Geek 2013: a great celebration of British gaming

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

At the weekend I drove down to Margate, not to buy a ‘kiss me quick’ hat nor bask in the winter sunshine riding on the back of the famous beach donkeys. No, I was there to visit the Winter Gardens where Geek 2013 was being held for its second year.

The Winter Gardens are, for those of you who don’t know, a series of halls where various shows and performances are held. I was visiting Geek 2013 with my 25-year-old game-loving son, Oliver.  There were several people dressed as gaming characters and a large stage with a presentation about what to look for when choosing a wig for your Cosplay character.

A more magnificent sight greeted us when we entered one of the side halls. This was a huge, dark, noisy room full of screens connected to every gaming machine you could imagine. Everything was hands-on and so you could play the original version of a particular game on the original console or machine it was written on.

(more…)

Goodbye Actinic Desktop and thanks for all the sales

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

Actinic has announced a change in name for its original Desktop product to Sellerdeck. Whilst most commentators are criticising the truly dreadful choice of name – which I’m told was due to the “lack of suitable free domain names”  - what is of greater interest to me as an Actinic watcher, reviewer and user of many years is that the company has been split between the online e-commerce offering (bought in from a French company Oxatis) which will be known as Actinic, and the original desktop offering now known as Sellerdeck.

Sellerdeck has a very old code base, some of the originators of which are no longer with the company. I have for some time suspected the reason that development has slowed to adding third-party add-ins is because maintenance of this code is becoming more and more difficult, particularly server-side.

I think it is fair to say that in the past Actinic has relied on its reseller and developer community to sell its products as a very competent online e-commerce solution to various companies. What is interesting is that there is no mention at all on the Actinic website now for reseller packages and it appears to be offering such packages itself.

So it seems that Actinic has decided to go it alone and in the future will have no need for the resellers, which is very bad news for those who have built a business selling solutions based on Actinic products, hence the title of this piece. I am waiting for a reply from Actinic about its position on resellers for its online product, but currently there isn’t one.

Aurasma: bringing pages to life

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

In the technology world, many catchphrases are bandied about until they become so tired and worn out that people stop paying attention to them. Phrases such as internet superhighway, virtual reality, wearable computing and augmented reality to name a few.

Until this week I would have been one of the many to yawn when the last one in that list was mentioned. That is until my son, Tim, who is an IT Administrator for a finance house showed me Aurasma on an iPad. It was one of those moments when hardware, technology and software come together into a jaw-dropping moment that you know will change a part of your life.

(more…)

Has BT given up on rural broadband?

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Is it just me or is BT heading the way of many other established companies, missing new opportunities and losing out to foreign companies? I am talking about the embarrassing quality of service offered to many ADSL customers who are brave enough to attempt to live in the more remote areas of the country.

By remote I don’t mean in some far distant Scottish island where you only have the puffins and otters for company, but in a large village only 70 miles from the centre of London, for example. This village like many others in the area I live in suffers from appalling broadband speeds of less than 0.5Mbits/sec.  Yes, that’s right 0.5Mbits/sec ! Worse still the connection is often unstable, so trying to do your online banking or shopping becomes a frustrating task.

(more…)

SimplicITy ‘over 50s’ PC is so un-PC

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

This morning I had a press release emailed to me about a new range of systems by simplicITy computers to be launched today by Valerie Singleton, her of Blue Peter and ’sticky-backed plastic’ fame. She was also presenter of the BBC Money program for many years.

What got me fuming was that this range of computers was for the ‘over 50s’, those people whose brains are just too old and addled to understand new technology, like me and a lot of my friends. I find the term ’silver surfer’ particularly annoying; my hair went grey in my mid-30s so presumably dementia set in then as well. Heck, even our own youthful Jon Honeyball has a few threads of grey, so perhaps he’ll need some help with his computer soon!

By all means market a computer for ‘those who find existing computers confusing,’ but this assumption that the over-50s and silver surfers have special needs is just plain ageist.

As for this computer launch, the operating system is Linux, so you are not going to find as much local help for that as you would with a Windows machine. By all means build an easy-to-use interface on top of Windows, make a simple email client, and remove all the unnecessary buttons from the browser (or use Chrome). But keep an operating system underneath that your kids can help you with, and that has support for all those devices that you might want to plug into it.

I’ll get off me soapbox now.

Silverlight 3 and Expressions 3 have escaped!

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing of their web design suite Expression version 3. This means that the development tools for Silverlight 3 will be available for developers.

Although Silverlight 3 is, according to Microsoft’s own figures, only installed on one in three internet-connected computers, several big players such as Tesco and NBC are developing with this technology. We shouldn’t get too excited to hear that the big boys are developing with any one piece of technology as they have the resources to try out most things.

The choice if your company wants to produce a slick web application with smooth, high-quality video still comes down heavily in favour of Adobe’s Flash/Air/Flex framework, mainly because of the true multi-platform capabilites and the large installed user base (Adobe claims over 95% of browsers have flash installed) .

But it is obvious that Microsoft is putting its considerable weight behind Silverlight and the next year or two will determine if it sinks or swims.

End of Microsoft Popfly

Friday, July 17th, 2009

I just recieved an email from John Montgomery of the MIcrosoft Popfly Team that from August 24th Popfly will be no more.

Microsoft Popfly is that free service that enable you combine a series of applets into ‘mash ups’; we covered its use in the mag and online.

So all the time you spent coding your killer app with this service will be to no avail, another blow against using cloud services. In a stroke all your hard work will be removed.

Perhaps the rumours are right and Microsoft really is feeling the pinch?

Vodafone to charge for Twitter posts?

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Yesterday I recieved an SMS from Vodafone saying that SMS to Twitter will in future be charged at the normal rate. I assume from this that SMS tweets will not come out of your allowance of free SMS. If this is so then Vodafone’s definition of free is interesting to say the least. Anyone else had this SMS ?

How I broke a world record and had fun doing it

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Before this Bank Holiday weekend I was invited by Microsoft to a preview of Photosynth, a new way of combing pictures into a 3D world which is then hosted online. Photosynth also uses the ‘Deep Zoom’ technology which is in Sliverlight that I have written about in this month’s issue. The trick to creating a good ’synth’ is apparently to make sure that your photos overlap and also take photos of any detailed areas that you might what users to zoom in on.

Over the Bank Holiday weekend I attended the ‘NATS’ which is a huge gathering of modded cars, both American and old skool UK cars. I thought that this might be a great opportunity to try my efforts at making a Photosynth.

(more…)

Online advertising

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

It’s always flattering when a company asks if they can advertise on your website. However a recent spate of these requests got me thinking. The requests often come from online gaming sites and take to form of ‘ we will pay you £50 CPA if you will display our advert’.

At first this looks like easy money for the webmaster. But have a think about this. When agreeing to pay on CPA ( cost per acquisition ) the advertiser is effectively getting free promotion of their brand on as many sites as they can convince to run it. A visitor will see this advert many times and if they decided to click on it AND sign up, then that, and only that,  gets the CPA money.

So in effect you as a webmaster are giving away page views to these companies. They get free, no-risk advertising, as they only have to pay if someone signs up for their service and pays them. Nice money for them, but for you and your website? I think not.

We have stoped accepting CPA requests, we have built up the traffic with lots of hard work and see no reason for others to piggyback on this without contributing to the costs.

I’m sure there are those in ‘Ad Land’ who can argue the case of CPA and I am happy to be convinced otherwise.