Google gave us all Android Dev 1 phones today, so now I have a second one to play with. So far as I can tell, the only difference is that the employee version comes in a cooler box, and a substantially updated firmware. I am not sure what to do with my other Dream phone, but I will likely give it to Dallas in Belgium.

I am writing this post on the phone itself using the wpToGo Android application. I am hanging out in a Starbucks since I have no data plan or wireless at home at the moment.

As a side note, it seems that no one in Belgium offers an unlimited mobile data plan. The closest I have seen yet is $137/mo for 2GB. I am really curious how the Belgians get by in such an expensive country, when the salaries are lower than they are here in Atlanta. I hope to answer this question by February, but until then I am scared to look up how much home internet access is.

Which leads me to another button:

Soon I see the holy grail, it is indeed available as a direct download for $49.95:

Then I am asked for what language the game is in:

And voila, it is added to my cart:

Yay, Spore for the PC is soon on it’s way! I had to laugh at the Comic Mischief bit here. Here is where it got ugly. It insists on using something called the EA Download Manager. It provides a nice link to click to download it, but .. it’s an .EXE file. What the heck am I supposed to do with this:

So, I fire off a friendly note to EA tech support, asking “I just bought Spore online for my Mac, but the EA Download Manager only works in Windows? Can I download the Mac version using a Windows machine?“. Their reply was swift and must have been automated:

QUESTION: When will Spore be available from the EA Store?

Answer: Spore and Spore the Galactic Edition will be shipped from the EA Store on the release date posted. If this date falls upon a weekend, it will be shipped the next business day.
Spore is currently available for PC as a Direct Download pre-load from www.eastore.com and will be available on the date of release. The Direct Download is typically available after 10 AM PST (Pacific Standard Time)

Oddly enough, I never got an e-mail notification for this message. Today, after doing research and finding other people in the same boat, I elaborated and asked: “That didn’t answer my question. It’s available for PC, which I have, but it seems to be Windows only. When can I download it for my PC running Mac OS X? I never saw anywhere that said that I had to have Windows to download this game.. ”

Looking around EA’s site, it seems that the gaming industry has redefined the term PC (Personal Computer) to mean a machine running Microsoft Windows. Nevermind anyone running Linux or Mac OS X. While the button I clicked on was advertising a product that was available for PC/Mac, the resulting product appears to be Windows-specific, although none of the pages said the word ‘Windows’ anywhere. Only later after sending this off did I notice that the System Requirements page for the Spore Direct Download are different than the System Requirements page for Spore.

So far, it appears that you have to download the Mac version from another company: Direct2Drive. If you buy the physical CD, you will of course still get both a Mac and Windows version of Spore. In effect, the download version is charging you the same price for half the product. I’ll post an update once I get a decent answer from Electronic Arts. So far I feel like I have been bait and switched.

Update

:

After I posted this, I stumbled across Matt Balara’s blog, who ran into the same issue. It seems that if you ask in a particular format, you will be refunded.

Update 2

:

After a week, they finally refunded my money. Yippy!

It’s a bit hackish, but I was able to do this thanks to VMware Fusion, which for $79, lets you run applications from Microsoft Windows or just about any other x86 operating system side-by-side with Mac OS X applications. You might think it’s slow, but this combination actually runs faster than Firefox 3.0.1 does natively (and not just for Javascript). Here are the results from two benchmarks I ran today (tho first two I found by searching for javascript benchmarks on Google): The Web Browser Javascript Benchmark and the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark:

So, how did I set this up?

The first thing I did was download the lastest VMware Fusion release (2.0RC), because I wasn’t sure if Unity mode (side-by-side application sharing) was available in 1.1 (it is). All you have to do to enter unity mode is go to View -> Enter Unity. You can then start Chrome and have it display side-by-side with everything else.

In order to make this a more ‘Mac like experience’, you should visit your Virtual Machines directory (usually under ~/Documents). Navigate to your Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm file in Finder, then right click to select “Show Package Contents”. This will reveal a hidden ‘Applications’ directory, with an application aptly called “Google Chrome – Windows XP Professional’. Copy this to /Applications, and then drag it to your dock. If you click on it, you now have Chrome application running under Mac OS X:

If you want to make this your default web browser under Mac OS X, you have to start Safari up, and then visit Preferences -> General, and browse for the Google Chrome Application you just made.

One thing you may want to do for a better experience is adjust the keyboard shortcuts in VMware (Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse) so that Chrome under Windows uses the same keyboard shortcuts as Safari or Firefox does under Mac OS X:

1. Change the Cmd (Cloverleaf) key to map to Ctrl instead of the Windows key
2. Disable the Cmd-W to Alt-F4 shortcut

Update:

If you are like me, you probably have a web application such as GMail, Google Reader, or Facebook that you leave open in a tab all day. Sometimes, you accidentally close the tab, or the web browser requires a restart, lose that window, and have to put all of the details back in. Sometimes, you feel like you could use an extra bit of screen real-estate for that web application. All of these are covered by Chrome by creating an Application Shortcut. Next to the toolbar, you’ll see a little icon that looks like a page. Visit any website, then click on the page icon to see this:

If you select it, you will be prompted to do something with this shortcut:

You’ve now transformed this webpage into an application that is sitting on your desktop:

If you click on it, it will launch your application, but without any browser decorations, preserving your precious screen real-estate:

If you look at the task bar at the bottom, you will see that this new application is treated as a separate browser instance entirely. It gets it’s own icon and name, which makes it easy to find. Just to demonstrate how much screen real-estate this mode saves, lets fire up Gmail in Firefox 3.0:

Some might say that this feature is just stolen from other plug-ins or web browsers, but I think this brings a whole new level of convenience to the end-user. I eagerly await a Linux version so that I can use it on my OLPC XO-1, where screen real-estate is very precious indeed.