bitsifter
friday, june 14

[sift this] Microsoft released Comic Chat this week which only furthers my opinion that the boys in Redmond have an obscene amount of money and an even more ludicrous number of UI designers.

The jist of Comic Chat is that you select from a list of characters and then participate in a chat over the Internet via Microsoft's server. The chat is presented in a panel-like form akin to comic books. The characters resemble pencil drawings and have a wide variety of expressions some of which are automatic selected depending on the type of message you enter.  (ie: If you start your message with 'I', your avatar-toon points to itself or if you type in ALL CAPS, the toon will shout).

It's slick. I spent ten minutes lost in the world of Comic Chat, but the geeWhiz factor fades fast. Comic Chat doesn't do well with more than four or five people in the pane and when I was on one server, there were 24 people in the room.  Additionally, the characters have no control when focus is shifted from one pane to the next, making conversation awkward.

With meatier 3D environments such as Worlds Chat already available, Comic Chat strikes me as a interesting afternoon, nothing more.

[pointer] The blood-thirsty world that id software's Doom created is about to become an outright battlefield. I was a Doom freak for months since the father had a Novell network at home which facilitated four player deathmatch games at the drop of the hat, but no recent game has yet to quench that Doom-thirst.

Three games are imminent -- here are the company sites along with non-company sites with timely information:

[rant] The web quickly eradicated my need to call local BBS systems, but the web has yet to properly integrate the idea of a chat room. I've spent time on ESPNET's chat room as well as others and, folks, the web's page-based metaphor just doesn't work for me. Chatting has always been about quick response time and the impression web-based chat rooms give are one of sluggish awkwardness. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still the way to go for that quick fix of mindless chatter.  If you're under Windows, try mIRC and see why web-based chat isn't the proper use of your real time.

[?] Why don't the same forces which reduce the number of transistors in my processor every 18 months, lower the cost of my CPU every six months work on the number bits I need on my computer to get things done.