4 years later

Weather: Cloudy
Time in line: 10 minutes
Estimated number of people I have seen today: 75
Cell phone off when signs says to please turn it off: No

Bending Windows 8 to my will on the desktop

Back around winter 2011 I tried the Windows 8 preview on my laptop. How impressive was it? I went back to Windows 7 hours later.

I went at another go with the RTM. Rather than groan about the changes, I came to a realization. Rather than keep the mindset of the Windows 8 desktop 'just another app', I went in reverse and treated the Start page and its metro apps as 'just another app'. Just because there's metro apps doesn't mean you have to use it. There's no advantage in using the metro browser over the desktop counterpart. So ignoring the metro aspect, the desktop portion of Windows 8 is a nice improvement over Windows 7. With tweaks, permissions changes, and restoration of the old start menu, Windows is not just tolerable, but a positive experience now. The start screen is regulated to an app launcher, the equivalent to launchpad on Mac OS X Lion. I removed all the metro apps besides calendar, pictures, and weather. Boot, restart, and wake up from sleep times are insanely fast (on an SSD) compared to Windows 7.

The World Ends With You will alway crash an iPod touch (3rd & 4th)

Even trying to eke out 150MB of free memory on the iPod touch using creative means (disabling launchdaemons), the game will quit on the most intensive scenes (i.e., too many onscreen objects). The last resort option for this device would be to enable the dynamic_pager daemon. I won't do that. It was just an interesting curiosity that it could even run on the old iPod touch in the first place. In the end 256MB iOS devices won't do at all. So to play The World Ends With You, just use a 5th generation iPod touch. Or an iPhone 4/4S/5. Or an iPad 2/3.

iOS 5.1 on a third generation iPod touch

The World Ends With You and your iPod touch

Hmm... "The World Ends With You: Solo Remix" (iPhone version) running on a third generation iPod touch. I suspect it was meant to run all iOS devices running 4.3 or higher originally. Due to amount of memory the game consumes, those devices with 256MB of RAM would run out and crash so that was why the iPod 4th generation and iPad 1st generation were cut out at release (despite them sharing the same A4 chip as the iPhone 4). So if the third gen iPod can run, then an iPhone 3GS could run this as well. Not officially, of course. Fun.

I don't think anyone considered this old non-retina third gen iPod touch to run the game at all.

Peak RAM usage of TWEWY (iPhone ver.) is about 140MB. Free RAM on an iPod touch after a reboot is around 100-120MB so it is guaranteed to crash. Swell.

And the ZAGG Invisibleshield is peeling off.