At 4AM my time, I woke up and got online, ready to order the new iPad from Apple’s store as soon as it became available. Boom, done. The wait time would be 2-3 weeks (still incredible that it was that long on launch day!). I went back to sleep.

In the morning, I got an email from Apple confirming my order, and it gave me the estimated delivery date. Even though it would ship before my wife’s birthday, it might not be delivered until the Friday before, which happens to be Good Friday, which happens to be a holiday, which means it wouldn’t arrive till after the weekend and AFTER her birthday.

I thought about this. Not an ideal situation. So being the schemer that I am, I started looking around for options.

Hmm, should I buy a spot in line for $150? Go line up at Future Shop or somewhere less high profile than the Apple Store? At launch time (5:00PM) I started looking at twitter, curious to see how long the lines were at the Eaton’s Centre, Fairview, Yorkdale, Sherway, and Square One. It’s pretty incredible that there are 5 Apple Stores in the Greater Toronto Area (and Mississauga). Pictures and reports coming back on twitter said the lines were long. Extremely long. 300+ people long.

On a whim I checked the local independent Mac store near me. All the iPad 2′s were spoken for, customers had pre-ordered and there weren’t any more.

Until I saw this tweet:

As it turns out, they would have more stock available for walk in purchase only, Saturday morning at 10AM.

So I took my chances.

Saturday morning we needed to go grocery shopping, so I offered to drop her off while I drove the kids around. Maybe we’d go down to the lake front, or something. I was vague.

As soon as I dropped her off I let the kids in on my plan. We would go to Carbon Computing which was nearby, line up for a bit until 10, and see if we could get an iPad 2 for mommy’s birthday.

When I pulled up to the store there were two people ahead of me, and half an hour until opening time. The manager was kind enough to let us all wait inside, out of the freezing cold. Being number three, I was worried that the two ahead of me might want the same model as I did, the 16GB Black Wi-Fi. Lucky for me, they both wanted White 32GB. Yes!

Less than 10 minutes after opening, I walked out with an iPad 2.

Total wait time? 40 minutes.

Check it out!

Answer here

From the article (emphasis mine):

When we first released our Source engine games on the Mac, we had to turn occlusion queries off but, with the latest update to 10.6.4, we can turn them back on, giving players higher visual quality.

Apple has some very nice performance analysis tools that allow us to diagnose performance issues like the occlusion query stall described above. Using these tools, another area that we’ve seen the driver spending a significant amount of time is in code which validates floating-point parameters that we hand off to OpenGL to drive the logic in our GPU-side shader code.

We have been able to measure performance improvements in this area with the latest software update, but we are anticipating even more speedups in this area if Apple implements the uniform_buffer_object extension and GLSL 1.3 in a future update. With these additional features, we will be able to sidestep this particular CPU bottleneck, allowing us to win back a bunch of CPU time and, ultimately, performance.

We are seeing dramatic performance improvements on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models. Depending on the game, video settings and the hardware, we have measured frame rate improvements from 15% to 120% on these systems.

Cool.

Support Article HT4286 lists the following fixes (emphasis mine):

Addresses frame rate issues occurring in Portal and Team Fortress 2 by Valve, on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) or MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models.

Resolves an issue that could cause Aperture 3, or StarCraft II by Blizzard, to unexpectedly quit or become unresponsive.

Resolves an image corruption issue that may occur when disconnecting and reconnecting external displays while the system is running.

Portal? Team Fortress 2? Starcraft II? It’s like a dream, only it’s really happening…

Apple has had a long history of ignoring games, gamers, and game developers. (Except for this game, Alice. That was cool.) In the 90′s, it seemed that while every kind of game was being released for the PC, only a select few games were available on Mac. When they were available, often months (or years!) later, they were heralded as demonstrating the equality between Macs and PC’s. But high profile games were far and few between. The dagger in the heart of Mac gaming was most definitely the purchase of Bungie by Microsoft, and the discontinuation of further development of Halo for the Mac. Slowly, by the turn of the century (ie. 2001) most major publishers abandoned the Mac platform. That was then.

This is now, and there are two major driving forces here*, whose games are mentioned as specifically those for which this graphics update addresses. Valve, and Blizzard. To give Blizzard credit, they have always released their games on Mac and PC simultaneously, day one. Warcraft, the original Starcraft, Diablo I and II, World of Warcraft, were all available on Macs. Valve announced that they would be bringing Steam and all their own titles over to the Mac, and they delivered earlier this year, giving Portal on the Mac away for free, and bringing Team Fortress 2, and other big titles like Half Life and Counter Strike: Source to the Mac. Mac gaming is picking up some major developer support these days.

The timing of this update is significant. Only three weeks after StarCraft II was released, the graphics patch is out. While it may not seem that fast, for Apple, three weeks is pretty quick indeed. For Apple to devote resources to a graphics driver fix, and to release only that fix in a timely manner, is something of a change of heart for Apple, and as far as I can tell, is without precedent.

However, all is not perfect. Graphics performance on the Mac is still a sore point. Given the same GPU, running a game in Mac vs. running the same in Windows will often result in lower framerates on the Mac side. Whether the issue lies with the drivers (Apple develops their own graphics card drivers, while the manufacturer develops the drivers for Windows), or with the coding of the game, or inefficiencies within the OS itself, Macs don’t always perform as well as they could, or should.

In addition, Mac users are starved for choice when it comes to graphics cards. For example, there is only one graphics card update currently available for the Mac Pro; you can either have a stock ATI Radeon HD 5770, or upgrade to a Radeon HD 5870. There are no third party graphics cards to buy after the fact either, so you’re limited to what Apple makes. You can’t just buy any graphics card you like and stick it in.

Issues aside, today’s Snow Leopard Graphics Update indicates a change inside Apple. Maybe they’re playing StarCraft II during lunch break (not likely). Maybe Team Fortress 2 is a mandatory team building exercise? Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome change. Hopefully it will be indicative of better things to come. Now if we could only get some driving games and sports games on the Mac, I’d be set!

*Well, three if you factor in that the reason this whole process started was probably Apple’s decision to shift from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and the resultant increase in speed. Gaming PC’s are pretty high performance machines, and while not all games require top of the line performance, it certainly doesn’t hurt. A current generation stock Mac will generally best the minimum requirements for most games.

… it won’t have 1080p output, according to Engadget (which refutes earlier rumors), but it will keep that US$99 price, and bring apps from the App Store to the table. It’s not yet known whether it will simply use iPhone or iPad apps (or get a brand new entry of its own), but Engadget says some connection to both the App Store and streaming services is going to happen.

You know, if this comes to pass and the new (old) Apple TV is $99US but only does 720P… for a bargain setup it would be pretty neat to pick up a 720p plasma that they’re clearing out for dirt cheap, add a $99 Apple TV, and have yourself a fun little system.

Most curious is the addition of Apps. How will you interact with the apps, since there is no screen to touch like the iPad or iPhone? Will you be able to use you iPhone as a input device, or how about that new bluetooth Trackpad they just released… Andy Ihnatko just might be right after all, Apple does everything for a reason, and the reason they need a trackpad is to serve as the input device for a new Apple TV with Apps.

I hope he’s right.

Snow Blog Cutest Chun Li Ever.

Out of the gate there are over 60 releases that are on the Mac list, and they are all Steam Play enabled. They include the excellent Machinarium and World of Goo, as well as the popular Tales of Monkey Island. Valve’s own Portal is FREE as in FREE until May 24th, and Torchlight is also featured and on sale at half price.

Since I already own Torchlight for the PC, I was able to download it on the Mac free of charge. I just signed in using my existing Steam account, and presto, my library of games is listed, and Torchlight was available to Install.

Once installed, I ran the game. It asked me to enable “Access for Assistive Devices” in the Control Panel, and then it launched into Torchlight. All my characters were there, at the same level and stage that I had left them on in the PC. It’s seamless. I can play on the PC, quit, go to the Mac, and pick up where I left off. Truly amazing. Check it out.

www.steamgames.com

Before Christmas I downloaded Mirror’s Edge from Steam during their Christmas sale, having heard that the game was pretty awesome. I was stoked. That is, until I started playing and realized that it was a first-person perspective game. I don’t handle that very well. Undaunted Foolishly, I tried to play the game anyway. Within 15 minutes I started getting the symptoms, sweaty, clammy forehead, feeling nauseous. I made it through training, but I couldn’t finish the first mission.

I wasn’t always like this. My motion sickness has gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. There’s a story involving me entering a Quake III tournament at MacWorld complete with Intensor chairs doing very badly and then wandering around the show floor feeling nauseous and then barely surviving the car ride back to where we were staying and then puking all over the sidewalk in front of the house… um, but anyway… Before that, I could play Tomb Raider for hours without much problem… but there was that one time with Spyro the Dragon where I got really motion sick… ok, hmm, I guess I’ve always had this problem. For me, first person is worse than third person. But both can be pretty bad.

So I did some digging. It would make sense to me that taking anti-nausea pills like Gravol or Dramamine would work, but they also usually make me very sleepy. Not the best solution for trying to play games. A quick Google search turned up this article, with some good common sense tips: limit your time, do training sessions to build up your tolerance, sit further away, turn on lights, alter settings in game to reduce the motion, etc. Other non-game recommendations were to try a Sea-Band and/or ginger.

Another link to MythBusters (this is the annotated version) also seemed to support the use of ginger as a plausible solution for curing seasickness.

Ginger. (Do gingerbread or ginger snap cookies count?)

So my next first-person gaming session, that’s what I’m going to do. Get some ginger (I like the candied kind, myself) and go to town.

Of course, I tried to sign up just now and I got an error, so I can’t tell you when or where you’ll be able to ask said questions to me. But hey, it’s always good to pre-announce an announcement, right?

OK, so… /whistling Dixie… yeah.

UPDATE: It worked! you can now ask me anything you want: http://www.formspring.me/yougenius