Straight from The World of Notch - Minecraft Beta 1.2_02

This update is a tiny one just to make the client download skins directly from Amazon S3instead of from minecraft.net.

Much of this week was lost migrating the server to the cloud, something that Tobias did an amazing job working on. Most of the site has been moved now, and seems to be running much faster than before. We’ve got five servers behind a load balancer, and a dedicated server for payment processing, and another for ingame authentication and login, although that won’t be in use until we update the game launcher.

Speaking of the Launcher, I spent the start of the week working on it, and here’s what it currently looks like:

That news area is loaded from the interwebs and will contain release notes so you know what’s changed. When you start the game, the launcher will ask you if you want to download the new update or not. Eventually there will also be an option in the launcher to choose where to load/save maps from.

Minecraft is getting pretty cute. The launcher could look better, but its a start. The ability to chose where to load/save maps is awesome. I hope they do it with screen shots as well as I hate going to a hidden folder just to post pictures of my amazing house. Also, with the server migration being done, hopefully I won't have to deal with Cannot Connect to Minecraft.net anymore.

Thank god.