I'm an iGeek

I've never been a huge fan of Apple products other than the iPod. I'm pretty much a PC and Windows guy. Although I have to give it to them when it comes to UI and usability, they do a great job.

With the introduction of the iPhone 3G, I considered moving from T-Mobile to AT&T. I've had cell service with T-Mobile for 11 years, but it was time for a change. I used to carry a T-Mobile PDA when they first came out, but they were pretty big and bulky, so I went back to using a normal cell phone. Once again, I want to be able to get emails on my cell phone, and with Apple now supporting Exchange servers, I gave the iPhone a hard look.

Last week we moved our phone service to AT&T and I ordered white 16gb iPhone from the AT&T store. It arrived yesterday, so while I was waiting for repair people to finish some repairs on the house, I ran out to the store and picked it up.

The iPhone is much, much cooler than I thought it would be. Not only does it do all the cool and nifty things that I was expecting, but I've found so many other great apps and utilities. I'm really impressed with this and it definitely lives up to all the hype.

I had reservations about how easy it would be to use with the touch screen. I mean, the thing really only has 1 button on it. I'm so used to right-clicking, left-clicking, holding shift while clicking, ctrl-alt-clicking. I was very impressed with how easy it is to navigate just using the screen and from my experience so far, the keyboard isn't near as hard to use as some people make it out to be.

Good job Apple! Now I just have to come up with a good way to integrate EQII into the iPhone.

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

As of 8:20am CST this morning I became a proud Godfather.

Our close friends back home gave birth to Chloe Isabella Sutton. These friends mean so much to me and I'm really excited to be a part of this child's life.

Welcome to the world baby Bella! I shall have you an EQII account as soon as you can hold a mouse.

EQII In-Game Help System

One of the changes rolling out with GU47 is an overhaul of the in-game help system. This was one of those pet-projects that I wanted to do, but wasn't on the schedule so most of the work was done outside of my workday.

The help window was modified to use our integrated Mozilla browser and all of the existing help files were converted to HTML. I went through all of the help files and updated any content that was out-of-date to the best of my knowledge. This update also includes the new integrated voice chat, so a new section was added to cover this feature.

One of the other things I've wanted to do for awhile is add context-sensitive help buttons to most of the game windows. So, all of the major UI windows now have a help button in the upper-right corner next to the "close" and "window settings" buttons. This button opens the help window and takes you directly to the topic related to that window.

The other challenge was that every game window didn't already have a help topic that specifically addressed how to use that window. Rather than having some windows link to existing topics and others link to new topics, I created a whole new section under "User Interface" called "Game Windows". This topic is like an index to every window in the game that has context-sensitive help. Where it made sense, I moved existing help content related to game windows to these new topics.

The new HTML-based help looks a lot better than the old text help, and now we have the ability to include images, screen-shots, etc. Originally I was going to try to add more visual elements to the help topics, but just reading and updated all the existing help text took a lot more time than I expected. For now, I think this is a great change to the help system, it looks good and the content is now up-to-date. With the new context-sensitive help buttons on the windows, it should be even easier to get help on specific features. In the future I still hope to go back and make the help topics even more visually appealing.