Chitika: OS X Mountain Lion continues to gain share

Ad network Chitika says Apple's OS X Mountain Lion now accounts for 10 percent of impressions from desktop Macs across its network.

One of the measures of the success of a computer operating system is how quickly users embrace it — that’s why Windows Vista was generally considered a bit of a flop and why Microsoft’s Windows 7 follow-up is viewed as a stronger success. When Apple launched OS X Mountain Lion last month, the company did everything it could to encourage users to jump on board, making the update available to a wide range of recent Macs as a downloadable update that only cost $20.

Ad network Chitika initially reported very strong adoption of OS X Mountain Lion, finding that 3.2 percent of traffic from Mac desktops across its ad network was from Mountain Lion systems just 48 hours after launch. Now that Mountain Lion has been out a month, however, the OS’s adoption rate seems to have calmed down a bit — but it’s still way ahead of its predecessor, Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion.” According to Chitika, as of August 27, Mountain Lion accounted for 10.3 percent of all the hits it was seeing from desktop Macs across its ad network. In contrast, Chitika count Lion took more than three months to represent 14 percent of total Mac OS X traffic.

Chitika’s figures are derived from impressions across its “extensive” advertising network, which the company claims spans more than 200,000 sites and serves up more than 4 billion ads a month. They do not represent official Mountain Lion adoption figures from Apple. The only official word from Apple on Mountain Lion sales is that the operating system sold more than three million copies in its first four days of availability.

Although Mountain Lion has generally received positive reviews, it has also been criticized for adopting too many elements from Apple’s iOS — although it’s important to note that Apple has many millions more customers using iOS than Mac OS X, at this point. Chitika speculates that the rapid adoption of Mountain Lion may have more to do with the low price point and the easy online distribution model Apple has adopted for the release. Ultimately, quick adoption of Mountain Lion and desktop operating systems means Apple can innovate the Macintosh more quickly with less concern about long-term support for legacy systems.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Check out our impressions of the PlayStaion All-Stars Battle Royale beta, then win a code to check it out yourself

Sony’s upcoming brawler, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale has begun a closed beta. Check out our impressions of the game and read on to see how you can land yourself a code to check it out.

Show of hands, who hasn’t wanted to see Kratos go head-to-head with Sweet Tooth in a battle to the death? You can put your hands down. We can’t actually see you, you know. Besides, it’s a rhetorical question, because everybody wants to see that. And that is where PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale comes in.

Developer SuperBot Entertainment has begun beta testing for its PlayStation-exclusive brawler. For a full recap of the game, check out our hands-on preview from April.

The game features four players going at it, with a roster made up of the biggest names in the PlayStation library. So far 20 characters have been revealed and more are to come, but only six have been made playable thus far: Kratos, Sweet Tooth, Sly Cooper, PaRappa, Fat Princess, and Colonel Radec.

These six characters are just a small sampling of the gameplay, as each playable character will have their own moves, which in turn means their own strengths and weaknesses. These six, however, give a good mix of the gameplay styles; they encompass a variety of types, from the brawlers to the ranged fighters.

The game moves quickly – so quickly that you may at first overlook the stages. But that would be a mistake for two reasons: First, they are fairly impressive and attractive mashups of some of the most popular levels in the PlayStation library, and secondly because they all feature an interactive element. Some will just occasionally try to murder you, but others will test your knowledge. One level primarily based on LittleBigPlanet features a quiz. The players are given four options, and each option is represented as a platform. Make it to the platform in time and you avoid getting hurt– assuming you can fight off the others and avoid getting pushed off when the countdown ends.

The six available characters all have their advantages, and each can take the day. The health bar, which I felt was out of balance to the point that it didn’t work at all, has been fixed, and now you have a realistic idea of where you stand — as well as who is the most vulnerable.

The scoring is based entirely on the number of kills versus deaths. This means that you will want to always be the person who scores the last strike that gets the kill. That gives the scoring a bit of a slant. Points based on hits might have made a bit more sense, but the fights do switch from one a free-for-all to more coordinated attacks when a health bar is low and there is blood in the water. On the other hand, that is also a great time to unleash special attacks or target someone who is vulnerable because they are going for the kill. Four players are enough to keep things unpredictable.

The action can get hectic and confusing, but part of that is due to the limited character selection, which leads to multiple players using the same characters. When there are more options, this will likely be greatly improved. 

For now the beta is definitely worth checking out for yourself, but it’s hard not to want to see what the game will be like when you have more than six characters. How they are balanced will be the determining factor of how much fun it is to play. On paper, BioShock’s Big Daddy should have no problem with Sackboy, and Nathan Drake’s wit probably wouldn’t mean much against a super powered, lighting spewing Cole McGrath from Infamous. How the characters are balanced will make all the difference.

That said, the beta is something you should definitely check out if you are interested in the concept of having the best and brightest of PlayStation’s library beating the snot out of each other. Check it out now, then look for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale on November 20 on both the PS3 and the Vita. 

And with that in mind, we have ten beta keys to give away so you can try the game out yourself. For you shot at receiving a beta key, simply post a comment below and let us know what character(s) from the PlayStation lineup you would either like to see, or are most excited to play as.

We’ll pick winners on Monday at random. The giveaway is for North America only. Good luck!

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Hands on with App.net, the pay-for Twitter disruption platform

In the wake of Twitter's harsh words for outside developers, App.net managed to surpass its funding goals and launch an alpha service. Check out our first impressions.

The Dalton Caldwell blog post-inspired App.net has been hatching plans to take on Twitter with its pay-for model for weeks now. At last report, the platform was well short of its $500k goal, but over the last week, the hype and interest was enough to tip App.net over the edge ahead of its deadline.

“Thank you for believing,” Caldwell wrote on Saturday. “I know in my heart that what made join.app.net succeed was your willingness and openness to give App.net the benefit of the doubt, to read our github documentation, to ask to participate in the alpha, to write blogposts in our support. Thank you.”

Now, the alpha version is up and running.

Interface

App.net’s interface is, to summarize, bare bones. You have a mere four landing pages you can check out: Your personal stream (posts from those you’re following), your posts, mentions, and the global feed. It’s certainly more sparse than Twitter, both in what and how you navigate, and its looks. While you have a Facebook-like profile page complete with a personal picture and cover photo, the rest of the site is quite stark.

And front and center, in big, bold, plain type, is a export tool for grabbing all of your App.net-posted data.

Actions

There’s a lot of work to be done, clearly, so plenty is going to fall onto the “what’s missing” list, but that’s to be expected. That said, let’s dive in.

Instead of 140 characters, you get 256. You can reply to other people’s posts (which a small handful are referring to as “appdates”), but there are no “retweet” or favorite options. You can select and view individual posts for backlinking purposes, which is incredibly helpful when using content for news breaking reference. 

It can probably go without saying that multimedia features like sharing photos and videos haven’t been added to App.net, but the developer community is so enthused about the platform that the building is coming fast and furious.

In development

Which brings us to a quick note on all the building that’s happening around App.net. Much of the reason for starting App.net in the first place revolved around how platforms exist and interact with their third-party developer ecosystems. Twitter’s continued distancing between itself and outside developers was a big part of the inspiration. So it’s only fitting that much of the discussion on the alpha site revolves around the third-party community.

Web and mobile apps are in the works, as are desktop and browser extensions. You can check out the in-progress catalogue over at Github. And there are a few fun tools already at your disposal, like this app that finds your Twitter friends already using App.net, and this one that shows an endless stream of posts as they’re published, in real time.

Users

There are a few problems that come with alternative social networks. The main one, of course, is building the userbase. As it can be assumed, Twitter’s numbers are far great than App.net’s… obviously. And the fact that there’s no native way to find people can make diving in a little intimidating. You’re just sort of thrown in the mess, although you can use the aforementioned tool that helps you find Twitter users you know using the application to help out.

The other intimidating thing about jumping into App.net is the community – or rather, it can be intimidating. Think about the type of people interested in paying at least $50 to start using a real-time communication application – so yes, it’s pretty tech-oriented. There’s a lot of developer-speak and a lot of App.net-speak. It’s pretty narrow.

To be fair, this means that the obnoxious drivel that Twitter often dissolves to hasn’t hit the site (at least not yet). It’s a relief not to be flooded with constant celebrity news and pictures of food, if we’re being honest.

The other element that hasn’t invaded App.net (again, yet) are spambots. The price gate is certainly helping, as is its just-launched status, although there’s no chance the platform will be able to remain spam free. Regardless, it definitely shouldn’t dissolve into the massive cesspool of fake users that has engulfed Twitter’s basement.

Conclusion

App.net is ambitious and exciting, but it’s not a solid bet quite yet. There are also already rumors that there will be a free tier of App.net, and I’d certainly suggest waiting until we hear more on that.

As it stands, it’s interesting to be part of the early crew. And if you ever wished you could have been a part of the early Twitter machine and all the user-sourced development that happened way back when, then ante up that $50 and come on in. Otherwise, wait until there’s more outside app integration and native built-in controls.

The larger question, of course, is, does App.net stand a chance? It’s hard to say yes — but given Twitter’s fickle heart these does, it actually seems possible. I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but Twitter isn’t the company that it used to be; its priorities are shifting. We can criticize and yell about it, but it Twitter wants to go ahead and be a media company — and it’s in a really good position to do that. It’s frustrated for many of its core users, but it’s still Twitter’s perogitive.

That means the timing is right: We have this brief moment where real-time communication is important and popular and where the largest player to date appears to be creating some market space. Paying for apps is a hard hurdle to cross, but it could deliver us from many of the issues our social networks have trapped us into. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com