MacHeist Review: Week 3

When you join the Heist, you are briefed on your role as a special agent working for the Directorate.

The first thing that you may notice is that the whole Mac "spy" community is in on this. Your first mission involves submitting a actual tip to MacRumors.com. You find clues for various side quests scattered throughout sites like MacZot!. And you realize the Directorate is composed of Big-Name Mac people like Philip Ryu.



Your goal in MacHeist is to complete the missions assigned to you. Unfortunately, if you're joining right now, you can't go back and play missions that the community has already completed.

Your mission assignments run on a roughly one-per-week schedule, with mini-heists filling the gaps in between. Heists are announced in your mission briefings, but mini-heists must be discovered.



Here's a look at the lead clue for a previous mini heist, Heist 1.5, which was discovered in some strange bits of RSS that would appear if you looked at MacHeist's RSS feed.



As I write this, the second mini-heist, or Heist 2.5 as the community calls it, is in full swing.

Here's the last puzzle for the currently running Mini-Heist. You can drag to words around for some reason.



The fun in this game comes from solving missions and debating possible solutions to mission and mini-heist puzzles with your fellow spies in the perpetually active forums.



Another aspect of MacHeist that motivates participation is the Heist rewards. There's nothing like entering my hard-earned secret code and opening the safe to discover what new loot awaits me inside.

I need to go soon, so here's a quick briefing on the state of things.

Join us, time is running out...



The reward so far:




If you're a student, I highly advise you to avoid checking MacHeist more than once a day. Like any interesting problem, solving these heists is addictive.

Improving Google Integration

I like how Google Talk and Google Checkout are nicely integrating with other aspects of Google, such as Gmail, Orkut and Adsense, respectively, but what happened to the obvious opportunity between Google Notebook and Google Docs and Spreadsheets? (And what's Docs etc going to be called when they add presentations? Google Office?)

The thing that turned me away from Google Docs etc and Google Notebook is that Notebook is a perfect resource and fact gathering tool, and Docs is a great publishing tool, but there is no way to easily integrate all the valuable data from Notebook to Docs.

Google Synergy! or at least Search-induced Serendipity

This story begins when Steve Wozniak signs my MacBook Pro.

A few days later, Andy suggests that I protect the signature somehow. Heeding his advice, I tape a piece of paper over the signature.

For a while, all is well.

One day, I notice a piece of the signature is beginning to smudge off. Alex suggests that I use some nail polish to perm-ify the autograph. Unfortunately, the elusive liquid is rarer than HP Printer Ink in our lab.

A while later I stumble across this clear shell for MacBook Pros.

Excellent! Except it costs 40 bucks + shipping. These guys must have a monopoly on clear, hardshell MacBook Pro casings.

Fortunately, I remember that Google Checkout offers a $10 discount incentive to purchase through them, so I search Froogle for stores that have partnerships with Google Checkout. However, every store I try mentions nothing of Google Checkout anywhere on the site.

In frustration, I go to Google to search the internet's product listings for the clear case, but I still can't find anything in stock at a reasonable price.

But wait! What does my peripheral vision detect in the ads column that I usually ignore?



There's a store with the Google Checkout logo in the ads! Yes! [Ed. This is the same type of feeling one might experience when discovering life on Mars or finding an animal previously thought to be extinct.] Ads usually annoy me, and I use adblock to block the lot of 'em, but this ad glows with an aura of awesome, since it's... gasp! ...actually useful!

Three simple steps finalize my transaction.

1. Add the case the cart.
2. Click Google Checkout.
3. Type Google Password.

MacHeist

MacHeist is great online ARG where you actually win free products, and a discount on a mystery bundle once the game is over.




If you want an invite, send me an email. (Your first task is to discover my email.)

$100 Xbox 360

Vote for it on

Amazon.com

Photosynth Video Update!

The Photosynth team has updated their video to include the Photo Tourism team!

Here's a labeled screen grab at 3 minutes 16 seconds (click for full version):

Photosynth

Microsoft has just put up the live demo of Photosynth, based on Photo Tourism.



Their version looks really cool, but it only works in IE.

Gmail updated

Looks like Gmail got some updates today:

Updates noticed first:

New UI elements.





Updates that could be improved:

Embarassment-reducing new message notifications

Why not just update the conversation instead of posting a little yellow box that asks if you want to see the updated conversation?

local.live.com in 3D

Live labs has just released "3d mode" for local.live.com. I've tested it on IE7 and it's like Google Earth mapped with local.live.com data.

Here's what it looks like if you haven't installed it yet:


Once you click the install button in the left sidebar, you get a helper program to install locally, which augments the local.live interface whenever you visit the site.

Here it is installed on Vista in IE7:

Visual Search

From the makers of Riya.com comes Like.com, where you can search for things that are similar to each other in shape and/or color.

Here's what happens when you click on a watch some celeb is wearing in a picture, and say you're looking for other watches with a similar minidial arrangement.