I played Tomb Raider 1 and 2 back “in the day” and am somewhat interested to see how Tomb Raider Legend pans out. Happily, the demo of the game was released today for the 360 on Xbox Live. One of the coolest benefits to the 360 is the fact that Xbox Live has so darn many demos available to download. Download, try, and then delete when you have decided if it is fun or not. This is one of the best marketing tools out there… better than waiting for the next issue of Xbox Magazine to come out, just download what you want to try — and much easier than doing the same thing on the PC — no need to install, tweak drivers, configure, etc. The only problem is you cannot download in the background (which I hear is coming “soon”), so, when you start a download you have to go watch TV or something because the 360 is tied up downloading.
I started work converting one of my smaller projects from Tapestry 3.0.3 to Tapestry 4.0.1. Tapestry 4.0.1 seems like it will have some nice benefits, but, the conversion is non-trivial (especially the first conversion). It seems the process will probably take about one to two days worth of work (hopefully no more) to convert this small application and my one component library. Hopefully I will have it all up and running tomorrow — we’ll see. I am not completely sold on how it splits concerns between HiveMind and Tapestry, but, obviously Howard is (and the benefits are undoubtedly in places I am not yet looking). I will give Howard kudos for not trying to handle a ton of backwards compatible stuff – several things were just dropped and a lot of stuff is marked “deprecated, this will be gone in 4.1” — that takes guts (and a willingness to hear whining from the developer community).