Posted by Tim Neill, 12th October, 2008 (8:54 pm).
For those of you reading my blog, thanks to both of you! I promise I’ll do more in the coming weeks to this place. Right now it reminds me of one of those banks that have gone under in America… Impressive looking from the outside and a lovely shiny place to be - but nothing going on anymore just a million empty desks! And an echo. (…echo….echo…echo)
So here’s something I’m liking at the moment. My new desktop!
Posted by Matthew Hilton, 14th June, 2008 (8:04 pm).
Okay, so a month or so later and I’ve been a very busy boy!!!
There’s been quite a few updates to the site in this version, which I officially released today, including:
- Unified theme - we finally decided on a consistent look for the page, which has been implemented, with the side effect of largely simplifying the number and content of files it takes to get the site looking like this
- Contact box - now AJAX-ified and slick; available on all pages
- Updated Lightbox (the cool image viewer in the gallery item pages) - it’s now quicker and better
- 404 Page - a custom “404 not found” error page has been created and implemented
- Slimmed down - the site is now about half the size (megabyte wise) as it was before, as many redundant images/style files have been removed
- Gallery index - there’s now a notification when there are no items under a certain category, rather than just nothing
- Gallery items - more modular for Timmy, more flexibility (ie can do image-only projects… page dynamically updates according to what’s in the database. If there’s no brief, the heading won’t show :))
- Maintenance page - nice little page which I can pop up while I’m editing the site
Yet to do:
- Matt: Change the iconset for the Blog… Done
- Matt: Add the About and Downloads pages
- Tim: Populate the Gallery
Woohoo!!! 
Posted by Tim Neill, 30th April, 2008 (12:13 am).
GTAIV
Wonderful game here, Great graphics, great story, much more grown up than previous titles. I’m not going to bother reviewing it, because every man and his dog already has, however I will outline some cool bits.
- Mobile phone is the lifeline of the new game, the game is much more social this time around and the phone helps get this across immensely (Also, the way it ‘interferes’ with your TV speakers if a nice touch)
- Graphics are stunning
- The constant in-jokes and silly names are brilliant, as always
Basically, everything that could be improved has been. It’s a much bigger game than any other GTA, very densely packed. Now, If I can wrestle myself away from GTA for a minute, I can start on my next point:
Gallery Pages
Are now feature complete. Projects and images are going to start populating the site, thanks to the hard work of Matty (Yay Matty!).
One More Thing…
The iMac is now for certain on the way! With the Apple Update the other night, I placed my order and specs are as follows:
24″ Display
3.06Ghz Core 2 Duo
2GB 800Mhz DDR2 SDRAM - 2×1GB (Will eventually be upped to 4GB, but this ram is faster than the last model with different DIMMs, so will have to wait for shops to update their lines)
nVidia Geforce 8800 GS 512MB
500GB HDD
Posted by Tim Neill, 27th April, 2008 (8:34 pm).
Hi all
I’ve compiled a list of things that you’ll see is going to change very soon as the site - a to-do list if you like. Since there’s a problem, with no less than three content box themes, and one of them not playing nice with resolutions of 1024 by 768 (seriously does anyone run that anymore?). So, a glassy, plasticky, ‘unified’ theme is going to be applied that renders well and is more attractive even at small resolution! Go legacy support! (if you can call 1024 by 768 legacy…) Anyway, onto the to-do list:
- Homepage - Unified theme, better welcome message and image
- Gallery - Unified theme, thumbnails need to be finalised
- Product Page - Content added, thumbnail size changed, layout and breaks inserted
- Blog - Blogo moved to correct position, sidebar tweaked (calendar centred, search bar fixed, internet explorer problems squashed, links inserted) and last, but not least the emoticons are hideous. Hello, aliasing!
- Downloads - Unified theme, layout
- About - Unified theme, known issues, site map, version history, links
- Contact - still to be coded, but design is done. Keep an eye out for that one.
- Help - How to navigate, download things, report bugs, contact me, helpful links
I’ll continue to update and strike out things on this list as they get fixed/completed. Also, Internet Explorer is retarded. Don’t use it. It’s slow, doesn’t render pages properly and makes Matt’s life hell. So unless you have something against Matt, don’t use IE. Just look at how it ‘renders’ the blog page compared to a proper browser!
Probably a good spot the difference game there, there’s a million little things wrong in IE compared to Firefox and Safari. So whether you’re Mac or PC grab
Firefox or
Safari. It’s gonna make your life, my life and most importantly Matt’s life a million times better.
Posted by Matthew Hilton, 26th April, 2008 (12:01 pm).
So I know this isn’t really my blog, but what the heck, I thought I’d post on it anyway 
As the middle of the year is fast approaching I thought I’d better get my ass into gear and get poor Timmy’s site finished. So I’m attempting to do that… If you’ve been checking out the site occasionally, you’ll notice new updates to the Blog as of this morning… You can now comment your life away, the sidebar has been updated, and I’ve also implemented search so you can find the ramblings you wish with the greatest of ease.
We’re also rejigging a couple of things on the main site… There’s a lot that’s half finished at the moment, so hopefully this week we should be able to get some polish happening, and tick some boxes on the “finished” list.
By the way… I’m v. proud of the Gallery hehe… For those of you who are more technically minded, I would like to gloat that the gallery is actually generated using fairly basic content management system that I wrote. Like very basic. But it brings together a few technologies (most of which I still only have a vague knowledge of) which we’ve done at uni, such as:
- XML
- XSL (XML Stylesheets)
- XSLT (XSL Transformations)
- Javascript
- PHP
Hehe. It’s my baby
Anyways I do believe that’s enough rambling on my part. If you find any technical issues with the blog/site, please let me or Tim know and I’ll fix it up as soon as possible! But overall I’m pretty happy with how the beast is progressing
