Aidan Williams - High Acuity

It’s flattering when someone completely rips off your XHTML & CSS for a major international brand’s website. Then it’s saddening when you discover they’ve completely messed it up because they don’t understand the fundamentals. Then it’s funny when you discover that they delivered the website six months past the original deadline.

Virtually every agency we’ve worked with has ripped off my XHTML & CSS to use on other projects, because I’ve been unavailable. I’ve even started putting one element into my CSS which really obviously cancels itself out, just to see if they’d keep it in – and they do!! Haha. And a few have shamefully ripped off Sanj’s designs. Sometimes it’s the complete design, colour scheme and all, and sometimes it’s just elements like the nav, header, buttons, layout, etc.

But that’s fine. We’re happy and busy, so they can make money from us on projects they’re not paying us for. The only thing I do slightly object to is when front-end developers from those agencies come to me and ask me how to do a particular piece of work while keeping it cross-browser compatible, semantically correct, valid and accessible. Largely because if I try to teach them how it all works, they’re not interested and just want me to do it for them. I’m happy to help people I’ve worked with before in that way, like ex-colleagues, but for anyone ripping off my code in its entirety for one of your projects and not paying me anything for it, I might be less inclined to give you my time and help for free.  

And ultimately, if you place our work directly next to theirs, it’s glaringly clear to everyone how much better the website we’ve produced is to theirs.

Sanj and I have spent the last year and a half debating what new computers we should invest in when we next upgraded and it ultimately came down to two choices: Should we go Mac and get 17” Macbook Pros and  Apple Cinema Displays? Or should we go PC, get great LED displays, very powerful desktop computers and buy ourselves separate laptops as well for the same price as the Apple setup?

After a couple of post-meeting visits to the Regent Street Apple store in Soho, and a bit more prodding from me, Sanj started coming round to the idea of switching to Mac. We decided to go ahead with the caveat that if they were hard to use or caused any problems for him, I would never be allowed to make any hardware choices in the company again. Haha – sounds good to me!

We ordered two 17” Macbook Pros, two 24” Cinema Displays, two Wacom Bamboo Tablets, and two Rain Design mStands, as well as a few other extras individually.

The packages arrived from China and were left sitting next to us in our offices upstairs while we focused on finishing two projects. We finally found the time to open them up and get everything set up and installed a few days later and we are both very happy people indeed. As with all Apple products it was fast and simple and, aside from a few questions as he’s getting used to the OS-X way of doing things, Sanj is loving his new Apple experience so far.

We were very dubious about the gloss on the 24” Cinema Displays that under certain light seemed unbearably reflective. We only ordered them after checking with Apple that we could return them within 14 days with no questions asked if we were unhappy with the results. However, the gloss has not been an issue for us so far at all. The performance of the screens is astounding with incredible bright colour reproduction, very high contrast ratios and a fantastic viewing angle. The design is also stunning and with the in-built magsafe connectors we can power our Macbooks straight from the displays and leave our other Macbook power adapters at home. We’ll see what we think after we’ve been using them for a couple of months.

Click here to view the extended version of this post and see some of my old setups.

I’ve always loved 1950s/1960s retro sci-fi design, from those sweet torpedo-styled space ships to the ridiculously square robots. So knowing my sci-fi obsession, my girlfriend picked up a couple of the coolest clocks on the face of this fine earth for Valentine’s Day.

They now take pride of place on my rather sparse desk at work. The best part is that they’re solid metal and rather heavy, so I can beat people with them if they’re not working hard enough.

They instantly reminded me of the video John and Mark created a few years ago for their masters degree in computer animation: ‘Short Lived‘. What’s so amazing about this video? The robot in every one of the shots isn’t real – it’s not based on a real toy (John & Mark designed it themselves and named it ‘Deedar’) and has never been a real physical object. Youtube doesn’t do the video justice but when you see this you understand why they’re now working on so many Hollywood blockbusters.

The use of Internet Explorer 6 has been steadily declining over the last year. Unfortunately most IE6 users have moved onto IE7, but some sensible people have moved over to more secure browsers like Firefox and Safari. Still, the use of IE6 has recently dropped below 20% and I have to say; I will miss the challenge of coding for it when we finally deem it obsolete. Don’t get me wrong, coding for IE6 is a complete pain, but IE6 has such esoteric idiosyncrasies that finding ways to make sure a website displays identically in IE6 just as other the more modern browsers was sometimes a fun challenge.

Still, a website has been created in preparation for the old dinosaur’s demise. So if you’re going to miss the old boy, you can leave your respects here. Some of the comments are NSFW, but most of them are pretty funny.

Twitter has now become so popular that even Google is getting in on the act. Its first ‘tweet’ on 25th February was:

“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″ which can be translated first from binary to decimal ASCII codes to letters and says “I’m feeling lucky.”

Welcome to Twitter, Google! Oh and…

01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101001 01100101 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00101110 00100000 00100000 00100000 00111011 00101001