I’m afraid I can’t do that.

TF2 in particular is a special one. The OS X community all got iPod earbuds as a welcome gift into the delightfully gore-tastic festival that is Team Fortress 2. Since I’ve been playing the game on Boot Camp for almost a year now, it’s reassuring to know that when I feel like sniping heads off, I no longer have to boot into Windows.

Actually, I confess. I still boot into Windows to play Tf2. The game is just way too buggy and under-performing (to its Windows counterpart) for me to accurately play. For instance, the first time I ran the game, I couldn’t join any of the custom maps that I mostly play on. The download of the map file itself would just stop. I bypassed this problem by grabbing the custom maps from my Boot Camp partition:

c:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\<username>\team fortress 2\tf\maps\

Right in there you’ll find your custom maps associated with the servers you have joined. Their extensions end with “.bsp”. Just copy those files and place them in Mac OS X in:

/users/<name>/Library/Application support/Steam/SteamApps/<username>/team fortress 2/tf/maps

You’ll be able to join your favorite servers with no problem.

But other than that, the game just runs poorly on OS X versus Windows. Lower frame rates and stuttering audio are some of the other problems. Something about the way the mouse is handled bothers me too. The same can be said for Half-Life 2 and Portal. The periodic updates are helping some, but it’s still just not as good. The great news it that Valve is working closely with Apple + NVidia / ATi to bring better driver performance to OS X, so we’ll be waiting for that.

It’s not just with Valve games. Sims 3 is the same deal. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 runs so poorly even with every graphical setting imaginable at the lowest point. Okay, but RCT3 just may be a horrid port. The point is, for the time being, the same games under identical hardware runs far better on Windows than Mac OS X. Hopefully, that changes.

WP e-commerce 3.7.5.3 – WordPress Plugin (http://getshopped.org/) – Free / $40 single / $195 business
This is a plugin designed for WordPress to help you sell things on your blog/website. It’s one of the very first i found when searching for an e-commerce solution. We took this plugin into strong consideration because it was very easy to customize (WordPress is essentially the template and there’s thousands of them). The ability to use FTP to upload our .zip albums was a huge plus, since many of our albums run 100MB and over. With the help of an additional plugin (which you have to pay for), you can make single song uploading easy.

Here’s where the good comments end. The plugin is incredibly buggy and chunky. Changing the plugin and tweaking it to your liking requires PHP knowledge, time and a lot of patience. Support on the forums is nearly non-existent. Seriously, don’t even bother making an account to ask questions. There aren’t nearly enough developers to help and/or they mostly seem to be on vacation. If you’re hoping to sell multiple versions of an album (Such as offering MP3, FLAC, etc.), you’re out of luck as product variations don’t work well for downloads. The only options you have for user downloads are the number of times the customer can download the album and “ip-address lock”, which restricts the downloads to the customer (assuming they have a static IP). If you would like an easy way for customers to listen to the album tracks, you’ll need some crappy MP3 plugin that they sell (that ALSO requires the “Gold cart”).

The actual shopping experience for the customer is sub-par and incredibly basic. Ideally, you would like to have customers sign up to have an account on your e-commerce site so they can access their digital downloads if they need to, as it’ll hold their records. Upon checkout, you can assign whether or not the user needs to make an account before they can purchase, which means it’ll stick a “register” form right below the cart and above the checkout forms. That’s it. No log in form or anything for the customers who may already HAVE an account. There’s also no option for both guest and registered user checkout, something a lot of the other carts do have. Also, your customers will have NO idea how big the download is or how much longer it’ll take, since for some reason, no matter what browser you use, it won’t tell you how big it is.

Should you decide to use this plugin, your experience will vary greatly. From the very first time i set it up, upon checkout for a digital purchase, it kept asking for shipping method, even though it had no option to input it. In another installation, I had to up my PHP set memory limit because ’32M’ wasn’t enough for it. From my latest experiment with this plugin, i’m getting strange user account issues where registered users aren’t allowed to see their account information or downloads, even if they’ve already made their purchase.

The developers insist their plugin is incredible/the best and they even have plans to take over the world. Uh, sure guys, whatever you say. It’s really hard to take you seriously when you call us lazy in your own FAQ:

Q: Awesome! You don’t expect me to manually load them all do you?
A: Cough Lazy Cough… excuse me, I had to clear my throat…

Q: Do I have to manually upload each and every track of an album? Can’t I just plonk the entire album online?
A: Cough Lazy Cough…oops, had to clear my throat again. I think I need a glass of water.

Selling Tickets
Q: How do I sell tickets?
A: We’re so glad you asked!

That last question had no actual answer.
Under “Support” in their FAQ (Last two questions of the three):

Q: But you give the software away for free – shouldnt you help us for free?
A: HA! Oh wait, you were serious weren’t you.

Q:Are you always so snarky?
A: Yes.

Q: Do JCROP images have to be so square?
A: Um…yeah. If you got a problem with it, crop your own damn images.

Troubleshooting
Q: I upgraded WordPress, and now a bunch of the links in my store are broken?
A: That’s because WordPress hates you! Oh just kidding…

Q: I changed the page name/title and everything is broken now – what do I do?
A: Ooooh, sucks to be you..

Yeah, every single one of those were pulled from the FAQ. Humor is good, this is not. Be a little more professional about your product. It’s a huge mess trying to deal with this plugin. But don’t take my word for it, go to their forums and take a gander at the thousands of unanswered questions.

Verdict for WP E-commerce:
MP3 Downloads: AVOID
Physical products: USE EXTREME CAUTION

Wait a second, why are my colors brighter? My reds look like they’re about to vomit all over my screen. The new 3.1 update automatically adds “digital vibrance” (i.e. “enhancements”). I wouldn’t call this an enhancement. It looks horrid.

In the NVidia Control Panel, under Adjust desktop color settings, you can see that the third option, which is Digital vibrance is bumped up all the way to 79%. That’s right, that’s the default. Apple is blinding you by enhancing the colors to make up for the fact that they put 16 bit LCD panels in Macbook Pros, even though these were advertised of displaying “millions of colors”.

Thankfully, you can turn it completely off. Just set the slider all the way to the left to turn off the disgusting explosive diarrhea of colors. You’ll have to do this to a second monitor you may attach as well.

-Update: May 7, 2010-

The 197.16 GPU update from the Nvidia website changes the Digital Vibrance settings a bit. Sliding all the way to the left completely turns your monitor black & white (Why? Who knows). 50% is the default setting, right in the center.

First forum software i thought of was phpBB. It’s free, it’s popular, everyone knows about it. It’s also extremely complicated (from the admin look of things) and creating templates from scratch can be hard and time consuming. We started looking for other alternatives and we came across one called bbPress, which is a nice little lightweight forum. Very simplistic and minimalistic. Problem is, it hardly comes with any features built in. Out-of-the-box, it doesn’t support:

• custom avatars
• attachments
• signatures
• post count
• ability to display members online
• bbcode
• private messaging
• polls
• smilies/emoticons
• topic icons
• post preview
• ability to report post
• display unread posts.

That’s right. From a clean installation, bbPress doesn’t have any of that. Features that are common in even the most obscure php based bulletin boards. bbPress, however, does support plugins. And guess which features i listed above are available in plugins? All of them! Which means people who were willing to use bbPress had to go and manually find (Or write their own!) the plugin they want, download it, upload it to the proper folder via FTP, then activate it from inside bbPress. Repeat this process for every single plugin to cover basic features that other bulletin boards have from the get-go. Oh, let’s not forget that if a bbPress update were to come out, there’s a good chance that upon upgrading, you’ll find half of your plugins malfunctioning and/or completely dysfunctional. At least the community is a little more helpful than a certain other plugin.

So for all the work of modifying the theme and uploading a ton of plugins just to do basic shit, we’re moving back to phpBB. It’s just not worth it.

I do salute you, mr/mrs. developer, who may have spent countless hours of their own time, writing plugins for such a shameful excuse of a bulletin board. Let’s just hope your plugin doesn’t spontaneously combust if a bbPress update were to come out.

In comes the unnecessary work of adding a second wordpress blog to the “shop” subdomain! Since i couldn’t gather any of the settings I used for the plugin when it worked, i had to redo everything from scratch. On the bright side, I do kind of like the idea of separating the shop from the main site and it’s a lot more cleaner as well. Here’s to hoping this plugin doesn’t crash and burn! Again!

It’s kind of a little terrifying working with these plugins. This one in particular, does have a development team but they aren’t doing much as to helping out individuals who need the help. In other words, their “Support” forum (notice the quotes) is bombarded with questions (of which I even posted my own with no reply) and hardly a post gets responded with helpful information. Topics from over a year ago are still left unanswered and demanded by newer users. Documentation is abysmal and out-of-date.

Why I continue to use this plugin you ask? Well, because it’s capable of doing functions i desire. Notably donation-based downloads. This is perfect for our “Pay-what-you-want” (User input price) MP3 downloads and it’s the only shopping cart i’ve seen that’s capable of doing it. Okay.. maybe that’s the ONLY function I really desire.

So all of that is done and i finally got the I/O site fixed up (minus the M3Us, i’ve still got to get on that). All that’s left is the i/o forum, which requires CSS modifications to match the i/o site.

more coding, great! tom is helping with that bit though.

on the bright side, i’m learning more as I go.