Call of Duty 6 (geez, has there been SIX of these now? guess so) have been released last week and was one of the most anticipated releases of 2009. However, during the twilight moments of the game’s development, Infinity Ward, developers of the game, announced that the game will not have a working multiplayer LAN component. To play with other players, you NEED to be using Steam, an online game distribution system created by Valve.

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The annual Apple iPod event, which was held some times ago (I am so late!) is finally over and the question remains on what are the new products which is getting updated?

Genius DJ

First off, Steve Jobs is back again after a 6 month hiatus due to illness. His return is great news for Apple and it’s also a great pleasure to see him getting back into the groove and delivering the presentation for new products. First off, there are some great features in iTunes which will be updated to version 9.0. Apple promised a more intelligent ‘Genius’ music recommendation feature which is now expanded to incorporate a Genius DJ. The Genius DJ feature is more or less same as the standard Genius, but offering a single click to generate playlist of songs that work great together. I am still a bit skeptical of Genius, so I leave all my song recommendation to Mufin, which has worked very well for me thus far.

Some other updates are specific to the App Store such as offering Genius for applications, enhanced Movie Store, etc. One important update for iPod Touch owners is that you can finally arrange your apps directly in iTunes instead of doing it manually on the device itself. It’s immensely helpful with the amount of apps that are installed on average on a typical iPod Touch, making organization much easier.

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While many a kind word have been said about Apple’s Jesusphone, the fact remains that for all the gloss and luster, there are some terrible failures stemming from Apple’s own fear of openness and the resulting restrictions that it has imposed on the iPhone platform. How else could you explain the absence of rudimentary features such as MMS, copy and paste, multitasking and other small but obvious omissions which have only been recently updated? In the case of multitasking, it’s still not present, although Apple has a good argument that it will drain battery life.

Nevertheless, with the background of iPhone’s struggles, Google have perfected Android, their own answer to the Jesusphone which runs exactly 180 degrees counter to the philosophies adopted by Apple. Google preached open platform development and as little restrictions as possible, in part because they understand how the nature of open source programming works and would like to tap into the power of sharing in order to slingshot their Android platform past Apple’s own.

Initially when the Android first debuted, it was only available on the HTC G1, which wasn’t a pretty looker and not that great a phone overall. However, many reviews praised the Android platform and hoped to see it available on more devices. However, a year on, Android is still greatly lacking in terms of having a killer hardware to run on. Phone manufacturers are only now starting to warm up to Android as a serious alternative on the smartphone platform.

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Yahoo! Malaysia recently launched their latest online and offline treasure hunt contest with lots of cool and limited edition Adidas merchandises to be won. If you’re an Adidas maniac or just a sucker for freebies, you might want to give it a go.

The rules of the game are that one must seek out a colored ticket (there are three colors – red, blue and green) hidden on the Yahoo! Youreka! website; register online and receive a confirmation e-mail that can be exchanged for a Tag to redeem a prize.

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The phenomenal growth of Facebook and Twitter has made a huge impact on the online communities, and these websites continue to push what is possible in Web 2.0, developing new technologies to deal with interesting new problems posed by having such fast, instant communication possible all the time and also in enhancing the look and feel of websites making them more dynamic and responsive. Along with the growth of these social networks come tools that promise to fix or enhance your experience using them. And if statistics are any indication, you will appreciate the more than 30% of time spent while surfing these websites in the course of your day.

First up are two very useful scripts for Greasemonkey that are called FB Purity and Facebook Fixer. FB Purity takes aim at annoying quizzes and blasts them out of Facebook alltogether. Well, technically they are just hidden from you using clever manipulation of CSS scripts, but at least you will enjoy a cleaner looking and less obnoxious home page. Next is Facebook Fixer, which does a whole lot of behind-the-scenes changes so that the new Facebook resembles the older style. More importantly, it adds a really useful feature whereby when you mouse over any images, it will automatically pop up the full resolution picture at the side. Very useful when browsing galleries.

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