[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us. This time -- how emotional design can make us think about not thinking about violence.]

Senseless violence in videogames is fun, but more importantly, it can also be intellectually stimulating and thought provoking. While designers and critics alike cry out for more depth in games, pathos is not the only path to artistic merit. For a medium that's constantly patronized, misunderstood, and derided even by its supporters, sometimes satire and irony is the best way to get a point across.

This is the philosophy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, as the most unapologetic of that series so lambasted by those who were the target of the game’s satire. The ultraviolent and candy colored Vice City is an excessively pink world in which violence is comical and cartoonish. Violence in this game is already highly desensitized. Pedestrians die, but after their bodies despawn the world will be back to normal as if nothing happened, maintaining the status quo like a TV serial.

It's the worst possible environment for a serious engagement with issues of violence, but it's a great environment to engage with how we depict violence. Most games take the opposite position of Haunting Ground, and are designed to soften, justify, or excuse violent actions so that players feel like heroes instead of murderers.

It's the same treatment summer blockbusters get. But unlike most of these media, Vice City goes a step further. This is a game that mercilessly skewers the groups most opposed to its existence, freely leaps into self parody, and satirizes the cultural attitudes towards violence that ultimately gave it form. By the end of Vice City it's clear that everyone from the mob to the talking heads on the radio are guilty of the same violence as the protagonist. No one in Vice City is innocent, and neither is anyone in the world.

How to Take the Sense Out of Violence

While technology makes blood and gore more realistic, game designers continue to construct this violence to minimize its impact. In the goriest of games (like Mortal Kombat) violence is there to thrill or disgust, not to inspire existential terror. Designers (and gamers) get excited over realism, but we want it for specific reasons. Despite how much we clamor for realism in graphics and physics, emotional realism actually gets in the way of enjoying games like Grand Theft Auto.

For this reason GTA4 has actually been criticized for being too realistic. GTA4 succeeded in its attempt to be more serious and taken more seriously, but it resulted in a different game experience--one that many fans hadn't been looking for and subsequently found in the much less serious Saints Row 2.

GTA4’s Nico feels more like a person than the caricature that is Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti, and for that reason it can be hard for players to engage senseless violence. Even the normal missions feel a little odd considering the sheer number of people you kill, creating a scenario in which the gameplay and story don’t quite mesh.

Abstracting Emotion

Trauma Center is an interesting example of a game that uses abstraction to eliminate squeamishness. This is a game inspired heavily by medical dramas with surgery-based gameplay. Medical dramas have a wide appeal; exposed organs do not. Surgeons and other medical professionals have to get used to blood and guts, but most people are pretty squeamish about that. Even the bloody fantasy violence of the average videogame can be less intense than the exposed entrails of a living human. Because of this, the designers went to great lengths to create a representation of the human body that wouldn't be grotesque.

Naoya Maeda, the lead 3D and event designer said on the Trauma Team web site that he came up with this abstract approach while thinking of how a surgeon would see the entrails. What's interesting about this approach is that the more realistic option may be less "true." In the game, the player is a doctor and revulsion is not part of the experience. In the same way, Tommy Vercetti attitude towards human life is pretty obvious from the way pedestrians are depicted.

A World of Mannequins

In violent videogames, it’s common to dehumanize the enemy so that players can feel justified in killing them. Zombies, robots, and aliens all serve their roles. With human opponents, it’s common to make them as evil as possible, which may be why WWII is the favorite FPS genre and Nazis the favorite foe. Ultimately though, the greatest tool for removing humanity is simply to leave them undeveloped.

The civilians in GTA don’t mourn, cry, or express themselves. Because they don't exhibit sympathetic actions, it's hard to empathize with them. They exist only to run screaming like Godzilla was stomping through the city. Vice City is inhabited by crash test dummies that respawn endlessly no matter how many times they die. It’s similar to watching Bugs Bunny gets blasted point blank with a shotgun: the next second, he's up and chomping carrots.

No matter how many times the player dies in GTA, or however many generic citizens he wastes, everything in the world will be respawning and back to normal in minutes. In this way, actions that would normally appear reprehensible loose all their emotional impact. If GTA was an accurate murder simulator, depicting the horror of real-world violence and murder with unflinching accuracy, the nightly news stories would have been about kids getting PTSD.

Sensitive Violence

If there is a flaw in this form of violence in videogames, it’s that it isn’t violent enough. It’s emotionally casual, designed specifically to not challenge the player’s feelings of empathy or guilt. Although it takes a lot of design work to make sure the player won’t feel sorry for the extras, seeing how many pixilated crash-test dummies you can run over isn’t emotionally challenging for the player.

Haunting Ground has a near-opposite outcome, but the design is obviously quite intentional. Compare GTA to the visceral Manhunt, and you can see that Rockstar is quite capable of creating an experience uniquely tailored to inspiring certain emotions. That’s a game that really does make the player feel like a murderer.

So Vice City is engineered for players to be as violent as possible without thinking about it. This is where a lot of game stop, having accomplished their purpose, and just let the player have fun. But Vice City fills the game with relentless satire, and this cleverness works in part because it's so violent. The result is a game about thinking about not thinking about violence.

Whose America?

The talk radio blabbering about videogame violence is underscored by the incredible violence perpetuated by the player. With Tommy Vercetti chaining rows of exploding cars and fighting everything from SWAT to the US Army, the irony of legislating against bleeding pixels isn’t lost on the player.

The jingoistic ads run by the game's gun stores unsubtly implicate that GTA is not the cause of America's attitudes towards violence, but a product of it. The entrepreneurial rise of the main character reflects a certain pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-attitude that, along with this construction of violence, satirically constructs Tommy Vercetti as an ideal American.

Vice City is violent videogame about America’s attitude towards violence. Vice City came out after GTA 3, and it was born while the immediate reaction to that game was fresh in the minds of its audience and opponents. As the in game talk show parody unfolds, extremists from all sides fight over which vision of America to cram down the rest of the country’s throat while the player is laughing at them and having a grand old time.

While the guests on talk radio worry about fictional violence, their world is being blown up by the player on a regular basis. After mowing down the city in a tank, players may wonder why they aren't the ones being discussed on the news. Shouldn't they be thinking about real violence? Shouldn't the player? It's fun to live the American Dream as Tommy Vercetti, but is this bitter satire worth bringing to reality?

Even though Vice City goes to great lengths to create emotionally uninvolved violence, it wants the player to be conscious of how different this is from real world violence. At the time, the charge levied against the playerbase and the industry was that videogames confused the two. With the pitch perfect satire of radio pundits and activists, Vice City invites the player to think about whether the game is more damaging to society than the people trying to ban it. Rockstar has a clear agenda, of course, and stacks the deck in their favor. Even so, that’s a lot to think about for a game that’s not supposed to be about thinking at all.

Pathos certainly has its place in videogames, and it's certainly something we need more of. A GTA like game that forced players to confront the realities of murder would be an interesting idea. It couldn't work as a satire, and it wouldn't really be fun, but that’s just fine as it’s another way to engage the player. One of the great things about survival horror games like Haunting Ground is that they've proven that games don't necessarily need to be fun to be compelling.

But let's not underestimate Vice City just because it makes us laugh.

[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, which is updated less often than this message, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]

Peter Atwood of Turners Falls, Mass. makes his living as a knife- and toolmaker. He produces limited runs of unique items every few days, which he then posts on his blog, Planet Pocket Tool. The name of his blog indicates his focus: small wrench-like tools. However, Atwood creates a wide variety of metal items like rulers, steel shot glasses, whistles, prybars, ring tools, and so on.

Filed under: Microsoft, Browsers

Internet Explorer 9 to support hardware acceleration of HTML5 canvas tag originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you follow Mashable, chances are you either visit the website directly, or subscribe to our RSS feed, daily emails or Twitter and Facebook pages. Given that there are dozens of ways to follow Mashable, we thought we’d round these up in a useful blog post.

We’re also aware that some people get a little overwhelmed by all the content we create every day. That’s why we recently created separate feeds, Twitter and Facebook accounts for all of the topic channels here on Mashable: Social Media, Mobile, Web Video, Entertainment, Business, Tech, Apple and the Mashable Jobs board.

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Il y a un peu de changement sur planet-libre ces derniers temps. D'abord Jonas a été avalé par la baleine du temps, notre benjamin de l'équipe s'est en effet retiré un peu de la vie informatique pour se consacrer à une vie plus saine, puis la fine équipe de modérateurs a gagné du galon. Nous passons donc avec Frédéric Bezies, Christophe Gallaire, et Philippe Scoffoni administrateurs du planet pour prêter main forte à Thomas et à Grégoire qui je pense préfèrent se préoccuper du développement technique de l'outil bilboplanet plutôt que de régler des problèmes "administratifs".

Ceux qui trouvaient déjà la modération détestable, seront ravis d'apprendre qu'en plus de nos traditionnels travaux de censure journaliers, nous aurons la joie de sélectionner les sites figurant sur le planet, de les refuser et même de faire sauter les comptes quand quelqu'un nous replace douze fois des messages n'ayant qu'un rapport vague avec le libre.

Fruit du hasard ou pas, mais il se trouve que nous avons ces derniers temps des emplois du temps de ministre et qu'un petit coup de main ne serait pas de refus, c'est pour ça que nous lançons cet appel. La modération du planet n'est pas bien compliquée, il suffit déjà d'être un lecteur assidu, et de faire sauter les articles qui ne cadrent pas avec le planet.

Les candidats doivent avoir une bonne connaissance du libre, avoir compris le principe du fonctionnement du planet-libre, avoir les épaules larges ou aimer se faire traiter de facho de façon régulière, et suffisamment d'humour pour collaborer avec la promotion en place, sachant qu'on peut considérer Greg et Thomas comme des gens normaux, Philippe aussi, par contre en ce qui me concerne, Fred Bezies ou le Grand Maître C, c'est déjà plus difficile, un peu de recul et d'humour sont donc à prévoir. Malgré nos désaccords, nos caractères parfois haut en couleur, nous n'avons jamais eu de problèmes entre nous, comme quoi c'est possible.

J'ai ouvert un message dans le forum du planet, nous vous attendons, une petite présentation avec un blog ce serait pas trop mal.

Billet original de Cyrille BORNE.Votez pour cet article sur le Planet Libre.

The first time you walk into an Apple Store and pick up an iPad, you’ll understand the hype: Apple has managed to create a beautiful, thoughtfully designed, compelling product in a space where mediocrity was, until now, status quo. But odds are you probably won’t buy one — at least not yet. And that’s OK.

For despite the high level of anticipation for and proclamations associated with the launch of the Apple device, the fact remains that outside of a few select vertical uses (like medicine), tablets are constrained by their own form factor, stuck in the nether realm between productivity and portability. Standing onstage during the device’s unveiling, Steve Jobs himself posed a question that acutely underscores the tablet dilemma: Is there room for a third category of product that sits between your two most essential devices, the laptop and phone? As much as I’m looking forward to the iPad, I’m still not sure there is.

To date, no one’s been able to scale tablets as a core personal computing product, though it’s certainly not for lack of effort. Just about every player in the electronics world has given tablets a go, from Nokia with its Maemo-based N-series Internet communicators to Dell with its Android-based mini-slates to all manner of Windows-based convertible and slate tablet PCs. But the problem with all of them — and the iPad may also be included — isn’t that they’ve been unable to offer fundamentally differentiated experiences from the devices we already own and carry.

Think back to the iPod — before it existed, there wasn’t such a thing as taking your entire music (and eventually, video) library with you wherever you went. But the concept proved to be so elemental that it transcended the iPod as a device, and became a staple in nearly every product Apple makes, from iTunes on the Mac to the iPhone. In his iPad launch presentation, Jobs seemed pretty clear about the fact that the iPad won’t replace your phone or laptop (at least not any time soon), and yet Apple has still been deficient in demonstrating more than scaled-up iPhone experiences (like browsing, light email, and gaming) or scaled-down desktop experiences (like iWork).

Of course, it would be a failure of imagination to assume there won’t eventually be something built on the iPad platform that simply couldn’t be hosted on a phone or laptop. But so far Apple hasn’t shown it to us, which may be why so many are still lukewarm on the device’s prospects. This also might be why iBooks was January’s dark horse announcement — it was the only app Apple showed off that seems to call out for the iPad by name. But long-form reading is still arguably better suited to devices like the Kindle and Nook, which benefit from E Ink displays, while shorter-form media (namely periodicals) went all but ignored by Apple, which punted to publication-specific apps like the New York Times reader. Had Apple attempted to create a new, ubiquitous, standard format for magazines and newspapers, and leveraged its sales infrastructure for subscription content, the iPad might have been hailed as the iPod of publishing.

There’s no question Apple has (re)defined the tablet dialog and raised the bar for the space moving forward. For browsing the web, the iPad experience is second to none; the product itself almost seems to melt away, leaving the user to feel as though they’re literally reaching in and touching the content. And by the time the iPad’s price drops in a year or two, Apple may be able to parlay a groundbreaking product into a market leadership position. But in the mean time, the countdown to launch has begun and Cupertino’s set its sights on building yet another market, we’ll have to see just how many people are ready to put their money where Apple’s tablet is.

Ryan Block is the co-founder of gdgt and the former editor in chief of Engadget. Disclosure: gdgt is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

The e-book war between Amazon.com and Apple is
getting uglier. Dennis Johnson cites a report in Publishers Marketplace (subscription required) that alleges that Amazon.com is telling publishers that if they switch to an agency model (ala Macmillan) , they will lose Amazon as a platform for both e-books and print.

This battle, which in many ways mirrors similar struggles between record labels and online music stores, underscores some of the challenges that moving into widespread digital distribution for a formerly non-digital product can bring.

Recently, Macmillian’s CEO John Sargent explained the agency model, as it relates to e-book sales, in his blog:

“Starting at the end of March, we will move from the ‘retail model’ of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who then sell to readers at a price that the retailer determines) to the ‘agency model’ (publishers set the price, and retailers take a commission on the sale to readers).”

In other words, Macmillan wants to be able to control how much digital books are sold for on a per-book basis. Much like music publishers fought (and eventually won) the right to sell certain digital tracks or digital albums for more (or less, in some cases) than the $0.99 per track/$9.99 per album standard, publishers want that same control.

Amazon disagrees. And while it did acquiesce to Macmillan’s position at the end of January, it apparently has no plans of making those same concessions for future publishers.

In the Publishers Marketplace report, Michael Cader writes:

“At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically by Amazon in a recent phone call initiated by the retailer that Amazon would not negotiate agency selling terms with any other publishers outside of the five initial Apple partners. This publisher was told that if they switched to an agency model for e-books, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in print and digital form. In conversation, Amazon is said to have reiterated that as matter of policy they are declining to negotiate an agency model with any publisher outside of the five who have already announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore.”

In other words, the agreements that have been made with the five publishers signed to work with Apple — Macmillan, Harper Collins, Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster — will not be passed on to smaller publishers.

It seems even the agreement with the other four publishers outside of Macmillan (known as Agency Four) isn’t set in stone.

Cader also writes:

“The indications are that if the Agency Four have not finalized new digital sales agreements with Amazon prior to the launch of Apple’s iPad, they could face delisting from direct sale at Amazon, as Macmillan did.”

Translation: If those publishers don’t finalize a new digital agreement with Amazon before the launch of the iPad, they risk being removed from Amazon.com

Because it is both the biggest seller of e-books and print books, Amazon has enormous power in the publishing industry. However, it’s unclear how long it will be able to play hardball with publishers, especially as formidable competitors like Apple (with iTunes) and Google emerge.

Apple, interestingly, held a reverse stance with music executives for many years before finally changing course in January of 2009 with the introduction of variable pricing. However, one reason Apple was able to exert so much influence over record labels pricing was because until Amazon launched its service (again, Amazon took the reverse approach with music, letting publishers set variable pricing for tracks and albums), there was no real competitor in the digital music space.

Amazon isn’t quite as lucky. First, e-books have been around for years and are available in a variety of formats from a variety of different storefronts. In fact, Amazon sold digital books long before it introduced the Kindle.

The e-book market has evolved much more quickly than the digital music space, which leaves less wiggle room for retailers, like Amazon, to exert pressure.

However, make no mistake, for smaller publishers, the risk of losing listings on Amazon.com is still probably a big enough threat to have an effect.

We’ll keep following this situation as it develops.

[via John Gruber]

Tags: amazon, apple, business, ebook price war, ebooks, ipad, Kindle, Macmillan

In continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news consumption, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing how Facebook users compare with others in return visits.

According to her article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

Sponsor

Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users are also repeat offenders. That is, they don't just visit once, they come back for more. From the Hitwise blog:

Why do we care about this metric? Because "visitors aren't as valuable if they don't come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again." Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?

Hopkins doesn't get into the "why" behind the numbers, but we'd be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual's world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more.

Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you've imagined. It doesn't offer that one thing we can all trust - the valued opinion of a friend. It's also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.

Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure - news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, "with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important."

Emily Haas' Armenian Experience, a blog by a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) in the former Soviet republic, post photographs and an insight into the lives of women in Armenia. The blog says that the project is to “show how hard the women in Armenia work and the important and overlooked role they hold in society.” Meanwhile, Ianyan has started to publish a series of posts on what it means to be a woman in general.

Una buena noticia para los que se preocupen mucho por su privacidad: Google anuncia que está trabajando en un método para permitir a sus usuarios no ser registrados en su servicio de estadísticas.

Según dicen en su blog, los desarrolladores de Google Analytics crearán plugins para los distintos navegadores que evitarán el seguimiento del usuario, con el fin de proteger su privacidad y ofrecerles más libertad.

¿Cómo interpretar esto? La verdad es que es una maniobra complicada. Ya existen addons para Firefox y Chrome que niegan la ejecución de scripts y que se pueden configurar para desactivar el código de Google Analytics; así que, ¿por qué Google desarrollará el plugin mencionado?

Para mí, esto puede tener como fin mejorar su servicio de estadísticas. Mientras los usuarios usen plugins de terceros para bloquear Google Analytics, no se podrá saber a ciencia cierta cuántos usuarios se quedan fuera de las estadísticas. Sin embargo, si es Google quien distribuye el plugin, sí que se tendría un recuento de esos usuarios con el que se podrían ofrecer estadísticas más cercanas a la realidad.

¿Y qué impacto tendrá esta medida? Probablemente solo haya dos opciones. Una, que haya tantos usuarios bloqueando Google Analytics que los webmasters tengan que buscar otra solución de estadísticas más eficaz. Y dos, que más webmasters se pasen a Google Analytics, que al proporcionar una opción a los usuarios que no quieran entrar en las estadísticas, ofrecería datos más reales y útiles.

Habrá que dejar que el tiempo pase para ver qué es lo que ocurre con las estadísticas de Google. Seguramente en Google se lo hayan pensado mucho y hayan decidido que este es el mejor paso. Pero en Google también son humanos y pueden equivocarse.

Vía | Denken Über
Más información | Google Analytics Blog

Michael Mace is a principal at Rubicon Consulting, and a former executive at Palm, Apple, and Silicon Graphics. This post was originally posted on his blog, and his reproduced with permission.

It’s a great time for ebooks.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• The e-Readers Coming To Kick Kindle's Butt This Christmas
• Kindle For Mac Now Available -- How About An iPad Edition?
• Barnes & Noble's Nook Finally Limps Into Stores -- Too Late?

Filed under: Audio, Google, Browsers

ExtensionFM is the first killer extension for Google Chrome OS (and it's not even here yet) originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

YouTube mantiene un litigio con Viacom desde hace años. La propietaria de entes como MTV, Dreamworks, Bob Esponja TV Nickelodeon o Paramount solicita compensaciones monumentales por el supuesto daño que sufre por la cantidad de vídeos suyos que los usuarios suben a YouTube, “sin que estos hagan lo suficiente por evitarlo”.

Pero ahora YouTube le devuelve la colleja a Viacom, y de qué forma. En un post en su blog oficial, denuncian que Viacom ha estado subiendo sus propios vídeos a YouTube a través de no menos de 18 empresas de marketing, con el objetivo de tener más argumentos en su demanda a YouTube. En muchas ocasiones, esos vídeos han sido estropeados de forma intencionada, para que parezcan filtrados o robados.

Otras veces los vídeos han sido subidos por empleados de Viacom. Incluso muchos ejecutivos de la empresa han afirmado públicamente que sus vídeos deberían mantenerse en YouTube. Vamos, que desde el servicio de Google insisten en que en Viacom no tienen nada clara ni siquiera su postura, pero que a pesar de ello mantienen la demanda.

Incluso no se han cortado un pelo y llegan a mofarse de Viacom por la gran cantidad de meteduras de pata que han tenido con sus propios vídeos:

También critican la doble moral de Viacom, que ha venido utilizando YouTube como medio publicitario, subiendo vídeos o no denunciando la retirada de algunos, mientras hacía el juego sucio y mantenía la demanda. Estas tácticas han dificultado, según el post, detectar qué contenido de Viacom era autorizado por esta y cuál no. “Pero Viacom piensa que YouTube debería saberlo de alguna forma.”

Si vas a embarcarte en una demanda absurda, por lo menos no tires piedras sobre tu propio tejado. Y sobre todo, no subestimes la capacidad de Google de analizar tus movimientos online, sumar dos más dos, y devolvértela con creces. Su negocio se basa en tener datos y sacarles el jugo, ¿sabes?

Sitio oficial | Blog de YouTube
En Genbeta | Viacom también se pelea con YouTube
Imagen | Mexican2000

Continue reading Niko, the N900-powered Lego robot, looks poised to take over Twitter (video)

Niko, the N900-powered Lego robot, looks poised to take over Twitter (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Renamerox is the simple way to rename, copy and move hundreds or thousands of files or folders with a single Drag-and-Drop using presets.

When you want to prepare files or folders for your website, blog, and backups, or when you need to organize or duplicate files, or when you make copies of your audio and image files for your iPod or iPhone, you spend valuable time copying and renaming each item by hand.

Renamerox is an universal binary application that renames, copies or moves your files and folders with a powerful engine, making your daily work flow easier. You no longer need to alter each file or folder by hand.

Why navigate through all the folders on your hard disk?
Renamerox supports drag-and-drop. An intelligent Drag-and-Drop engine makes the application easy to use. Drop as many files as you want or a folder that contains hundreds or thousands of files to the main window or to the application icon to rename, copy and move your files and folders.

In order to have different settings for different jobs, use a preset (pre-defined setting) for each job.

The powerful renaming engine allows you to:

• set a new name with index, prefix and suffix.
• add a prefix and suffix.
• add a prefix.
• add a suffix.
• add random digits as prefix.
• add random digits as suffix.
• replace a piece of the name.
• set or to change the file-extension.
• convert the file name to small or cap letters.
• convert the file name to Titlecase.
• truncate some letters from left or right.
• create a new name with Roman Numerals index, prefix and suffix.
• add Roman Numerals as prefix and suffix.

Undoing the renaming process reverts to the original names of the items.

When you drop files or folders on the Renamerox application icon, Renamerox will start up and will immediately begin the job. If the checkbox "Quit after Job" is checked in the preferences, Renamerox will quit automatically after the job is finished.

Renamerox offers several additional options to optimize the renaming process.

• Added the ability to generate random digits.
• Added the ability to set a limit for the random digits.
• Added the ability to use the random digits as prefix or suffix.
• Added a random digits menu.
• Minor changes

The first beta for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) is ready for your downloads! See http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1 for a list of mirrors, and for suggestions on how to participate in testing for the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS final release.