Xbox Live “Metro” Dashboard

Being a Software Tester and a Gamer, I obviously jumped at the chance to become a beta tester for the new Xbox Dashboard. Earlier this week I got the “Time for an update” message, and knew it was time to play.

As always with the Xbox updates, it just worked, took very little time and before I knew it, I was presented with the new dash, and I have to say, Microsoft have really impressed me.

So, what to expect when this goes live to the public ?

First screen you get is, Download a profile, Create a profile, or log in using your profile on a memory stick or hard drive. I have multiple Xboxs in the house, so tend to carry my profile and saves on a memory stick. However what I did was hit the download profile button. Within about 30 seconds it downloaded my profile from the server and plonked this on the hard drive, you are then given the option to save password….this essentially automatically logs you in when you switch on the Xbox.

Once your logged in, your presented by the new dashboard. This seems a lot cleaner than the previous version as it groups the content together with a title bar above.

The landing screen (at least for me) is Home, which gives you a Play <Current game in your DVD Drive>, Quickplay (the previous couple of games you’ve played), a rolling advert in the middle, and a couple of adverts down the right hand side.

The left tab to this in the bing search, which I’ve tried on the the Kinect and this seems to work fine. I shouted at it “Xbox Bing Search Batman” and was presented by all the batman films, games, and any music that was available on Zune Music. I could then just say “Lego Batman”, then screens, and I could quite easily navigate through the screens with the power of my voice.

The tab to the right of Home is social. Now this is where I think the major difference is. No longer do you have a massive list of friends that you have to scroll through, you only get the friends that are online and what they are playing. You can if you wish click on the friends tab and see everyone.

Underneath your friends button you also have a Social Apps section, this is where you will find the likes of twitter, facebook and video kinect. Finally on the screen you have the option to Sign In or Out.

Now one of the major additions is you can now see friends of friends. Clicking on any of your friends will give you the option to Send Message, Join Game, Invite to Party, Compare Games or Friends. The Friends button will show you a list of your friends friends, what they are playing and essentially everything you would expect to see if these people where in your friends list.

Another feature under the Friends tab are Parties, Beacons & Activity and Add friend. Add friend and Parties explain themselves, however the Beacons & Activity is quite interesting. The centre tab is “My Activity” which give you your top 5 activities, currently at the top of mine is Skyrim, which says 2 online, and 13 recently played. Clicking on this drills you down another level and takes you to a “Your friends’ activity in this game”. Currently this lists 13 of my friends, which you can then click through to their profile.

The next tab is Friends’ Activity, which gives “The games and apps your friends have been playing” and essentially a personalised top 10, with the top seeming to be Modern Warfare 3, on the Xbox, with 19 recently played. This screen is quite interesting, if I wanted to play online with my xbox friends, I know what games are hot within my gaming community. Currently the top 5 are Modern Warefare 3, Gear of War 3, Battlefield 3, Skyrim and Call of Duty Elite.

The final tab in here is the My Beacons. Here you can tag a game, and highlight to your friends that you want to hook up and play online. From my understanding, if one of your friends starts playing a tagged game, they will be notified that you want to play. Beacons are also something you can set on the Xbox.com website, as this has just had a major overall to bring in line with the Metro dashboard.

What they have added, and I think is an excellent feature is a more verbose notification system. Previously if I fired up a game that others were playing, it would say “Friends playing this game”, now it tells you how many friends are playing this game. Also, if friends start playing a game you are playing, you will get a notification saying <friends names> has started playing <your game>, which I think will be brilliant for people wanting to hook up and play multiplayer games.

The next 3 screen Video, Games, Music all work similar to the current dashboard, but redesigned to the new format.

The next screen, Apps, intrigues me, and not sure where they’re going to go with it. Currently in the beta this had Sky, ZuneVideo, ZuneMusic, Last.fm, Facebook and Halo Waypoint (as I have these all installed. There is a My Apps “folder” that contains Media Center, Picture Viewer, View Player, Music Player and Sky. The next “folder” is the one that intrigues me.. “Apps Marketplace”. Currently all this has in it is “Social”, and takes you to the Social tab, however this could get interesting if they start to add more apps.

The next tab is Pre-release, which currently has Green Preview, Latest Info, New Features, Help and Tips, which essentially give you a text dump to the screen. The Green Preview however doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

The final screen is settings, and here you can find all the normal, System, Preferences, Profile, Kinect, Account, Privacy, Family and Turn Off.

Now one of the major features you’ll find here is the Cloud Saves. Microsoft are kindly giving 512Mb of cloud storage to gold members. This isn’t enabled by default, you need to go into System >> Storage >> Cloud Saved Games >> Enable. Once this is done, you can select this as a storage device as you would if you were saving to a memory stick. What is seems to do is use a local cache, and then upload to the cloud in the background, I assume this as I’ve recently been playing skyrim, and after turning off the xbox, the light blinks on the front as it does when you have background downloads enabled.

All in all I’m very impressed with this update, and only hope Sony copy what they’ve done with the cloud storage, instead of this ‘backup your saves at some point during the night rubbish’ that they have, this doesn’t help me having multiple consoles and wanting to move between room.

One thing I will say, is I hope they give the option to buy more storage, as Skyrim and my 48 saves take up most of the 512Mb, and there is no way I can get my 2Gb of Dragon Age saves up there.

Tags: activity, advert, adverts, Batman, batman films, beta tester, button, chance, content, drive, dvd drive, facebook, feature, gamer, hard drive, home, house, lego, little time, lt, memory stick, Metro, Microsoft, music, option, password, play, previous version, profile button, screen, software, software tester, tab, Video, xbox, xbox dashboard, xbox live, Xboxs

1password

For years now, I’ve been experimenting with different types of password management/virtual wallet software, but never found one that I’m 100% happy with…well, not until now !

When I bought my iPod Touch a couple of years ago, I found the most painful part of browsing, was entering my username and password into websites (as you can imagine the email address of ub3rg33k.co.uk isn’t very iPhone / iPod touch friendly). I tried many free and cheap iPhone apps which sort of did the job, but at best I could copy and paste the details to the site, 1password however just works !

1password comes from Agile Software Solutions, and to be honest is an absolute god send, not only is it a very good virtual wallet, it’s also a bookmark/username and password manager for the iPhone.

I tend not to carry my wallet around with me (unless I’m going shopping), and like the idea of still having all my details safely locked away in an iPhone app protected by AES encryption, for if I need them when out and about.

There are 2 levels of protection, either a simple 4 digit pin, or 4 digit pin and master password (for your more sensitive information)

Currently I have all my card details, my driving licence, passport, and logins to the majority of the sites I use, with username and password saved. I currently have my iPhone set to “10 attempts that the pin code, then delete”, this option is also present on the application too, so if somebody did get into my phone, they would then have the crack the next 4 digit pin, then my master password with 4 attempts.

The iPhone app is good, and I was quite lucky to have picked it up when it was free (now £3.99 for the standard version and £7.99 for the pro version), however I would be more that happy to pay the £3.99 now, if nothing else, I alway have my personal info with me, and never have to punch in my username and password into a site again.

Where 1password really excels is the desktop application (Currently only Mac, there is a beta version out for Windows). I recently wiped my data from my iPhone, I couldn’t really be bothered entering all my details back in to my previous virtual wallet software (Lockbox), which led me to look at other solutions. I googled 1password, and found there was a desktop app, that could sync with the iPhone ! Result !. Not only would this allow me to quickly populate all my information again, it also has browser integration too.

Once installed, it took me an hour or so to enter all my personal details and sync up, Success !

Now the browser integration, whenever I go to a website I get an option to save the login details, or if I’ve already got this saved, I have the option of logging in. If you don’t already have the details saved, you are given the option of adding the details to a folder, and to add tags, for easier searching at a later date.

Another massive benefit to me of using the browser integration is the fact that with it storing all your card details, it makes online shopping a breeze, just a simple click on the icon, select your credit card, and this will enter all the relevant details for you !

As I’ve got both an iMac and a MacBookPro, I wanted to find a way of syncing between the 2 machines, as I use them both an equal amount of time. I didn’t really want to keep backing up, copy to other, etc, as every time I go onto a new website, I would be adding to my database. This was were I discovered Dropbox, a pieces of software that allows you to sync between multiple machines, and with the cloud, however more about that in my Dropbox post.

1password may not be the cheapest option out there, but if works fantastically, and only wish I’d discovered it sooner. The single user licence is $39.95 and the Family version (5 users) is $69.95, however the iSlayer code will save you 20% !, I think the 5 user licence version cost me only £34, there is a fully functioning 30 day trail available from the website, and can’t recommend this product highly enough.

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Dropbox

I discovered Dropbox only last week, as I was looking for a solution to sync my 1Password software between 2 Macs, as mentioned in my 1Password post.

Now I’ve been using cloud storage in 1 way or another for a while now, and do believe it’s the future, as the internet gets faster, there is going to be less of a need for keeping data locally, and everything will be stored and accessed from the Cloud.

Dropbox is a simple piece of software, and essentially give you access to 2Gb of free storage (you can pay a monthly fee for the 50Gb and 100Gb version, however for my needs the 2Gb free version is currently sufficient). The storage is accessible via the Dropbox website, or via a application on your Mac, PC, or Linux machine.

How does it work ? Quite simple….once the software is installed, you get a new folder added to your machine, anything you drop into this folder will be synced with the Dropbox website, so if the worse case happened and you lost your hard drive, no worries !…it’s backed up on the web.

Now the beneficial thing for me was the syncing is done real time, so if you have more than 1 machine needing to access a particular config file to keep in sync, then this is the solution. I’m currently using this to keep my 1Password config file safe, not only is it backed, it’s also realtime synced between both machines, so if I add any new details on my MacBook, these are instantly reflected on my iMac

Dropbox also has a sharing function, meaning that you can share 1 file, or an entire folder with other Dropbox users, so anything you drop into folder, will be instantly downloaded to their machine. This is great if you have work you are collaborating on. It also allows you to send a link to a specific file, if you would like to share this with a non Dropbox user.

Dropbox also comes in the form of an Iphone app (and I believe also a iPad app now). This essentially means that any files I drop into the Dropbox folder, are accessible on the move. I’ve found this beneficial so far with photo sharing, basically, take a photo via the Iphone app, upload to dropbox, and it’s instantly downloaded to all your machines, and anybody your sharing the folder with, or you can upload any existing file from your iPhone to the cloud.

From what I can see, there are no file type or size limitation, so basically you can upload whatever you like.

All in all, a fantastic service, it’s fast, and most of all, it’s all FREE !

If you do want to increase your storage without having to pay, they have the option of the referral scheme, which essentially, if you get somebody to sign up to the free account, you and they both get 250Mb of addition storage, however they say that the limit is 8Gb additional space, so if after reading this, your planning on signing up, drop me an email and I’ll send you a referral link, this way we both get an addition 250Mb free storage.

edit : My referral link is here

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