Tips and Hints

- Link: How does hacking work?

- Each clinic has two praxis kits for sale for 5000 credits each. When you know where a weapons dealer is, it’s not really hard to get the money by taking single guns from your opponents to the dealer. Always make sure you buy them.

- Overall you will get all useful augmentations in the game, if you explore a lot. Exploring a lot gives you not only what you find, but a lot of XP bonuses too.

- Not killing enemies gives you more XP and is more silent, so use an appropriate weapon and knock people out instead of killing them. Hide them, as when they get found they can wake up again.

- Have a rocket launcher with you and save rockets for situations you can’t solve otherwise. The rocket launcher can solve every hard situation.

Good Augmentations

- Hacking power, and the augmentation to lower the chance of getting found while hacking. Important to get a lot of XP early on and also later in the game. Later in the game, hacking turrets is nice. I also bought the hack robot thingy, but there was no chance to use it so far.

- Raise carrying strength (there’s always more stuff you want, and the place in your inventory is very small – helps getting stuff to weapon’s dealers and helps having the rocket launcher with you when you approach boss fights)

- Raise lifting strength (with crates you can often get to higher places, use big crates to block line of sight or push away big things that stand in front of passages needed for stealthy actions)

- Social Optimizer (you get more XP if you persuade people and at least one level can be done without fighting just because of the optimizer). When you have it, just look for the weakest area of the person can choose the appropriate way of persuasion.

- Break though walls (at least 2 praxis kits and a lot of stuff are hidden behind breakable walls and some stealthy approaches are benefitted highly by this).

- Augmented reflexes (in many places two guards talk to each other and can be knocked unconscious simultaneously)

- The skin armor is the only really good augmentation when it comes to fighting.

Mediocre augmentations

- The Taifun looks cool, but I only used it once in a boss fight. Maybe I should just play this in hard mode. Again multiple enemies it’s hard to use, as they will have you killed before you get in the middle of them. Maybe good with a lot of battery and the cloaking augmentation, but there are rarely so many enemies in one place, and for those you also have the rocket launcher or grenades.

- The cloaking augmentation. If you hide well you should need this very rarely, though there are some few scenes where I just couldn’t fulfill all side-quests silently (police station) and it might have helped.

- Therefore the battery stuff might be useful if you use the Taifun and the cloaking, but I don’t like that battery only reloads to one battery automatically and everything else needs recharging by power items.

- The shooting thing is maybe good for players using a mouse, I played this game on a playstation and didn’t use and aggressive play-through. I didn’t use it.

- The jumping augmentation is okay, but not really necessary when you have lifting power and crates. But later in the game you will want to buy it anyways.

Worthless augmentations

- All stealth augmentations. Crouching towards enemies and keeping out of line-of-sight is always enough.

- All vision enhancements, maybe besides the look through walls thingy, that’s just handy from time to time, but not really necessary as you can always look around corners and have your basic radar.

- I bought the augmentation to fall down slower, but it seldom actives in the game, and I so far didn’t find even one chance to use the aggressive mode of this thing. Looks cool though.

- Breathing gas. Bought this in a situation where I didn’t see the thing that could close the gas vent behind a breakable wall. Did need it once, when an enemy threw a gas grenade at me, and once where it was easier to save a worker who was about to die from gas, but I don’t think you really need this.

- The vision timer and flash immunity… flash immunity is rarely worth it and the vision timer doesn’t shorten the time needed till enemies will become less hostile.

- Running speed and duration. What for? To play the game in 5 minutes less overall?

Buy augmentations in this order

- Hacking 3

- Silent hacking 2

- Lifting strength

- Social optimizer

- Break though walls

- Silent Hacking 3

- Reflexes

- Carrying strength

- Hacking 5

- Skin armor 3

- The stuff you want but don’t really need.

Hope this helps you a bit with your decisions. Have fun playing the best game I’ve played in my whole life. If you disagree or have any more hints to share, post a comment.

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ToDo is not perfect. But I’ll begin with the nice little tidbits that make me keep on using this app, which is the best feature a ToDo app can have: continued usage.

• There’s a keyboard shortcut to quick add tasks, that can be defined in the settings. After the shortcut, just type the task name and hit return or tab, which adds the task and lets you go on typing the next tasks name unless you hit return or tab again. Great feature for quickly adding tasks.

• Clicking on the blue linked day in the calendar filters everything by tasks due today

• CMD + N is the shortcut for a new task, or, if you’ve selected a project or a tasklist-task adds a new subtask. With the arrow keys you can navigate in the list, hitting right or left arrow folds or unfolds projects and tasklist-tasks.

• If you’ve selected a context or tag, you don’t only get the whole list filtered by that tag / context, but also have new tasks get the context and tags automatically selected for the active values. Very nice thing if you’re seperating contexts as work and private and projects as tags.

• I should mention that I only use “lists” for the default one “inbox” and “ideas”. I’m throwing everything into ideas that shouldn’t be deleted, but that I usually won’t want to clutter my list. And you can completely filter out lists from your views, what I did with “ideas”. Additionally, context and tags are kept, so I can scan for ideas very targeted, if I need to.

• Via drag-and-drop you can drag your single or multiple selected tasks to tags, contexts, lists or on a due date (in the calender) to set those on the task(s). Very nice way to easily set stuff on tasks.

CRITICISM:

As I like this app, I want to make some point that could be improved, and if anyone reading this develops this app or knows someone who develops this app, please forward this.

• automatic recognition of context by WIFI-SSID (or place on iPhone)
• keywords for the quick-entry dialog (for example #tagname or @contextname), autocompleted if possible
• more folding levels for tree-like tasks
• tree-like contexts
• more performance after CMD-N: sometimes half the typed name is missing because I didn’t wait for the new task to pop up in the tree

OVERALL:

The app fits my workflow most and keeps me using it – what no other ToDo-list-tool has ever achieved as I’m to much of a GTD freak. Have fun with this app.

photo credit: @superamit

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The workaround I use now is the Firefox Addon “Session Manager“. In it’s preferences, you can set “Close Firefox on close of the last Window” and “On close: save current session” and “On start: choose session: last session”. This let’s Firefox always open with the last session, that means with all the tabs you had open before you closed it. Happy Maccing, Mr Firefox. Also works with 4.0 btw.

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• Pointers and the asterisk: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1105815/placement-of-the-asterisk-in-objective-c
• The type “id” is always a pointer, so no asterisk there
• Strange effects happen when you “#inport” .h files with cyclical references. I didn’t find a better solution than having id instead of the Type I wanted to use in one of my classes
• There are no null pointer exceptions. This means you’ll all the time miss the initialization of some object or some reference and won’t recognize it. Since recognizing this, I love null pointers exceptions. But this is language design in Objective C. So if you definitely need to be sure, throw an exception if you want to be sure and / or add some unit tests.
• When the application crashes, you won’t get meaningful answers from the console often times. To get some more information you’ll need to set a breakpoint in the last thrown exception statement. You can find out more here.
• When you want to use a simple integer like 5 and get the warning / error “makes Pointer from integer without a cast”, you need to use [NSNumber numberFromInt:5]
• Always correct header file first, implemetation file second and always correct from top to bottom, as the compiler does this too. When the compiler sees an error in the header file for example, it might make up 50 more errors somewhere below. This is literally top-down debugging.
• Don’t try to mess with XML too much yourself. Use this nice, free and fast XML framework instead.
• There are great resources for iOS development out there, for example the full open source Canabalt game or framework-like libraries that could make some things easier, if you see it before you’ve implemented all such things yourself.
• To find such resources, I’d read this blog and follow it’s writer on Twitter.
• Oh yeah, and Google and Stackoverflow should fix the rest.

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So, just use the following plugins, and you’ll be fine:

• Efficient Related Posts (doesn’t steal your time like some other related posts plugins do)
• jQuery lazy load plugin (important if you use pictures, you’ll not want to load all images the user won’t scroll to anyways)
• TweetMeme Retweet Button (this is the fastest retweet button I found, usually those things make your site dog slow – if someone knows a faster one, please give me a hint, as this still drags me down)
• WP-Optimize (optimize your database very easily, so the dataconnection is faster)
• WP HTTP Compression (just use it)
• WP Minify (big time speedup – just use it)
• WP Super Cache (you don’t want processors calculate what HTML to output everytime someone enters your site, caching lets you store that)

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So I accumulated about 50 ideas for blogposts in my ToDo “blog” context, and I’ll try to put out one or two a week. Let’s see if I can manage that. Do you also have “small resolutions”? Please no jokes about 1024×768 and such ;-)

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I bet if you use Twitter, you heard that too. In the 185 people I follow, not a single one tweets about food, and I seldomly see irrelevant tweets. But people not using Twitter just cannot get that. Therefore, we have to transport the experience into their world. The best analogy I could find was the following:

(Short version)

Understand Twitter as TV, and everyone can design 5 minutes of one channel every day. Either, you can use those 5 minutes to show the most impressive and interesting things you’ve seen, experienced or felt today – or you can talk about your breakfast, lunch and supper. And now guess which channels the other viewers will be watching.

(Extended version)

Not the “I had fish today” stuff – and if you don’t experience anthing worthwhile in your days, you should maybe not tweet too much, but you can still watch the other channels. And all the people out there do their TV channels in a different style, there are funny ones, newsstyle one, channels about one person (made by the person him-/herself) and lots of experts of a certain topic. For every topic, there are at least 100 people doing channels on it. Even for a topic that interests you. And using up 5 minutes of your day to get the best and most interesting experiences about everything that you care about is worth it.

(If they didn’t already drop you as lunatic and stopped listening to defend their life against the limitless possibilities)

Well, and this doesn’t even mention that you can connect to those experts, and you can keep up with friends and you can even directly message celebrities. You can have other people see what youre doing or what you’re inspired in or what music you like or which YouTube video is the really funny thing you laughed 10 minutes about. In the blink of an eye. And if you watch a channel that is boring, you can just switch it off. Oh, and you can install the twitter app on Facebook, so you don’t need to update Facebook anymore – it gets auto-updated.

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