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Alongside a bunch of iPod, iTunes and AppleTV updates, Apple also showed off its new Game Center app, bundled with the new iOS 4.1 at their music event yesterday. To demo the ease-of-use of finding friends online, they allowed Epic Games to give a tech demo of an upcoming multi-player game. However, I think it's safe to say that like me, most people forgot about Game Center completely and simply marveled at the console-quality graphics of Epic's Citadel tech demo. It uses the Unreal engine, and the graphics were so stunning that even my wife asked in shock "Is that on an iPhone?" What you see on the left there, is an actual in-game screenshot.

"Well", you think to yourself, "they're probably cheating somehow." But then, shortly after the keynote, Epic actually releases the tech demo into the App Store. I downloaded it and, wow, am I impressed. I would say the graphics are on par with my favorite MMORPG "Myst: Uru online" - and that really maxes out my iMac's graphics capabilities. The tech demo includes live shadows and complex shaders, such as parallax mapping (which for those who don't know, is like bump mapping, but actually changes the geometry of the surface, rather than just the way light falls onto it). And the frame rate is excellent, even when looking over endless landscapes, or at the whole castle and village from the outside. Though I was not able to test this particular feature (owning only an iPhone 3GS and an iPod 3rd gen), I hear it looks even more gorgeous on the Retina display.

More screenshots after the break.

Yes, you read it correctly: After years of forcing their followers to resort to textual blogs to follow an event live, Apple is finally broadcasting a live stream of its music event tonight (at 6 p.m. London time / 7 p.m. Berlin time on Apple's website). The catch: You will need a Mac with Snow Leopard or an iPod/iPhone as the stream will be an HTTP Live stream only. Though Apple has made this a standard, so far it seems only Quicktime X adopts it. You may try your luck with VLC as described here, in case you are stuck on a PC or an older version of Mac OS X. See y'all tonight!

Ever since the Wii hit the market, the conventional rules of video gaming have been shattered. The image of the lazy nerd sitting in the basement with pizza and a controller has been transformed into fitness-hungry beautiful people advertising for that new Wii fitness package. The demographics of the video gaming world have shifted, and after the huge success of the Wii, the other video game console companies are shipping their motion-controlled accessories this holiday season.

After the break we will take a look at all three systems, and compare their features. While each system brings its own share of exciting new features, they will most surely also introduce problems. We will take a look at the strengths of each system and possible issues.

When I came to Ireland, I was amazed at how many TV ads there are for car insurances. It feels like every other commercial is for one of these insurances. As the market is so seemingly over-saturated, the companies have to be creative to get your attention. One of the most interesting and creative ads is for CompareTheMarket.com, which according to the advertiser people are constantly mixing up with CompareTheMeerkat.com - a site for comparing meerkats. The interesting twist is that apart from actually having built up a very elaborate site to compare meerkats (definitely check it out), a number of TV ads are run by the disgruntled meerkats, who complain that people drop by their CompareTheMeerkat site, looking for car insurance. There's a whole series of them, but I'll give you a taste of them after the break.

When I made the move from Germany to Ireland and finally got my dream 46" LCD TV, one of the first things I noticed about the TV program in Ireland were the amount of ads that got me chuckling or at least put a smile on my face. Others, who have come to visit have had the same impression. So, in the next few weeks I'd like to share with you some of the best ads here on Irish TV.

Most of them will fall into the humorous category, as nothing can make an ad more memorable than a good laugh. However, I am also fascinated by ads that leave an impression by their techincal or directorial excellence. We will take a look at some of these, and why I think they are great. If time (and energy) allows, I might post some ads that I think do not work well in my opinion. Again, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, and would love to see any other suggestions for ads that you think are worth watching.

After the break, I'll share with you an ad by the Belgian brewer Stella Artois. Our partner site 3plusHeinz has posted this a little while ago, after they had seen it here on Irish TV. All in all, a great ad with great style, that will surely put a smile on your face.

So when Apple presented the iPhone 4's "Retina" display at the WWDC it certainly did raise a few eyebrows and spawned quite a few discussions on whether or not Apple's claim of the human eye's incapability of distinguishing pixels on the display are in fact true. However, nothing quite describes the resolution of the display like a pixel-by-pixel screenshot. View it on your low res display here (make sure to zoom to actual size) and then imagine all that visual glory on an 8 cm x 5 cm pane. Hell, it doesn't even fit on my MacBook screen!

On a side-note here, it is interesting to note that Apple has been attempting to introduce a resolution independent version of Mac OS X ever since 10.4 (Tiger). Rumor was that Apple had some super high-def displays up their sleeves. However, it proved too difficult to get the application developers to support the varying scale levels. I assume that Apple found their golden opportunity with the iPhone, where the UI follows a more streamlined approach, making the step towards resolution independent apps much less painful. Let's see if they find a way to port this back to the Mac. As some have said, who have witnessed the Retina Display first hand: You won't want to go back.

I just came across a cool video showing art from a totally different angle. Check it out, if you have a minute to kill:

There is some type of music that seemingly just wasn't meant to be live: Electronica, techno, rap and hip hop come to mind. After all, who wants to see some dude work a keyboard, emit electronic voices using a computer or rap to a beat that would have probably sounded better mixed on a CD? Well, it turns out that this extra bit of challenge to make a live event a true "event" has resulted in some of my favorite versions of popular hip-hop and electronic songs. Today I'll share with you a classic of German hip-hop that just doesn't sound as good perfectly mixed electronically as it does live. Video after the break.

As I have already mentioned in an earlier post, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my computer... and I am quite happy with it.

However, some things have changed since previous versions. For instance, you now cannot move a window to the other desktop by just dragging it. I guess they removed the feature to not confuse inexperienced users.

Since I used that functionality a lot (and also the desktop switch with the mouse wheel) I looked for a way to get it back. Here are the shell commands I ended up with.

gconftool -t string -s /apps/compiz/plugins/vpswitch/allscreens/options/next_button "Button5"
gconftool -t string -s /apps/compiz/plugins/vpswitch/allscreens/options/prev_button "Button4"
gconftool -t bool -s /apps/compiz/plugins/wall/screen0/options/edgeflip_move "1"

If you have been following Google's IO conference and keynotes, you surely have not missed their latest incarnation of their Android operating system, named Froyo (short for "frozen yoghurt", following Google's tradition of naming their OS versions after desserts. Beats large cats in my book anyway, but don't tell Simba). You might have also caught their claim, undermined by numerous eyebrow-raising graphs, that Froyo boasts the fastest browsing experience ever.

As Froyo made a surprise appearance on Android phones around the world in the past few days, the benchmarkers have begun inspecting that claim. It turns out that while the claim is valid, another feature works against it: As usual the culprit's name is Adobe Flash. Hit the break to watch two videos on how fast Froyo really is, and just what an impact Flash makes to the whole experience. It gives credit to the recently uber-chatty Steve Jobs when he stated in his open later, that so far Flash just hasn't been convincing on mobile platforms. It looks like he wasn't exaggerating...