatically bookmarked and a small form appears so you can edit the bookmark data, or remove if it if you want.

the Omnibox

The browser menus are all contained within two simple buttons, one for controlling the current page and another for accessing the Google Chrome settings.  The settings are very minimal, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  After several hours of usage I didn’t find any glaring omissions from the options, and was able to get everything set up how I wanted it.  But I’m sure this won’t be the case with everyone, so more options are likely going to be something Google needs to add.

The now ubiquitous bookmarks toolbar is hidden by default, accessible via Ctrl+B.  You can change this behavior from the settings menu so that the bookmarks bar is always shown.  I think it tends to clutter things up though, so I chose to leave it hidden.  The history and downloads are accessible via the settings button and load up as simple web pages.  They both look nice, but browsing your history isn’t as easy because you can’t collapse and expand days and months.

Overall, the design choices Google made with the Chrome interface are a fresh take on today’s browser, and a positive step in the right direction.  It’s clean, intuitive, and puts the emphasis on the website content, not the browser rendering it.

Performance

How does it perform?  Very well.  Keep in mind it is still a beta, so things will likely improve, but based on my few days with it, Chrome is stacking up quite nicely in comparison.  It loads up flash and javascript heavy sites nimbly, and moving between lots of open tabs always feels quick and responsive.  Typically, Firefox and Safari (for Windows) tend to eat up processing time when sitting idle if a page with flash is open in one of the tabs.  Thankfully, Chrome performs similarly to Internet Explorer 7 in this regard with only 1 or 2 percent popping up periodically.

One of the main features Google was touting was the fact that each part of Chrome is started as a seperate process, so theoretically a tab can crash for whatever reason and the rest of the browser can recover.  As a result of this, chrome initiates a seperate process for each tab and plugin that it is running.  That sounds extreme, but it ends up being pretty beneficial:  each one of the processes can be terminated individually without killing the whole browser.  If a particular plugin or website is causing problems, you can just end the process in the Windows Task Manager.  [Tip: each process IDs can be found by going to the Chrome task manager via Shift+Esc, then clicking 'Stats for nerds']

Google’s new browser is looking very promising so far.  I’ve already switched over to using it as my daily browser when I’m in Windows.  We’ll likely see performance improvements and additions in the future (they’ve already announced an extension API in the works for plugin development) along with more options and settings available.  Try it out at www.google.com/chrome.

Technobabbles Forum - coming soon

Yes, we’re still here!  Things have been a little slow for the past couple weeks, but fear not, we’re in full swing with big updates coming soon.  We’ve been hard at work on the forum, and I’m happy to say that it’s almost complete.  Once the forum is out the door, we’ll be back to regular news posts and feature articles.

the 1st generation iPod Nano

The first generation of the iPod Nano came out in September of 2005, and if you own and still use one of these then chances are the battery is on its last leg.  I received mine as a Christmas present in 2005 and I used it regularly for the first couple years.  Then I let it sit unused on my dresser for the past year (been using my Samsung Juke), and when I finally charged it up again the battery only lasted about an hour.  Since I plan on using it regularly again at the gym, I decided to order a new battery for it and see what was involved in swapping batteries.

Warning: The following is a tutorial on disassembling your 1st generation iPod Nano and replacing the battery.  When attempting this, be aware that basic soldering skills will be needed.  Do not attempt this battery replacement if you are not comfortable working with circuitry.

The first step is to get your replacement battery ordered.  There are a lot of different places to order one if you look around online.  I just did an ebay search and ended up getting an 850 mAh battery for about $6.  The original battery is only 400 mAh, so I ended up with more than twice the battery capacity.  Most resellers of this battery also include “removal tools”, but trust me, they are pretty much worthless.  I ended up snapping the tips off of both of them.

Once your battery has arrived, you’ll need a few tools to accomplish the task:

• very fine soldering iron (a small amount of solder may also be needed)
• one or two very small flat-head screwdrivers (an eyeglass screwdriver will work fine)
• X-acto knife (or equivalent sharp razor)
• very small needle-nose pliers or a pair of tweezers

Now that you’ve got the tools required, it’s time to tackle the hardest part about this entire project:  actually getting the iPod Nano apart.  I had an invisibleSHIELD on mine that I really wanted to keep intact, so the first thing I did was take my X-acto knife and slice the shield along the tiny little groove where the front of the Nano meets the back.  I was hoping this would work out okay, but after trying this I would highly suggest just pulling your shield off of the back altogether.  The reason for this is that even if you do successfully slice the shield without scratching too much of your Nano, once you start trying to pry the iPod apart you end up mangling the tiny little strip of invisibleSHIELD that is left on the upper half.  By the time you’re done all you have is a lot of gunk that you’ll have to clean off.  A new shield is about $20 bucks though, so you might still want to give it a shot. You could maybe even send Zagg an email and see if you could come up with a reason to get a replacement (they are guaranteed for life).

attempting to carefully slice the invisibleSHIELD

It’s kind of hard to get a good feeling for how the Nano is actually held together until you finally manage to get it apart, but the best way to describe it is that the front face is actually sitting inside the back metal cover and it’s held in place by about twelve little metal clips.  What you want to do is take your flat-head screwdriver (or something sharp enough to get between the front and back pieces of the Nano, but still strong enough to pry with) and press it in between the front plastic piece and the back metal piece.  While doing this angle the screwdriver ever so slightly towards the back of the iPod.  If you angle towards the front you’ll end up creating little divots in the plastic.  Once you are able to get a little bit of separation between the two pieces you can follow along with the second screwdriver to help keep the pieces separated.  Work your way around the Nano slowly prying it farther and farther apart as you go.  Be patient and careful, as it definitely isn’t an easy task.  When you have enough of a gap to get the screwdriver in a little farther, slide it in the gap towards the back piece, then with a prying motion try to push the top piece up and out of the back.  Hopefully with enough patience and work, you can get the two pieces of your iPod separated.

Now that you have access to the circuit board, it’s time to do some soldering.  First you’ll want to remove the small little piece of yellow tape holding the wires of the battery against the circuit board and also the piece covering the three solder joints.  If you’re careful enough you can reuse them on your new battery, so try not to bend them up too much.  The next step is actually soldering each of the wires just enough to pull them out.  If done correctly, you should be able to use the same little spots of solder for the new battery wires.  Once the wires are loose, you’ll have to pull the old battery out of its place (it’s held there by a small strip of glue).  Be sure to pay attention to what color wires go to each solder point.

soldering in the new battery

Once the old battery is out, put your new battery right where the old one was and line up the wires for re-soldering.  Again, make sure you have the battery turned the right way with the correctly colored wires going to the right points.  If you hold the circuit upright and face the circuit, the black wire should be on the right.  Now just solder the new battery wires into place, being careful not to let any solder flow onto the surface mounted resistors that are close to the contact points.  After soldering you can position the wires along the circuit board just as before, and re-apply the little pieces of yellow tape.

pressing the iPod back together

Regardless of how confident you are in your soldering abilities, it is probably a good idea to test things out just to make sure.  So, turn on your newly powered iPod and cross your fingers.  If all went well it should power up just fine, and now you’re ready to put it back together.  The only thing to be careful of here is to make sure the hold switch on the case and the physical slider on the circuit are in the same position before you place the two pieces back together.  Once they are, just place the front piece back into the metal back and press the two together.  You’ll want to press around the entire perimeter slowly making sure each connector snaps back into place.

Now, go enjoy the extended life of your iPod Nano.

the HP EliteBook 8730w

The new notebook models announced, dubbed EliteBooks, are the EliteBook 8730w, 8530w, and 8530p.  The 8730w boasts a 17 inch, 16 million color, widescreen display; a big step up over most notebooks on the market today, which traditionally have about 250,000 color displays.  Also available on the 8730w is an Intel® quad-core processor, 8 GB of memory and NVIDIA’s Quadro FX cards with up to 1 GB video memory.  The 8530w and 8530p drop down to a 15.4 inch display (color reproduction on these displays wasn’t mentioned), Intel Core 2 Duo processors (quad core on the 8530w only), and again up to 8GB of RAM.  The 8730w should be available later in August, base price of $1,699.  The 8530w and 8530p are set to ship in September starting at $1,499.

The color calibration software, HP DreamColor Advanced Profiling Solution, is now shipping as an option on the HP-DreamWorks collaboration LP2480zx display.  It also includes a customized DreamColor colorimeter.

the HP LP2275w 22 inch widescreen display

Finally, the LP2475w and LP2275w add 24 and 22 inch widescreen monitors to HP’s higher end; capable of 102% of the NTSC color gamut and 92% respectively.  The 22-incher is available now for $459, with the 24 inch model following in September at $649.  Both can also have the calibration software and colorimeter thrown in (Windows only for now, Mac in September) for an extra $349.

the Samsung MediaLive Windows Media Center extender

Samsung recently announced the August availability of its new MediaLive Windows Media Center extender.  With this set-top box you can stream your music, videos, and pictures from a Windows Media Center PC to any 2008 model Samsung HDTV (or presumably any display with an HDMI port).  You can connect up to five of these to your Media Center through your wired or wireless (802.11a/b/g/n) network.

Other features separate from streaming media from a Media Center PC include access to Vongo, MovieLink, Showtime TV, XM Radio, and FOX Sports, and news from Reuters and NPR.  Support for TV tuners connected to Windows Media Center is also present.

To find your way around the menus, you can use the included MediaLive Simple Remote, or an existing Samsung TV remote.  Interestingly, with certain flat panel Samsung TVs, you can actually mount this box vertically on the back of the panel (bracket included).  This could provide you with a nice clutter-free set up for some wall mounted Samsung’s out there (specific models weren’t mentioned).  Priced at $200, this could be a good alternative for those looking to get in on the Windows Media Center action without an Xbox 360.  Anyone planning on grabbing one of these?

Regardless, the new interface is a drastic change, and from what I’ve played around with so far, a huge improvement.  The biggest change is the merger of the wall and news feeds into one continous ‘wall of posts’ if you will.  When you go to your profile page, everything from your individual news feed and your wall is the first thing you’ll see.  You’ll also notice it is now wider and easier to see all of your information without having to scroll through 35 applications (I’m looking at you application addicts).  Some of the application panels are still in place, but a lot of the information is now organized into tabs.  By default there are Wall, Info, and Photos tabs, with the option to add a tab for each application you have.

the new facebook

Clicking on the different tab repopulated the profile page with the applicable data, and it felt pretty snappy and easy to navigate.  The newly merged wall and news feed offers several different filtering options so you can view what you want to view.  You can view all posts, posts by you, or posts by others; and of course there is a little settings button with a few other options for your wall.  Any applications you had in the left pane of your profile are still in place and can be easily edited .

The facebook home page has also seen a slight change, with a width increase, and small tweaks to the way things are layed out.  But, everything is not 100% functional yet.  I noticed small little pencil icons next to everything that are supposed to let you edit that piece of your profile; but instead most of them are just placeholder links that pop you to the top of your profile.  Other than that though everything worked great.

Go take a look, login to facebook and then type http://new.facebook.com in the address bar and see what you think.  I thinks it’s a big improvement, and just one more reason that facebook is the social networking king.  Sorry myspace, you just aren’t showing any signs of keeping up.  Thoughts in the comments.

the cuil search page

After performing several searchs on pretty specific topics and people, it seems as if the actual search results are not nearly as accurate as Google; but it is still in its infancy, so hopefully things will shake out soon.  Cuil is headed up several former Google employees and one former IBM employee.  With those types of people behind it, maybe it can rise above some of the other heads in the search engine crowd.  Head on over and let us know what you think.

my slightly dented Jukebox Zen

The Enclosure

Like most people, I’ve got a lot of old electronics lying around.  Broken ones, out-of-date ones, and a few I just never got around to using much.  I recently came across one such device, an old relic of an mp3 player. A Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX… quite a mouthful. This particular device served me well as my trusted mp3 player for my first 2 years of college.  With a 20GB 2.5″ laptop hard drive and drag-and-drop USB transfers, it was a desirable player back in the day. But, one day it just wouldn’t power up anymore, and it found its way to the bottom of one of my junk boxes.  After I rediscovered this little gem, I decided to take it apart and see if that old hard drive was still functioning; and if so, build myself a nice little portable storage solution.

In order to put together an inexpensive portable hard drive, you’re going to need to find yourself a used drive somewhere.  A quick ebay search returned a ton of results for drives a lot bigger than my 20GB going for around ten to twenty bucks, or you may already have your own un-used hard drive lying around.  Whatever your source for a cheap hard drive is, read on to see how I built a 2.5″ portable hard drive for $9.99.

The first thing I had to do was figure out how to open up the case to the Jukebox so I could extract my hard drive.  Thankfully, a few years ago companies used to make their electronics in a manner friendly to DIY types like myself, and a small Phillips-head screwdriver was the only tool I needed. The front cover is just a metal plate that provided access to the battery without any tools via a small sliding release.  Once the battery was out I moved on to the plastic circuit board cover holding everything else inside.

There were four small screws holding the plastic cover, and then a few more hidden screws that actually mounted the circuit board to the metal bracket on the back of the unit.  But after that, my hard drive and Jukebox circuit board were both completely free from the enclosure.

The hard drive was plugged in pretty snugly to the header, so with some slow but careful and forceful pulling, I was able to separate the two without bending any of the pins.  Now that I had everything disassembled, it was time to see if the hard drive was even functional.  After all, it had been about five years since the thing had seen any power.  To test things out, I used a multiple-interface hard drive USB cable. One end of this cable plugs into just about any hard drive connection and the other end plugs into a USB port.

With the cable ready to go, I plugged it in and crossed my fingers. The drive spun up and sounded like it was functioning just fine, but it didn’t show up right away on the Windows XP machine I had plugged it into. To look into what was going on required some digging in the Windows computer management menus, accessible by right-clicking on the ‘My Computer’ icon and then selecting ‘Manage.’  From there, I went to ‘Storage’, and finally ‘Disk Management’.

the HDD interface cable

This brought up a list of all the storage devices that were currently connected to my computer. Fortunately, my drive showed up, but it was listed as ‘uninitialized’ with no tables formatted on the drive.

I right-clicked on the drive in question, then selected ‘Initialize’, and I was prompted with what file system I wanted to format the drive with.  I chose the trusty FAT32 file system.  After 15 minutes or so of formatting and then a quick copy and paste test, I was ready to find a suitable new home for my now functional hard disk drive.

What I wanted was a 2.5″ external HDD enclosure, and I found one from newegg.com for $9.99.  Once I opened up my new enclosure, I simply plugged in the drive into the header, and slid it into place.  Now this particular enclosure required two very small screws to hold the drive in place, and the screws actually go from the outside of the aluminum case and into the plastic header.  If you’re going to buy an external enclosure, I highly recommend looking for one that is either all metal, or one that doesn’t require any screws; because I can see this one wearing out if I swap drives in and out of it very often.

the 2.5" HDD enclosure with cardboard cushion

Perhaps another result of my poor purchase decision, after I had the drive in I noticed a little bit of rattle when I shook the enclosure.  To remedy this I just cut out a small rectangular piece of cardboard and placed it in between the hard drive and the case.  You could also use foam or some other soft material, but I had cardboard around and it worked just fine, resulting in a snug fit for the drive and case.

So, ten bucks and an hour later, I now have a 20GB portable HDD.  Now what should I do with it?  Check back for the next part of this article:  PortableApps.

Noteworthy features include one-button security set-up and an integrated bandwidth priority menu.  The one-button security just launches the ‘WiFi Protected Setup’ wizard to guide you through the steps necessary to give your wireless network some needed security.  The ‘Bandwidth On Demand’ menu supplies you with the management controls to give certain tasks a higher priority than others.  Say for example that you have an FTP upload going on, your significant other is browsing the internet and downloading music, and you want to do some online gaming.  Through this menu you can set gaming network traffic to have the highest priority to keep your game lag-free.

The RT-N15 also throws in some interesting energy efficiency measures.  Network cable length is calculated and power to specific ports on the router is automatically adjusted to shave off some power usage depending on the length of the cable.  You can see by the diagram below that this could definitely save some power for routers that are located right next to the PCs plugged into them (my current set-up).

the RT-N15 cable length detection and power savings

Woopra is a new web site analytics program by iFusion Labs.  It’s divided into two parts, the desktop client that gives you all the charts and detailed info, and the server application that actually gathers the data.  Setting it up was a piece of cake for me, I just installed the WordPress plugin and downloaded the desktop client and I was up and running.  Unfortunately they only have WordPress and vBulletin plugins available right now, but more are planned, and you can always manually paste the javascript code into whatever web site you need.

Right now, the Woopra software is in a very early beta, so I will cut the Woopra team some slack on certain things not working correctly; after all, that is what a beta test is for.  However, I feel like I have to mention the issues I had with the Linux desktop client.  They have quite a bit of work to do to get its resource usage toned down to a reasonable level.  It is literally using around 60% of my processor’s resources, the entire time it is open.  For comparison, I forced Firefox to open 20 tabs at once (by opening an entire folder of bookmarks in tabs), and at its highest spike it only hit 72% and only for about a second.  My computer is quite a bit outdated, but I do far more on it on a normal basis than what a web site analytics program should require.  The client was very unresponsive most of the time and I had to wait for about 30 seconds for a response any time I clicked on anything.  I couldn’t do any analysis with it behaving like that, so I installed it on a Windows machine and it worked like a charm.
[Disclaimer: I am using a 6 year old hp pavilion laptop with a 2.0GHz Pentium IV in it and running Ubuntu 8.04]

But, enough of the negative stuff, because Woopra really is a great application and shows tons of promise at this early state of development.  So, let’s dive into some of the great information and tools provided.

When you first open Woopra, you’re greeted by your ‘Dashboard’ area, which is filled with an overview of recent statistics for your site.  Across the top is an interactive time line of your visits and page views.  When you mouse-over a particular point on the time line, more detailed information about that day’s statistics is presented.  The bottom half of the Dashboard is split into a 5-way grid; each grid giving you different statistics: Overview (hits), Content (where they went), Referrers (where they came from), Searches (what they searched for to get here), and Country (what country they are browsing from).

the Woopra client dashboard area

Quite a lot of information is available right from the dashboard, but it’s just scratching the surface.  Along the left-hand side are the navigation controls, and the Live view is where you can really do some neat stuff.

The Live view is just like it sounds, a display of live information about visitors that are currently on your website.  It is also separated into a grid, with a map of the earth showing current visitor’s locations with little dots.  There is a listing of your current visitors, with the selected visitor’s expanded information along the right-hand side.  As you can see in the screen-shot below, my only current visitor was Ryan.  At first I thought, how on earth does Woopra know his name is Ryan?  I’m not sure of the complete details on how Woopra does visitor tagging, but I’m pretty confident they just compare IP addresses to registered users of your blog and to all commentors on your blog.  Then, they just use the names recorded there.  If someone is browsing your web site that has never left a comment or registered, they are simply shown as visitor-#.  If you happen to know who it is, you can ‘tag’ visitor-# as the appropriate name.

viewing a live visitor's information

The expanded data for visitors is quite extensive.  I can see Ryan’s IP address, the city of his ISP, his browser type and version, his operating system, his screen resolution, what he is currently looking at, and a short summary of his browsing history.  A bit excessive maybe, but hey, why not? And perhaps one of the coolest (and slightly scary for the visitor) functions of the Live view is the ability to start a chat conversation with anyone currently browsing your site.

the Woopra live chat pop-up

When you initially start the chat conversation, a small window slides up for the visitor, and they can click on it to start chatting away with you.  Obviously this could be a startling thing to have happen to you if you aren’t expecting it, and some people would likely think they were being attacked by a some malicious program; but it can be pretty neat and is quite a testament to Woopra’s capabilities.

the Woopra chat window

Next up are the Analytics.  This is where you can really get into what people view on your site and how they do it.  A lot of this information is really useful for web developers who need to see how many people are really viewing their site in a particular browser, screen resolution, operating system, etc.  I can see this being used to gauge the width of a website design based on whether or not anyone is actually viewing the page below a certain resolution.  We plan on using it here to see what percentage of Technobabbles visitors are using Internet Explorer 6, and if a significant portion are then we may consider adding support for it.  You can see some examples of the Analytics pages and information below.

The final section of Woopra, Manage, looks like it is only partially complete in this version of the beta.  All the other screens have at least a few tabs, but Event Notifications is the only thing available here right now.  The Event Notifications tab lets you set up and manage any type of notification you can imagine.  These are basically little alarms that alert you when someone is visiting and matches a certain set of criteria.  Just about any combination of the statistics that are gathered by Woopra can be used to trigger the notification.  These alerts happen in real time too, so if you’ve got Woopra open you could technically start a chat with the visitor that fits your set of notification criteria, and ask them for example, why they are still using Internet Explorer 6.

managing event notifications

All IE6 jokes aside though, after using Woopra for just a few days, I think it has the potential to be an absolute must-have application for any web developer.  It is definitely a fresh take on statistics with the focus on live visitor information all in a desktop client instead of from a server generated web page.  You can still view some of the statistics from the member area of the Woopra website, but the emphasis is on the desktop side of things.  Web developers, keep an eye out for Woopra as it progresses past the beta and into main-stream use.  It really is quite good.

In addition to consoles, Nintendo has also sold 20.8 million DS handhelds since launch.  And for the month of June, six of the top ten best selling video games were for Nintendo systems.

It looks like the choice to go with a cheaper, less powerful console that is specifically tailored to the more casual gamer crowd is paying off in a big way for Nintendo.

- Image from Nintendo promotional videos.

the new Xbox 360 dashboard

More details to come after the press conference wraps up.

Update:

Now that the media briefing has wrapped up and news has settled down a bit, we’ve gone back through the videos of the press conference and dissected the Xbox 360 fall update part.  With the barrage of awesome new game trailers, really strange fly-swatting, and some down right scary dancing, you may have missed some of the details.  Based on what Microsoft showed off from the new dashboard, it looks like 360 owners will be greeted by a brand new interface this fall.  From the screen shot above you can see the cover-flow-esque view of the contents of your Xbox, and as you navigate from one page to the other the pages sort of slide towards the front of the screen.  It really makes the current blade system look dated, so I’m eagerly looking forward to whenever ‘this fall’ actually is.

As part of the dashboard demonstration, Microsoft also showed off the new Avatars that are now part of your gamercard.  They look way too Mii-ish to me, and I really wish Microsoft would have done something a little more innovative here.  Catching up to everyone else is good and all, but come on, this isn’t a new concept, and they sure acted like it was the greatest thing ever done.  I quote from the avatar demonstration, “Where else besides Xbox Live can you introduce the concept of an avatar, and it immediately becoming a community of 10 million avatars.”  Hmmm… I can’t think of anywhere else. They even went so far as to refer to the new sections of the dashboard as channels!  Seriously though, the ‘Community’ section (I’m sorry, I’ll never call them channels) does have some truly new functionality.

As part of ‘Community’, you can now join a Live party.  The concept here is that all your online friends’ avatars show up in the Community section, and then up to eight people can group together to chat, share photos, play games, and more.  That’s right, finally more than just two people can chat at once through the dashboard.  I’ve been waiting on this one since the 360 launched.  They didn’t get into too many details on everything that will be possible while you’re in a Live party, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Up next was ‘Primetime’, which focused on community based (your Live party and presumably anyone else) gameshows that you can participate in with your avatar.  This looks like it could be a great place for the non-traditional gamers out there.  As an added bonus, there are apparently real prizes for the winners of the show too.  It’s pretty obvious that Microsoft wants to penetrate more of the casual gaming market this holiday season.

And the final part of the fall update was a huge addition to the lackluster video part of Xbox Live.  This fall, anyone with a Netflix account and an Xbox Live subscription will have access to the Netflix library online.  So far, the movies available online through Xbox Live have been slow to update and pretty sad in sheer number of movies; but it looks like this is finally being addressed.  Not only that, but with your Live party you can all watch the same movies together.  Whether or not everyone in the party has to have a valid Netflix account wasn’t mentioned; I’m hoping not, but we’ll have to wait for more details.

Update: Turns out everyone in the Live party will need valid Netflix subscriptions.  Boo!  I fail to see how this is actually ’sharing’ if everyone has it… but oh well.  It’s still nice to see new features.

Overall, I think the redesign will be a huge improvement over the current blade system, with a lot of new features added.  It’s really quite a testament to the amount of functionality a software-only update can bring.

- Image from the IGN.com live video stream of the Microsoft Media Briefing.

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