For my first effort, I want to post some sunset pictures. If you don’t know me, I am always in awe of a good sunset. I’ll start in chronological order and post the first sunset photo I can remember taking. This one is from 2002, I think. It was taken at a bar in Cape Town called La Med. If you’ve never been there, Camps Bay in Cape Town is one of those classic places to watch a sunset.

This will always tug at my heartstrings

This one in particular was for Surrey Cricket Club, the club that manages the famous Oval cricket ground in South London. Check it out here. Whoever came up with this was a genius – even when the site goes wrong, you still get a laugh out of your customers!

It got me thinking about what I could put on this site, so….

Years, no, eons ago, my friends and I used to play this card game called Uno, remember it? I mean, we played it a LOT. Throughout high school and university, almost everyone we knew would have a grubby deck with them for a quick game or 20 to pass the time. Anyone who played it will recall the most kick-ass card in the pack, the plus four. With a couple of plus fours you could pretty much wrap up a 2-player match, and put yourself in a winning chance of even a 3-player game.

So here’s my hat tip to Uno and those good old days. I hope you enjoy it … click here

I can’t remember if I read this somewhere, or if it’s just a hunch, but such a shortcoming is most probably being worked on very quickly by the Issuu developers, so hopefully we’ll have some joy soon.

In the meantime however, I reveal our latest offering from work, a digital magazine about cards and payments. Try out the navigation in this, it’s pretty smooth, huh? Much smoother than some other tools.

At the end of the day it was a toss-up between Issuu and 3D Issue which, if you follow me on twitter, you will have seen why we went for Issuu instead. The pricing plan is much more palatable from a budget perspective. Also, we’re just kicking off this digital media expedition, so it seemed a bit hasty to empty our pockets on a fully fledged one-off implementation.

Anyway, enough rambling from me…..here is the magazine! (PS This is still a bit of a draft. I believe our design guy wants to add a couple of little icons somewhere, but it’s fully readable!)

There are some exciting changes happening this year, not least that F1 is now going to be shown on pay TV provider Sky. Heck, they’ve even started their own F1 channel, which from what I’ve seen is going to be very cool – 3D stuff, Full HD slow-mo playbacks, and full 5.1 surround sound, awesome! Not to mention that it’s an entire channel dedicated to the sport, so you know what channel I’m going to default to when I come home from the pub on a Friday night!

But…..BUT….something really hacks me off about this whole parade, and it’s FOM themselves. Specifically for releasing their exclusive and official track timing and positioning app. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have seen this app in the past and it looks pretty cool, but what pisses me off is that they want 20 bloody quid for it! £20! For an app!

It must rank as one of the more pricy apps in the appstore – in fact, I did a little research and the only apps up in that price bracket are specialist academic titles and satnav applications. I can understand how these are expensive because they contain proprietary intellectual property, but F1 timings? You can get that off the internet or your telly for goodness sakes!

Seriously whoever is doing their marketing is a bloody pillock. I’ve been having a think about what I would pay for it and I’d struggle to justify forking out a fiver even. I think a more sensible price is about £3.99. You know, not so cheap as to demean the high-stakes image of the sport, but not so expensive as to put off thousands of middle class, motor-racing anoraks (like me), who nowadays can no longer afford to go to the race.

The problem is, they’re thinking about this app in the context of physical merchandise, where you whack a 200% markup on the cost price, pile it high and wait for the punters. But this doesn’t work in the app store. You’ve got your strategy wrong folks, sort it out!

1. So! First up is Issuu, a publishing platform that allows you to upload PDFs and then view them in a nice easy to navigate way, which you can then embed into your sites. To quote from their website, “Issuu is the leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional reading experiences of magazines, catalogs, and newspapers. Millions of people have uploaded their best publications to create beautiful digital editions. When will we see yours?”

Well here is mine – it’s a little dry but it’s my business unit’s production plan for 2012. This is all in the public domain anyway, so don’t go thinking you’ve got your hands on proprietary information.

The slightly sucky thing is that the document is in a landscape format which doesn’t seem to look as nice as portrait. I get the sense this platform is designed primarily for magazine style content, although the World Bank uses it too on their site.

2. Next up is SlideRocket, basically an online powerpoint on steroids. You can upload existing ppt files, or create your own document in the sliderocket interface, and add all sorts of animations – your call whether you think that stuff is cool or not though! The killer features in my opinion however, are the ability to track views and a bunch of other stats, and add polls directly into the presentation and gather that data for use in surveys and the like. Here’s one I made earlier…

That’s all for now – I will add more later as I try them out. Enjoy!

“Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet turkey anim culpa kielbasa sunt ad. Eu quis sirloin exercitation sed est. Ullamco laboris excepteur, ball tip id bresaola mollit eu ex tempor adipisicing pork loin aliqua nulla. Ut duis irure reprehenderit, cupidatat consectetur ham esse shank pork loin swine id. Pork belly non pastrami, boudin officia ut et bresaola excepteur do ham hock beef ribs qui prosciutto cillum.”

Brilliant right? You can choose from a couple options in the generator, including the number of paragraphs to generate, whether you want just meat or meat and filler, and whether or not you want it to start with “Bacon Lorem…”

Check it out at http://www.baconipsum.com

So, it was a lovely surprise when my cousin Sean got in touch the other day asking about setting up a website for his local tennis club. We threw a few ideas around and I’m delighted to say we came up with a few clean and simple pages that everyone seems rather happy with. Best of all, we managed to get a coveted .com domain name!

www.bpltc.com is the new online home of Brookmans Park Lawn Tennis Club. If you live in the Hertfordshire area, then get along for a lesson or two from the local club pro!

From now on I hope to post some interest bits and pieces up here related to my work and other interests. So you’ll mainly see stuff about technology – anything from cool Ubuntu server scripts to iPhone jailbreaking tricks, to rather dry web design project management stuff. Stream of consciousness really!

Maybe I’ll even talk a bit about my playstation, attempts at DIY and, oh yeah, my impending wedding. Although you can check out my better half’s blog for the full details on that one.

For more about me, check out the about page. Gotta say I’m on twitter but I don’t say much. I’m currently feeling a bit over the whole social media thing, but that’s a story for another blog post!

So have a look around, or not, whatever you want. Get in touch even! If you are nice I might even let you listen my music on my Subsonic server.

J