review by Bill Palmer

If you hear “charge your iPhone wirelessly” and you imagine your iPhone being able to magically juice itself up while still in your pocket simply by being in proximity to the charger, then you’ll have to wait until the next big technological breakthrough. But wireless iPhone charging does actually exist here in 2009, in the form of a plastic case that you keep your iPhone in all day and then toss onto an electrical mat when you get home. The iPhone then charges up via the panel on the back of the case, and while it does require persistent physical contact, there’s no plugging or unplugging of cables involved – nor do you ever have to remove your iPhone from its case. And while more than one vendor has brought such a solution to market this fall, this one from Powermat is the most ambitious attempt at wireless charging to date.



First you pick out a $39 charging case for your iPhone or iPod touch (solutions also available for devices like DS and BlackBerry at various prices), then you choose a $99 charging mat, either the slim “Home and Office” mat or the “Portable” mat that folds up and comes with a carrying case. Either mat can hold up to three devices, which means you can buy up to three cases for your various devices and only have to buy one mat. The mat includes a generic square block and a series of tips (including an iPhone/iPod tip) which allow you to use one of the three charging points on the mat for a random device such as an iPod nano. If that’s your only use for the Powermat (which is to say, if they don’t offer a charging case for your primary device), then the whole thing will feel pointless; but as a way of adding a random extra device to the mix in addition to your iPhone or iPod touch, it’s not a bad throw-in. I’m also impressed with the wind-up power cable, which feels Apple-inspired (and that’s a good thing).



The iPhone charging case itself is a two-piece hard plastic shell that’s surprisingly normally shaped, as the rectangular charging panel on the back does stick out but not by too much; the case felt fine in my pocket all day. The main attraction, though, is the inclusion of a micro-USB port on the bottom of the case which (with the included micro-USB cable) allows you to connect your encased iPhone to your computer for syncing purposes. In other words, the Powermat solution sets you up so you theoretically never have to remove your iPhone (or iPod touch) from the charging case again: toss it on the mat nightly for charging, connect it to your computer via the cable as needed for syncing.



As such the Powermat solution is a more complete product than its primary competitor, the Wildcharge. But that comes at a cost, as one mat and one case, which will cost you a hundred and forty bucks from Powermat, can be had from Wildcharge for $79 in a bundle. This leads to the question of whether the Powermat, priced at nearly twice as much, turns out to be twice the product.



Based on my side by side tests, I’d have to say the answer is muddy. Right away you see that the Powermat allows you to charge three devices instead of two, and comes with the generic universal adapter. But I actually found it easier to toss my iPhone onto the Wildcharge, where it can pick up a charge anywhere on the mat’s surface, than on the Powermat where you have to hit one of three dots on the mat; miss one of the Powermat’s dots by even an inch, and it won’t charge. There are built-in sound effects to let you know that you’ve hit the dot, or that it’s slipped off the dot – as annoying as those sound effects are, I never did bother to turn them off because it’s just that easy to miss the charging dot if you don’t have the audio feedback.



As far as the iPhone charging case, I significantly prefer the Powermat case overall, both because of the inclusion of the micro-USB port and because the Powermat case is more normal-shaped than the Wildcharge case which is far more asymmetrical in shape. One potential concern I had with the Powermat case is that the two sliders that connect the top and bottom pieces on the sides are extremely thin and fragile-looking. Although they held up just fine during my testing, my hands-on experiences with dozens of plastic iPhone cases over the years leaves me a bit worried about how sliding connectors that thin will hold up over the long term. Then again, if you never remove the case, then there won’t be much opportunity for the connectors to break anyway.



Hate to say it, but while the Powermat is the better solution overall, dollar for dollar it’s not worth paying nearly twice as much for this solution (for one device) as you’d pay for the competing Wildcharge solution. But if money is no object, then the Powermat’s bells and whistles are tempting. Come to think of it, if you’re buying a product like this one, then you’ve likely got some money to begin with, as you’re basically paying all this money to avoid sticking a cable into your iPhone each night. But products like this do show a lot of promise for what might be possible in the future.

Learn more about the Powermat at Powermat.com.

review by Steve Loopipe


As a fantasy football player, I’m always looking for any sort of an edge. Any tool that lets me slice and dice stats or get player news sooner than my opponents can mean the difference between winning my league and sitting at the bottom of the standings. So when I discovered Pocket Stats NFL, it sounded like the answer to my prayers – full NFL stats on my iPod Touch without requiring an internet connection, plus additional web data baked into the app alongside the stats. Visions of a league championship danced in my head as the app downloaded to my iPod Touch.

Opening up Pocket Stats NFL presents the user with a long, searchable list of NFL players, past and present. Choosing a player brings up a summary of that player’s career stats by season. The user can also choose to view this person’s “Player Card”, or Wikipedia page, as well as a selection of video clips from YouTube. The interface is fairly simple, but it is clean and works well to collect a good amount of information about an individual player all in one place.

However, there are some fairly glaring problems with this app that keep it from being a truly must-have app for hardcore NFL fans First of all, only offensive skill players are included in the current build of Pocket Stats NFL; offensive linemen, defensive players and special teams players are missing entirely. Defensive players are promised in a future update, but even for a work-in-progress app, this seems like a significant omission.

Similarly, career stats cut off at the end of the 2008 season; while real-time stats might be too much to expect, looking up a current player’s stats and not seeing any mention of the current season limits the usefulness of the stats that are included in the app, especially given that the app bills itself as a tool to help fantasy football managers evaluate players. As a heavy fantasy player myself, the only stats that matter are the most recent stats, so not having those negates that claim. In fairness, full stats can usually be obtained via the link to NFL.com on the player’s Wikipedia page, but when your app bills itself as a full NFL stats database, you shouldn’t have to go to an external site (even via a tab inside the app) to get full stats.

Which leads to the biggest problem with Pocket Stats NFL, which is that it costs 99 cents in the App Store as of this writing. If this were a free app, it could be a useful resource to keep on your iPhone. However, at 99 cents, it’s a tough sell, given that the stats database itself is incomplete and the additional functionality is available either as a built-in app (YouTube) or available for free on the app store (Wikipedia). Those features are indeed nice, but I could just as easily save the 99 cents and type a player’s name into Wikipedia or YouTube.

Pocket Stats NFL has potential, but it feels, much like a rookie quarterback pushed into the starting lineup, it was released into the wild before it was ready. This app is one to keep an eye on; with several significant updates and/or a drop to free, it could indeed be a useful resource on an NFL fan’s iPhone. In its current state, though, I simply can’t recommend spending the 99 cents on an app that doesn’t do enough to make me want to use it instead of just going to NFL.com.

Pocket Stats: NFL is available for 99 cents in the App Store.

review by Eric Nguyen


Frogger is one of the oldest video games out there, so it makes sense that there’s an official version for iPhone in the App Store. There aren’t any fancy features like 3-D to be found here; it’s pretty much the original Frogger with better graphics and iPhone-friendly controls.

The objective of the game is simple: get a frog from one side of a road and river to the other without dying. Unfortunately for the frog, there’s a lot of stuff in the way—cars, trucks, water, crocodiles, and all kinds of other moving things. Since the game involves a top-down view, the frog can move left, right, up, and down. Through careful timing it’s possible to weave between cars and over logs in the river, making it to slots on the other side of the screen safely. If the frog goes through its five lives, the game is over. Even for those who have never played Frogger before, the game is simple enough to figure out in a few minutes.

There are five slots on the far side of the screen, and you have to move the frog over to each of them in order to get to the next level, adding new obstacles and challenges. While this is a good way to extend the game, it can also be frustrating trying to fill them all, especially the upstream-most slot. Since the only way to reach it is to jump to a log right as it passes by, it’s almost entirely a matter of luck whether your frog makes it or has to begin again.

The game manages to take full advantages of the iPhone, including three ways to control your frog. The default control is ’slide,’ which is pretty self-explanatory: slide your finger in the direction you want the frog to move. Another is ‘tap,’ where you tap the corner of the screen where you want the frog to move. Last is ’tilt,’ where you tilt the entire iPhone in the direction that you want the frog to move. I found that this is the least effective option, since it’s hard to guess the threshold at which the frog moves.

Music-wise this game could be improved. Much like the gameplay itself is very similar to the original Frogger, the music and sound effects sound like they could have come from a mid-90’s MIDI sequencer. While that sounds like a bad thing, it’s not necessarily so (although depending on your skill level, the game over sound might get old quickly). The music actually fits the game rather well, considering its cartoon-like graphics.

In terms of replay value Frogger doesn’t rank all that high. After all, it’s pretty much the same short game over and over again with small variations on each level. However, this game works great in small chunks, as a short diversion. A few minutes waiting for the bus is a perfect amount of time to finish off a couple levels of frog-hopping action, and since it’s been very well optimized for the iPhone, it’s very good at that task.

Frogger is available for 99 cents in the App Store.

review by Bill Palmer

While the best iPhone earbuds have prices that run into the triple digits, those users on a budget should be pleased to learn that they too can drastically improve their listening experience simply by replacing their iPhone’s bundled earbuds with almost any in-ear earbuds at any price point. And while the number of options is reduced if you’re looking for earbuds that include iPhone-specific functionality including a built-in mic and play/pause button, there are in fact a few iPhone-specific in-ear earbuds that clock in under the $20 mark. And while their audio quality is likely to get scoffed at by those accustomed to the aforementioned $100+ earbuds, those used to using the bundled iPhone earbuds will be pleasantly surprised at what twenty bucks can them – as most recently evidenced by Macally’s TunePal earbuds for iPhone.



These all-black earbuds look fairly stylish for their price (I’ve seen more expensive earbuds that looked cheaper), and while many inexpensive earbuds suffer from lack of bass, the TunePal goes in the opposite direction by cranking the bass up to a level that’s higher than most other earbuds I’ve tested at any price point. It’s not a particularly sophisticated bass like you’d get from more expensive bass-leaning earbuds, but it’s not bad, either. It certainly adds to a user’s options at this price point. As far as overall sound quality, however, you can do noticeably better by paying five dollars more for RadTech’s competing ProCable earbuds.



So you really only want to lean toward the TunePal if you’ve got a specific reason, such as being a bass lover, or liking the all-black styling, or if your budget is tight enough that $19.99 sounds that much more attractive than $24.95. While it seems like a fairly random inclusion, the TunePal’s free bundled headphone splitter may also come in handy for you. Is the TunePal the best-sounding option in this price range? No. However, it’ll still represent a marked improvement over the audio quality of the iPhone’s bundled earbuds, without losing any of their functionality. [No star ratings one way or the other for sub-$20 earbuds.]

Learn more about the TunePal at Macally.com.

review by Bill Palmer

While one piece hard plastic snap-on shields are all the rage when it comes to protecting your iPhone, there’s something to be said for a full-blown case that recesses the iPhone’s screen and covers its easily scratchable silver bezel. One of the more interesting candidates to come along in awhile is Contour Design’s $34 two-piece HardSkin Inked, essentially the same as the company’s $29 HardSkin but with a choice of white patterns etched into the material.



The Inked gets all the standard things right, like making the cut-outs the right size (not a given when too many casemakers are still making the cut-out for the silencer switch too small), and the hard plastic actually has a smooth rubbery feel, accentuated by the etched lines to create a unique-feeling texture. Assembly consists of setting your iPhone into the back piece, then snapping the front piece into place, which is effortless. Removing the case officially requires putting a coin into a slot on the case’s lower right side, which would be mildly unacceptable if it were true, But in my tests I was able to easily remove the front face with my fingernail each time I tried, no coin needed, and I suspect you’ll be able to do the same.



This is a well-done case. It even comes with the bonus of a pair of small grooves on the left and right side, presumably for your thumb and middle finger, which aid in gripping the case in your hand. Unlike its standard HardSkin counterpart, the Inked is only available in Apple Stores (online and retail), which is fine, but I’m less thrilled by its price tag. I’d be more okay with it at $34 if it came with screen film, or maybe priced at $29 without film, but as it is the Inked feels a bit more expensive than it should be. That having been said, it’s a major upgrade over one-piece plastic shields. And though not quite the best in its class, the Inked is one of the better plastic iPhone cases I’ve tested.

Learn more about the HardSkin Inked at ContourDesign.com.

review by Daynah


Starting your first year of college? Feeling a little lost? Not to worry! There’s an app to help you find your way around campus! Logical Dimension has developed a variety of iPhone applications that map out some of the popular college campuses.

The example app used in this review will be on the “UC Map” bundle. This app includes maps of all 10 campuses in the University of CA system. It’s perfect for college students, faculties, staff, or anyone who visits any of the UC campuses often. Also see the other campus map apps available.

The app was built with simplicity in mind. To use it, scroll and select the campus map you would like to see. Once you make your selection, click on “Buildings” at the bottom. Now, select the buildings you would like to find on the campus by tapping on them. Note, you may select more than one. Once you are done with your selection, tap on “Map” at the bottom. This will pull up Google Maps with pins on all the buildings you selected.

Tap on a pin and you will get options for “Walking Direction,” “Driving direction,” and “Public Transit.” Upon your selection, Google Maps app will open up, show your route, directions, and estimated time of arrival from your current location to the selected building. This will surely help you on your first week of classes. Note, the GPS coordination are not always exact, so be sure to use it only as a guidance.

To test out this app, you can download the UCD Map for free. All other individual campus map apps are 99 cents, and only the UC Map Bundle is $1.99 (but includes all 10 UC campuses).

See all of the Logical Dimension Apps here.

Review: Belkin & Kensington chargers

New in iProng Magazine: a hands-on review of the new micro car chargers for iPhone and iPod from Belkin and Kensington, priced at $19…

review by Bill Palmer

Car chargers are car chargers, right? Pick the one with the best price, or the most attractive styling, or the brand name you feel the most comfortable with, and be done with it. That’s the logic that has held true for iPhone and iPod car charging products for years. While we’ve seen variations with aux ports and dual-device ports over the years, the bottom line is that it’s not been a complicated equation; at the end of the day you’re going to have a bulbous entity protruding from your car’s power socket. Except wait a minute, those bulbous protrusions are suddenly no more, thanks to new products Belkin and Kensington.



I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t care. It makes me wonder, sarcastically, if the big bulgy blobs on the front of every iPod or iPhone charger to come to market were just there for show. Because now all the sudden the big bulbs are no longer part of the equation. Instead these new car chargers, once plugged in, sit nearly flush with the lip of your car’s power socket, making them essentially invisible during use. And based on my tests, there’s no tangible difference during use. They don’t take longer to charge your device than the oversized car chargers do, and while I’d been skeptical about whether it might be tricky to remove the tiny stubs from the power socket, it turns out they each stick out just enough millimeters to be yanked out easily with your fingertips.



It’s very rare that we hand out five star ratings for any product as inexpensive as these, as a sub-$20 price tag nearly always means some corner was cut somewhere. But these devices are game-changers. With the exception of chargers that offer additional ports or functionality, there’s now no reason to recommend any car charger that isn’t as tiny as these. The two products are nearly identical. But if we were handing out awards (actually, we will be soon), I’d give the nod to the Kensington because in addition to the $19 charger-plus-cable product, there’s also a $9 charger-only option and a $29 charger-plus-cable-plus-wall-charger combo package. But you can’t go wrong with the Belkin product either.

*****

Learn more about the Kensington charger at Kensington.com.

Learn more about the Belkin charger at Belkin.com.

*****

Felicia Day interview

iProng Magazine talks with Felicia Day, star of The Guild and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, in our cover story interview for our October 12th issue…

interview by Daynah

Felicia Day was on the road to stardom shortly after she moved to Los Angeles. She landed roles in TV series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “House,” and “Dollhouse.” She also starred in web series like “The Legend of Neil” and the Emmy-winning “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” But one of her greatest achievements was when she went from actress to script writer and producer, creating what millions of fans know today as The Guild.

The Guild is a comedy web series about the online and offline lives of a group of gamers. It’s a must-see, as you will find yourself laughing at all the characters and the storyline. The characters are like exaggerated versions of your friends or better yet, you!

As The Guild enters its third season, many extra surprises were revealed to the fans at the last Comic-Con. The first of the surprises was the addition of a “Guild” comic book written by Day and published by Dark Horse Comics. The second was the exquisitely funny bonus music video called “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar.” The song topped the charts in a matter of hours on Amazon and iTunes, surpassing mainstream music! And lastly, the addition of Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation) to the cast!


With the recent release of a new DVD package containing the two seasons of The Guild, I got to speak to Felicia Day about her show, new comic project, and more.

How did it all start? What inspired you to create the Guild?

We started over 2 years ago. I’m an actress in Hollywood who has been acting for 5 years. But I got bored with the opportunities I was being offered because I’m not really a standard Hollywood girl – I don’t look like everybody else, I’m not perfect, and I’m definitely a little awkward sometimes. I worked consistently, but I wasn’t working all the time, so I had a lot of free time on my hands. I ended up getting a bad addiction to online gaming. In the downtown of acting, I filled it with a lot of gaming. It was not the most productive use of my time. And at one point, my friends and people close to me intervened and said you should probably fill time up with something else.


So I sat down to write something and that was The Guild. Because they always say, write what you know, especially on your first project. I wrote the Guild as a half-hour pilot. It wasn’t practically something that would get traction in Hollywood because it’s a very specific audience. And Hollywood content tries to reach everyone at once. So when my co-producer, Kim Evey, came on board, she suggested that we should do this as a web series. It wasn’t particularly popular at the time, but I thought hey, this sounds like fun. So we just shot it in our houses, and that’s how the show started.

What is your process when writing an episode of The Guild?

Web video doesn’t really have a template, like a half-hour comedy does, or a page count. We don’t have to conform to standards of broadcast because there are no standards of broadcast on the internet. Dr. Horrible episodes were 15 minutes each. In the beginning, the Guild had shorter episodes because we didn’t have enough money to shoot more. But now, they’re a little bit longer, and episodes are up to 5-8 minutes. At any rate, it’s very short pieces of content, and no one has really defined what a 5-minute episode of a web series is. It varies which I think is great, it’s a creative ground for people to invent things.


For all 3 seasons, I always sat down and wrote them as a whole season. The first season was a half hour pilot that I rewrote to make it longer to fulfill the 5 minute episodes and get 10 episodes. For seasons 2 and 3, they were essentially feature-length scripts. I write them like a feature, but the format of a feature length script is different from what a movie would be.

What was the craziest place you had to film the show?

When we started doing the show, we established a lot of our sets in rooms in our own houses. Four of the characters, Clara, Bladez, Vork, Tink, were based only in my house. Ironically, my character (Codex) was the only one we didn’t shoot in my house. One of the reasons why Codex moved at a certain point in the show was because we lost our location.

One of the craziest places we shot was in my shed. For one, it’s really hot and uncomfortable. And then for Season 3, we couldn’t afford permits, so sometimes we just had to go out in an alley and be paranoid someone was going to see us shooting. Even now, we still have to steal shots and things like that.


What challenges do you face when writing the comic? How is it different from writing a video series?

The comic is very challenging and I’m in the middle of developing that right now. It’s a much more truncated sort of story-telling. I’m very verbose when I write and my shows have been dialog-heavy. So I have to reconfigure that for the comic, and there’s not a lot of space for dialog. Additionally, I don’t think particularly visually when I’m writing. I’m very much into the characters and how they’re communicating with each other and I leave it to the director and DP to define the look. In comic-writing, the writer has to be a DP, director, and a writer all at once. So you have to be able to tell the story in a much more visual way — which is a great exercise for me but it’s much different. The cool thing about this comic is that I can go outside of people’s houses more because we don’t have budgetary restraints. I’m particularly excited about them having a whole life in game, and following their adventures in game because we don’t define the game they play in the show because of copyright purposes, and I basically want to concentrate on the characters. But here, I can invent a whole world and see why they have so much fun together in the game.

What inspired you to do a Guild Music Video?

It was a combination of things. We have a fan who’s a professional artist, Jeff Carlisle, and he had done some fan art for us to sell at conventions. And it had our faces on our avatar bodies and the fans loved it. It was our best selling item. So, I always thought, “Hey wouldn’t it be cool for us to be in our avatar outfits?” But you know, it’s very expensive to get things made like that.

But while writing Season 3, we usually have an additional video that we turn into Xbox for our order — we do 12 episodes a season, and we have a bonus video. And I knew I needed to come up with an idea for that, and I’ve been listening to a lot of 90’s dance music while writing. So I crowdsourced a playlist on Twitter. And since Dr. Horrible, everyone has been asking me to sing, but it’s hard to figure out venues for that. 


So those three things combined led to the idea of the title “Do You Want to Date My Avatar.” And I emailed Jed Whedon, who’s the director and co-writer of the song, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea for a bad 90’s dance music video and song where we sing in our avatar costumes, and here’s the title… and he said, “I’m on board!” So I sent him lyrics, and within hours he sent me something back. The song went back and forth, until we finally came up with the track. I wanted him to direct, because I just had this feeling that he would be fantastic at it, even though he’s not necessary a director. But now he is because he did such a fantastic job with the video.

How did you ask Wil Wheaton to be in the Guild and how did he react?


Wil has known my co-producer, Kim Evey, for years. They did comedy together in ACME, a comedy theatre in LA. I would always see him at social functions and I knew him from online. I always knew I wanted to use Wil at some capacity because it’s just so much fun to be around him. I felt that he would really fit in the show very well. But I didn’t just want to put him in just because of who he is and his experience. I wanted to find a great character for him. 


I was at a convention and one of the guys who was helping us at the booth was wearing a kilt. So I was obsessed with making a character who wore a kilt. When I came up with the idea of a rival guild, I was like, “Oh, Wil can play the rival guild leader and he’ll wear a kilt! Now let’s just find a character for him and ask him to be in it.” So I came up with the idea of the character that I thought he would be fantastic playing, and I took him out for coffee, and the minute it came out of my mouth, he was like, “yes, yes, and yes.” So he was very excited to be involved. And we’re really lucky to have him because he’s such a good actor and having so much experience working, he just centered the whole new guild in a way we would not have had with anybody else. He’s just really funny and subtle and he really just fills the character out. I’m excited for people to see what else he does in this season.

•••••

The Guild seasons 1 and 2 have just been released on DVD. Learn more about The Guild at WatchTheGuild.com. Learn more about Felicia Day at FeliciaDay.com

•••••

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged:

iProng Magazine issue #50: Felicia Day and more

October 12, 2009 by iProng · View Comments 

iProng Magazine’s 50th issue features a cover story interview with The Guild star Felicia Day, along with interviews with Lights and PC Weenies, plus reviews of Tweetie 2, Madden NFL 10, and iPhone cases.

Tap here to read this issue

Filed Under: Mobile
Tagged:

iProng Magazine issue #50: Felicia Day, Lights and more

October 12, 2009 by iProng · View Comments 

iProng Magazine’s 50th issue features a cover story interview with The Guild star Felicia Day, along with interviews with Lights and PC Weenies, plus reviews of Tweetie 2, Madden NFL 10, and iPhone cases.
Read this issue now • Subscribe

Filed Under: iProng Magazine
Tagged: Felicia Day, iPhone cases, Lights, Madden NFL 10, PC Weenies, The Guild, The Listening, Tweetie 2

PC Weenies interview

October 12, 2009 by iProng · View Comments 

iProng Magazine talks with Krishna Sadasivam, creator of the PC Weenies comic strip, and author of the new PC Weenies book entitled Rebootus Maximus…

interview by Bill Palmer

Krishna Sadasivam has been publishing the popular PC Weenies comic strip online for a decade, and it’s been syndicated in various publications (including this one). Now the strip, which follows the travails of IT geek Bob Weiner at work and at home, has evolved into book form. Krishna fills us in on the evolution of the strip and more…



What led you to create PC Weenies ten years ago?

I initially started The PC Weenies as an online comic to counter the rapidly negative attacks Mac users were receiving from PC users at the time. Thankfully, it quickly evolved into a comic that poked fun of ALL aspects of technology on our lives, not just Mac vs. PC. The first comic was posted online on October 21st, 1998 – this October marks 11 years of publication online!

Are any of the characters based on people you’ve known or met over the years?

Bob was initially based on a friend of mine from college (at least personality-wise), but his personality and attitude have grown beyond his initial character concept. Many of the characters that I draw in the comics are based on composites of people I have met or trouble-shooted computers for, back in my days as a Macintosh systems administrator.

The internet was still wearing diapers back in 1998. How has the evolution of the internet over the past decade affected the evolution of PC Weenies?

When I first started writing and drawing the comic, I had just purchased my first scanner and Photoshop. I had never used Photoshop before – and my results painfully demonstrated that. Over the years, I’ve developed a sense of proficiency in Photoshop, thanks to constant practice. Within the last 4 years I have added Corel Painter to my arsenal. My art style has evolved considerably since the first comic. Having the Internet certainly makes it easier for me to research ideas for upcoming comics. The advantage of having an online comic is that I can make comics that are topical to technology news, within a few hours of reading it.

You’ve never been afraid to integrate real-world tech industry news into your storylines. Do you ever feel like you have to be careful when dealing with something like Steve Jobs’ illness, or is everything fair game?

Handling Steve Jobs’ health would be in poor taste for me. I like to keep my comics family friendly and accessible to readers of all ages. The underlying theme of my comics is “There’s more to life than technology” – so I’m basically poking fun of how dependent we’ve become to tech, along with the frustrations that go along with it. In my current storyline, the main protagonist, Bob, has found his “dream” job at Footle (which rhymes with a certain large search engine company), only things inside the company are not exactly what he expects.

What were the biggest challenges in putting the book together?

The biggest challenge for me was overcoming the initial fear of exploring print. Prior to making the book, I was not versed in pre-press, printing paper types, etc. I had to do a lot of research to find the right printing company. I also had to teach myself a lot about paper types, and offset printing methodologies. Thankfully, several webcartoonists I know were more than happy to share their methodologies with me.

Once I had the resolve to make a book, it was just a matter of doing it. I’m very pleased with how the book came out, and I’m receiving a steady stream of e-mails from readers who are enjoying the book. It’s a gratifying feeling for me to know that the book has found a home both within the US  and internationally. My long standing dream of publishing a book has finally been fulfilled!

•••••

Rebootus Maximus is now shipping. Learn more about PC Weenies at PCWeenies.com

•••••

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged: comic, interview, Krishna Sadasivam, PC Weenies, Rebootus Maximus

iProng classic interview: Silverchair

October 12, 2009 by iProng · View Comments 

In honor of our 50th issue, just published this week, here’s iProng Magazine’s first-ever cover story interview from all the way back to Issue #1, featuring Australian rock trio Silverchair, originally published December 3rd, 2007…

interview by Bill Palmer

“Imagine if tonight, I hung myself. Now how amazing would that be for your story?”

Daniel Johns asked me that question a few minutes into our interview, and for a split second I thought I might have a problem. Did the lead singer of Silverchair, who when he made his rockstar debut at age fifteen looked and sounded hauntingly like a young Kurt Cobain, really just suggest that he was going to kill himself?

“I was just joking. I’m not going to do it tonight.”

And then I realized he was just having a little fun with me. In fact all three band members were. “That was brilliant,” drummer Ben Gillies complimented Daniel on his wit, as our interview dissolved into laughter. It wouldn’t be the only time. When the hotel waiter came by, Daniel put my portable voice recorder up against his mouth and asked for a double espresso as if he were placing an order into a McDonald’s drive thru speaker. He then gave the recorder to Ben, who promptly ordered a quarter pounder meal deal from the confused waiter.

Who were these comedians and what did they do with Silverchair, the trio of angsty Australian teenagers whose smash debut “Tomorrow” saw the most airplay of any song in the United States in 1995? And where was the anxiety in Daniel Johns, who eight years ago was so anorexic he weighed barely a hundred pounds, and who five years ago was suffering from such a severe case of arthritis that he was confined to a wheelchair? During the time I spent with the three founding members of Silverchair on the Sunset Strip earlier this month, must as I might try, I couldn’t find any trace of angst.

Nor will you find any real angst on Young Modern, the new Silverchair album which if you’ve been asleep for the past decade will stun you with its moments of downright cheeriness. The now-standard lyrical references to Daniel’s health issues are still there. But while 1999’s Neon Ballroom was one long painful admission that Daniel was fighting anorexia and that he wasn’t winning, the reference to the arthritis in the first thirty seconds of Young Modern comes almost in a “been there, done that, let’s move on” throwaway kind of manner before he boasts that “the band is back together.”

Silverchair never did officially break up, but the five years between Young Modern and its predecessor Diorama saw all three band members dive into various side projects. Most notable was The Dissociatives, a 2004 pairing of Daniel with fellow Australian musician Paul Mac, who just happened to be sunbathing down at the other end of the pool during our interview. It turns out Paul is now Silverchair’s keyboardist. So is Paul’s addition creating any friction within the band? Hardly.

“I don’t think we’d be able to replace him,” bassist Chris Joannou said of Paul’s contributions to Young Modern and the current tour, with Daniel comparing Paul’s role in Silverchair to Billy Preston’s role in the Beatles. When I pointed out that Paul’s unofficial status meant that he got to sunbathe in solitude while the three of them had to put up with me, Daniel suggested that they might start having three Swedish male models handle interviews in their place. But then we were getting silly again. Come on guys, where’s the angst?

Not that Young Modern doesn’t have its share of earnest moments. The first single “Straight Lines” appears to find Daniel determined to walk the straight and narrow. The line “lately I’m a desperate believer” implies that he’s found a specific reason for it, but he insists that the line is meant to be vague: “It’s not ‘I’m a believer in God’ or ‘I’m a believer in Xanax’ or anything like that.”

“You could just tell instantly that it was a single,” Ben says of the song that not only debuted at number one in their native Australia but also landed the band back on the U.S. singles charts for the first time this decade, reaching number twelve on Billboard’s Modern Rock charts. In fact “Straight Lines” has received enough attention that Silverchair commissioned their friends from a band called The Presets to create a remix of the song which will be released exclusively through iTunes on December 1st and is currently featured on Silverchair’s official website.

But the earnestness of “Straight Lines” belies the downright jocularity the three band members displayed during our time together, now in their late twenties but often acting as if they were fifteen. When I asked them to describe what Young Modern Station (the title of the album’s first track) would look like if it were a real place, their answers were predictably zany. “Cocaine, prostitutes, Beck’s [beer], fires, Motorhead would be playing, and it would look like hell…I don’t think it would be a place that you’d want to stay for very long,” said Daniel, with Chris adding that “there’d be lots of heat.”

Before the interview I was given brief run-downs about their various personalities from an outside source, and I asked the band how accurate they felt those descriptions were: Ben the silly one, Chris the shy one. Chris expressed frustration at always being tagged as shy, leading the other two guys to mockingly comfort him they way you might console a child. Chris pretended to perk up appropriately. “With confidence-boosting moments like that, how can I be shy?”

Daniel decided to take his description, “the most serious one but he knows how to have a good time,” and put his own spin on it: “I think that means I’m manic depressive.” He then went on to invent his own descriptions for each of the three band members, coming up with “wildly reclusive, eccentric, manic depressive” for Chris, Ben, and himself, respectively.

Did he mean it when he labeled himself manic depressive? With Daniel it seems you never can quite tell whether he’s being serious or not. Perhaps he’s not even sure himself. I asked him about his habit of asking concert audiences to scream two times, then eight times, then six times, and so on, and he gave me a rather detailed description of how the various numbers added up to secret codes he couldn’t reveal, spelling out moods of joy and sadness.

“You’re making that up, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, a little.”

I’m still not sure whether he was or not.

“I’ve had forty birthdays this year,” Chris said in reference to the fact that Daniel keeps asking the crowd at each concert to sing “Happy Birthday” to Chris whether it happens to be his birthday or not. When exactly was his birthday? “It was a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve had numerous ones before that.” And Daniel himself warned me not to bother quoting anything he says while onstage, as it’s all just “buying time so I can catch my breath.”

Was that just Daniel’s way of not having to explain the “we felt like U2 for awhile and we didn’t like it” line that he dropped on the audience during the band’s performance in Anaheim the week before, or does he just honestly not remember what he’s saying when he’s up there? He certainly didn’t dodge the tougher questions, including the obligatory inquiry into how he views his health problems now that that they’re in the rear view mirror: was there a point where you didn’t think you’d make it?

“There was a moment when I didn’t think we’d be doing anything else because I couldn’t play guitar, or I couldn’t even walk,” Daniel said of the arthritis which kept him from touring after 2002’s Diorama. I mean I expected to get better but I didn’t know I’d get a lot better over time. Yeah I’m surprised I’m sitting here but I’m glad. It’s better than being on a lounge and eating soup the for ninetieth day in a row.”

Then came perhaps the tougher question, directed toward his bandmates who’d referred to him as a “brother” earlier in the conversation, the question they’d have to answer while sitting next to him: was there a time when either of them didn’t think Daniel was going to make it?

“I always thought he’d get better,” Chris offered. “The hardest thing was watching him go through the pain, like coming in some days he could play maybe two chords and that was about it, and that was too much.”



Ben’s take was similar. “You’ve just kind of got to sit back and just hope that they do whatever they need to do to come out of it. And you’re kind of thinking about the band as well, thinking aw geez, will we ever do that again?”

Although they both had side projects of their own during Silverchair’s five year hiatus, it seemed that Ben and Chris didn’t really want to consider the possibility of never being able to make music with Daniel again. These three guys have, after all, been doing this together since they were twelve years old. I was almost sorry I’d asked. All three of them were plenty forthcoming when it came to discussing it, but it’s just not where their heads are at these days. I was dredging up something it seems they’d already made peace with.

But it seems we couldn’t go too long without getting silly again. This being the publication for iPod and iPhone users, there comes a time in every iProng interview where I make up an excuse to pull my iPhone out of my pocket in order to get a reaction. With Silverchair being from Australia, where the iPhone has yet to become officially available, I thought I might be able to wow them or at least elicit some degree of fascination.

No luck. Seeing as how they recorded Young Modern in Los Angeles and were currently on their second U.S. tour in the second half of 2007 alone, the iPhone was already old hat. “I just had to talk him out of getting one the other day,” Daniel said of Ben, who summed up his iPhone fascination with “brilliant. YouTube!”

Daniel’s take on Apple’s new product lines sounded like something you might hear from a Wall Street analyst. “They have a really obvious pattern. Whatever they release, it takes at least three generations before it’s good. I think they just released it now to sucker everyone into getting one…I’m sure it’s fine in America, but in Australia?” You’ll hear more than one Apple aficionado speak in the exact same terms, particularly when faced with the prospect of using an iPhone in a country where you’d have to hack it in order to get it to work. But because it’s coming from Daniel, you wonder if he was offering serious commentary on Apple or just finding a subtle way to tease me by calling me a sucker for buying the first generation model.

Chris was more interested in the iPod touch, which I didn’t have with me, but he knew all about its wireless internet access and sixteen gigabyte capacity. I did manage to impress the band with Cover Flow on the iPhone, as there’s something about an artist seeing their own album covers fly past one after another on-screen that invariably elicits a reaction, but it makes me think that perhaps Apple might want to hurry up and launch the iPhone in places like Australia before it becomes yesterday’s news.

When I fired up the 1998 hit song “Torn” from Natalie Imbruglia and handed my iPhone to Daniel, he took one look at his wife’s face on the album artwork and declared that “she’s hot” in the same way that any other guy might. I did get him to reveal he’d written a song for Natalie’s second album, saying that “to sit down and write a pop song can be really enjoyable.”

And perhaps that explains why “Straight Lines” sounds more like a pop song than a grunge song, and why the most terse moment on the entire Young Modern album involves some thieving birds. So what of those early Silverchair fans who fell in love with “Tomorrow” and are now finding their way back to the band and expecting the Nirvana influences to still be there? A few songs from the first two albums are still in the concert repertoire, but “Tomorrow” hasn’t been played live in years.

“There’s a very small element of people that come to a Silverchair show to experience the sentimentality or to re-live the first time they had sex or something, or they want to hear what we were doing at that moment of their lives, but I don’t think it would have been a very wise decision to continue down the road we were going down ten years ago,” Daniel explains, with Ben referring to the “limited shelf life” of the grunge sound.


Sure enough, here in 2007, grunge is long gone and yet Silverchair is still very much still with us. Could these guys really have had the foresight all the way back when they were teenagers to know that their sound would have to evolve in order to stay relevant? As Daniel summed it up, “It’s not really that conscious or anything…we’re having more fun now than we did in the early days. So that seems to have been a correct decision.”



The day after our interview I saw Silverchair in concert once again. Ben, the “eccentric” one, was wearing swimming goggles on his forehead while playing the drums. Daniel led the crowd scream in an even more elaborate pattern of screams than the week before (was that because I’d asked about it?) and this time I couldn’t help but jot down it down. The numerical sequence was 1-1-2-1-2-3-7-3-1-2-1-1-2-3-3-4 for anyone who wants to take a crack at deciphering it.



When Silverchair left the stage for an encore break, the crowd predictably erupted into a chant to bring them back. Was it along the lines of “Play ‘Tomorrow’” or “Bring back the old stuff?” Nope, the crowd was singing the opening notes of “If You Keep Losing Sleep.” the latest single from the new album.

You know what? Maybe these guys are onto something.

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Learn more about Silverchair at ChairPage.com. Looking for iProng Magazine issue #1 from December 2007? Right here.

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Filed Under: Interviews, Musician interviews
Tagged: Ben Gillies, Chris Joannou, Daniel Johns, interview, Silverchair, Young Modern

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