I’m somewhat of a browser nerd. I’ve never realised how many web browsers I have installed, and the recent release of Google Chrome only adds to my collection.

Why do I, and quite possibly all computer fans in general, have so many browsers?

On my Mac alone, I have Camino, Firefox, Safari and Shiira. In a virtual machine, I have IE6, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. But why? I only use one.

Many people use the excuse of checking for compatiblity of their websites as justification for their browser collection, but you don’t really need two Gecko-based browsers, two WebKit engines but you probably do need half a million versions of IE.

I think the reason we have so many browsers is that we want to see how our primary browser will evolve.

Browsers generally steal ideas off one another (Firefox ’stole’ tabbed browsing off Opera, but IE ’stole’ it off Firefox) and through installing the largest range of browsers, we can see which innovative features will be integrated into ours. Shiira, for example, has many aesthetic features which I expect will one be adopted by other browsers whilst Chrome’s way of handling web apps will also probably soon be adopted.

The more browsers we see, the more features we can see and we know what our web experience will be like, even if we don’t switch browsers.

@azhar and @azharcs both wanted a review of Spore, so I’m giving one (albeit a belated one).

Spore has been in development since 2000, so as you can imagine it’s an extremely well finished and very fun product. The game was from the same creator as The Sims and a key member of the development team was also a Civilization IV develop, so the game brings aspects of funny simulation with serious strategy.

In Spore, you design your own life form and take it through different stages of evolution. You start off as a cell in a 2D world, then you evolve into an animal in a 3D world, then into a sentient being living in a tribe, then in a civilisation before finally evolving into a space-faring species.

Cell stage

The cell stage is quite easy, but quite fun. Firstly, you decide whether your microorganism will be a carnivore or a herbivore. If you’re a carnivore, you must eat smaller organisms whilst avoiding predators whilst if you’re a herbivore, you must eat plants but avoid predators. ‘Eating’ involves chasing and then clicking on the other organism/plant.

This stage sounds really boring, but its simplicity is fantastic. This stage doesn’t last long, but it lasts just the right amount of time for eating microbes and avoiding bigger ones to seem fun. As you eat more, you grow bigger and you get more ‘DNA points’ to spend on additions to your organism (for example, spikes and eyes).

When you’ve eaten enough microbes, you emerge from a rock pool to become a creature.

Creature stage

The animal stage of the game allows you to explore the bigger world, whether your animal be bipedal, unipedal or 8 legged!

The creature stage maintains the basic idea of the cell stage but (literally) adds another dimension. Your creature is now an animal as opposed to a blob of cells and this animal must eat and evade predators, but it can also forge relationships with other species and your creature must find a mate.

During creature stage, you accumulate DNA points and unlock body parts, allowing you to further customise your creature and allowing it to evolve.

There are two stances you can take in creature stage: a combat one or a social one. If a combat stance is taken, the goal is to kill a number of members of a rival species rendering it extinct. A social stance requires you to impress members of other species, through mimicking, singing and dancing. Friendship provides alliances, so you can add members of your allies to your pack along with members of your own (who will assist you in killing/befriending other species). It also allows you to use their nests to restore your health.

Rival creatures are other players’ creations which have been automatically downloaded off the internet. This is an example of the RL social element of Spore, as you can add buddies and even subscribe to ‘Sporecasts’, where users publish lists of their favourite in-game objects/creatures.

I disliked creature stage, it dragged on and made me lose some of my interest. Whilst it’s great to adventure in your fantasy 3D world, the primitive in-game social aspect and lack of sophisticated methods of killing rival species makes this whole stage somewhat boring.

When you evolved enough, your species will reach sapience.

Tribal stage

When you’ve left creature stage, your species divide into tribes and you control one of them. You direct the tribe and must ensure there’s enough food, that labour’s shared properly and how to handle relations with other tribes.

There’s several ways of gaining food: you can either hunt, through making some tribe members hunters, fish, if you have earned fishing roads and allocated that duty to some members, or you can domesticate creatures and eat their eggs. Other tribes can also give you gifts.

You have the option, once again, to either employ a social or a combat stance. However, in the combat mode you can use weapons (arrows and torches, for example) against other tribes, providing you have them (you gain weapons by conquering or allying with other tribes). A social stance involves impressing other tribes with music, by playing instruments when they request it. You gain instruments the same way you gain weapons.

To complete this stage, you must conquer or ally with 5 tribes. For each tribe you ally with or conquer, you get one piece of a totem pole. It takes 5 pieces to complete this totem pole, at which point you advance to civilisation stage.

I didn’t find this stage particularly interesting, but it didn’t take too long to complete.

Civilization stage

This was the point at which the game started to get interesting for me. Your tribal village evolves into a city, and you are taken to a ‘city hall’ designer.

As a civilization, you no longer need to concern yourself with individual creatures but you create vehicles (sea, air and land) to mine ’spice’, the main unit of currency in the game, and to trade with other cities. One you’ve traded enough, you can buy a rival city.

Alternatively, you can take over rival cities by creating military vehicles and quite simply attacking them.

You must ensure cities are productive and happy, through placing different types of buildings in the right place. You can also buy turrets to help defend the city.

The borders of each city are marked using Civilization-like colours.

This was one of my favourite stages, but it is cut short because eventually all cities unite when you (and your allies) have gained control of a sufficient number of cities.

Space stage

Once you gain control of your planet, your species advance into space. Space is quite like your planet, just much bigger. You must still decide whether to buy, ally or attack your rivals but you can also establish colonies on other planets.

In space stage, you can partake in missions to earn money which you can spend on buying tools to establish colonies, sculpt planets, form atmospheres and get powerful weapons. You can also collect artifacts which you can sell and your planets will provide you with spice to sell.

As you progress through space stage, you earn different badges and ranks, which unlock other features.

The space stage is effectively infinite, with tens of thousands of systems to explore. Other species, vehicles and planets are downloaded off other players. The game could probably therefore be described as a space exploration game.

EA promises there is an ending, but claims finding it will be next to impossible.

Other nice things

Best thing about Spore is that it runs on an Intel Mac like it does on Windows, using a proprietary fork of WINE (Cider) very effectively with their being little difference. The game does sometimes freeze on my Mac, but it isn’t the most capable thing graphically (only 128MB!).

If you have Spore, add me. My username is computerjoeuk.

I have neglected Webby’s World of late.

The reason, I keep claiming, is that I’m too busy in real life. My work load has suddenly increased and I’m not used to dealing with the quantity of work I have and writing high quality blog posts.

Some bloggers have it ‘easy’ in the time management sense. For probloggers, blogging quite simply is their life but the rest of us have to balance our life with blogging. I, quite frankly, am struggling to do this.

I’ve struggled for some time with finding time for blogging, which is definitely something I don’t want to abandon, and I’ve had several clever suggestions.

The suggestions range from doing extremely brief podcasts, handwriting posts and scanning them in to simply increasing my use of Twitter. For me, as clever as these suggestions are, they all have flaws compared to conventional blogging.

The idea behind all of these suggestions is to provide more frequent, but briefer, content. Which is better? In the long run, proper content holds more value; it will turn up on search engines (although posts like this quite possibly won’t) and it gives you more to look back on in hinesight. Yet, in the short term, more frequent content is probably better for the subscribers. It’s a difficult choice to make.

I’d rather provide lengthier posts. Not essay length. But this long. And no, I haven’t had the time to proof-read this.

This post is from David Peralty, a Canadian problogger, who writes at xFEP, another Grand Effect blog.

Recently, there was a big deal made about how far we have come in search online. It seems some people think we have come 90% of the way to a perfect search system, probably meaning Google, and others say that we’ve probably only gotten 10% of the way to a perfect search engine.

This makes me wonder if we need a new search engine to come along, or just new innovations from the ones we already have. A long time ago, a fair number of geeks were using Alta Vista, a search engine that was fairly well known, but not really Yahoo! like in strength. Many people swore by its results and were happy, at least until a little search engine called Google started picking up steam. Now Alta Vista is, for most, just a distant memory, and Google seems to be the new goliath of search. But with Google’s business interests more focused on advertising, are their results getting more and more watered down, and gamed by people trying to make a quick buck?

There are new search engines popping up all the time, trying to either capture a certain niche, or attempting in some way to outdo Google, but is the new search engine that provides us the exact results we want already out there? Could Google, Yahoo or Microsoft do something revolutionary to enhance search that would make it the only system worth using?

Really, the importance of this whole conversation has a lot to do with the ever increasing archives of content stored online, and our growing need to be able to sift through information to find what we are looking for, and as school starts up again, and College students run to College Crunch or the ever important Wikipedia for help, I am left wondering if online search will ever be perfected.

What kind of results are you getting from search engines? Do you use any search engines outside of the big three? Let me know in the comments below.

ShareTool is Mac-only software, made by the Speed Download’s developer, which simplifies the process of accessing your Bonjour services (such as file, printer, screen and iTunes sharing) from any Internet-connected place in the World.

ShareTool automatically configures your router, through NAT-PMP or UPnP, so you can remotely connect to a Mac network you have at home/your office from another Mac.

Using ShareTool, you can easily share files between the Mac, print something off remotely to your printer or even access your iTunes library. There are also many other Bonjour services you could use ShareTool to access remotely (for example, Skype or IM).

ShareTool does this through an SSH (which by definition is secure) tunnel, meaning it will work with or without a VPN or even a static IP. An SSH tunnel ensures that your data is transmitted pretty securely, so it’d be pretty hard to decrypt any data you send, and it also allows you to secure the web more securely if you’re being forced to work on a network you don’t trust, so a man-in-the-middle couldn’t read everything you are!

That all sounds terribly complicated, but ShareTool simplifies the whole task into an easy-to-use GUI as opposed to the difficulty you’d face without it!

ShareTool only costs £17.70 for a 2 machine licence, £45 for a 5 machine licence or £12 for a single machine licence (but you need at least 2 or there’s no point!).

YazSoft have kindly provided me with one 2 machine licence to give away (worth £17.70!). If you want it, either send me a message on Twitter (twitter.com/computerjoe), email me using the contact form or leave a comment. I will choose the winner in a random prize draw.

8th September: Stephen Shambaugh wins the licence!