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27th april 2006

ps3 time again

some good news from playstation magazine about the ps3 yesterday. the release date hasn't changed - november, worldwide - but at least it's nice to have some kind of confirmation. but the good news is that it - apparently - it's only gonna cost around £280, which ,for the best of the next generation games consoles, and a blu-ray player, doesn't sound too bad to me.

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http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/04/27/ps3-t...

20th april 2006

would hide a stain on your wall

when the thecssweblog wrote this week of a poster that "conveys the importance of web standards visually" i saw myself printing several out and sticking them all over my work's office, but...

i don't want to sound awful, but does anyone else see any kind of rhyme or reason in taking the time out to create something like the standards in a nutshell" poster? i'm sure natalie jost is a very nice person, and her site is very nice too, but c'mon. thecssweblog states that it "may be the key in driving home the point to those who have seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the concept". how exactly does it do that? imagine taking that into your next project pitch, and saying "you really should consider us because all our sites are developed with web standards in mind, observe...", and holding your "standards in a nutshell" poster up.

again, i really don't want to sound awful, but at least just present it as a quirky, humorous little poster to stick on your wall rather than "how to best explain web standards to someone unfamiliar" or something that "conveys the importance of web standards visually" (thecssweblog, not natalie).

if only zeldman had thought of this, 'designing with web standards' could have been a flyer.

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http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/04/20/would...

19th april 2006

the greatest

despite having supported newcastle united all my life, been a season ticket holder for several years, travelled to see my team in europe on more than one occasion, and t'wife would claim that the game is the most important thing in my life, i made a decision right from day one of my site that i wouldn't talk about football. however, as the majority of fans of english football will know, alan shearer, on monday, probably played his last - competitive - game for the mags, and although i would bet on my life that he's never visited, or will visit, oneplayer, i just wanted to say...

... thank you.

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http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/04/19/the-g...

13th april 2006

bed time reading

relevance are posting reviews of various ajax books, with the aim of producing the definitive list for ajax developers. they seem pretty honest, and certainly worth a read.

there are four books reviewed so far, and they've got "at least another four reviews coming out in the next couple of weeks".

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http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/04/13/bed-t...

11th april 2006

wow. just wow.

i realise i've been a bit slow on this - although it has a lot to do with the uk being a bit rubbish when it comes to this kind of stuff - but i finally witnessed hd television on sunday. with an hour to go before all the food shops in the area closed, and no food in the house, t'wife and i decided it would be best to spend the next two hours in an electrical superstore looking at lcd televisions, and off to currys in isleworth we sped.

we've been talking about getting a hd-ready lcd for a couple of weeks, but i had absolutely no idea that this place had set up an hd source for their tvs. my god. 3 lg plasmas and 3 lg lcds, of 37" and above, all hooked up to an hd source showing what looked like a "visit europe" tourist information video. my jaw dropped and i have a faint recollection of dribbling at various points throughout the following hour or so.

all the reports i've read - which is quite a few - are true. it really is a revolution in tv. the picture quality, the colours, the detail, everything, is just mind blowing. t'wife was just as amazed, and give me that "sod it, let's just buy one on credit" look on more than a dozen occasions. i know what you're thinking, and the answer is no. no, we didn't get one. but it won't be long.

oh no, it won't be long.

incidentally, we ordered pizza.

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http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/04/11/wow-j...

10th april 2006

w3c taming the xmlhttprequest animal

missed this last week - you may have noticed i haven't posted for a while as i've been soooo busy - but the standardisation of ajax seems to be on it's way.

the w3c kids published their first working draft on, my friend and yours, the xmlhttprequest object on wednesday. they're aiming to provide more interoperability between the various implementations of the object, so i guess no more new ActiveXObject / new XMLHttpRequest browser sniffing type code.

no doubt this will take a long, long time, but it's nice to know that they're making a start.

you can read the whole w3c working draft if you want to.

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http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/04/10/w3c-t...

4th april 2006

is anything happening?

it doesn't take a genius to realise that it's good to let your users know that something is actually happening behind the scenes of your brand spanking new ajax app, particularly if you're relying on external resources to send you the data that the user wants. but if, like me, you find creating animated gifs a bit tedious, and you get bitter that you're wasting time when you could be writing code, what you need is an animated gif, loading sequence, generator. if only.

what? oh, right...

it turns out that there is such a thing. at the moment, it only creates one style, but you can customise the background colour and the dots colour to match you site (mmmm, white and grey for me then), but i guess if this thing get's really popular, we may be offered all sorts of crazy sequences soon.

get generating.

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permalink:
http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/04/04/is-an...

thanks for coming