Bother No More - A Weblog By Mattias Gunneras

Have you ever been annoyed that you can't reach a website and you're wondering if the problem is at your end or if the website is actually down? Well I have, and so has the people at downforeveryoneorjustme.com. On their website you can check if the site is down for other people too.

I thought it was a really cool, simple idea, but I figured it would be even better if you didn't have to copy URL, got to downforeveryoneorjustme.com paste it back in and then hit submit, so I made a little bookmarklet to do the job instantly for you.

Bookmarklet: Down for everyone?

Drag the above link to your toolbar to create a bookmarklet out of it. Should be working for Firefox and Safari.

I might be a bit of a cynical but I do have my doubts about buying expensive things from around the world over the internet. I always think that I will get ripped off and there's no way to get my money back if it happens. Having been recommended by my friend Oli and the knowing of saving lots of British pounds, I set out to buy a new camera lens for my canon 400d on ebay from a company called Digital Rev in Hong Kong. I picked out my lens and paid for the item and shipping using Paypal.

Yesterday the UPS guy came to my office and asked to see me. This was good news and bad news, the good news was that the lens actually arrived, the bad new was that he had a pink VAT invoice in his other hand. I kindly had to pay £44.12 before the man would let go of my parcel. Having remembered reading something about a 'no VAT guarantee' I went back to ebay and look it up, and there it was:

“This is a special 'We pay the import fee if there is any' auction.”

I contacted the ebay shop about this and only hours later they had reimbursed me the £44.12 to my Paypal account. Nicely done by Digital Rev! And thanks for helping me overcome my fears for future purchases from far flung corners of the world!

Every now and then you hear about these annoying wonder kids that are really young and does something better than a professional who's spent half their life learning it. Here's another one, Joey Lawrence is 18 years old and he has taken some really nice pictures.

“Still waiting to take my favorite photo…”
- Joey L

All photos by Joey L 

I haven't really thought much about photography as an hobby before. I've used the built in 5MP camera in my Nokia N95 mobile phone, I thought it was alright.

Santa was nice to me in 2007. Last christmas I got a Canon EOS 400d, a prosumer (I hate that word) model DSLR. And I can't tell you what a great difference this has made. Now, of course I knew this would be a huge boost in image size and quality, but what I couldn't predict was this whole new world of possibilities and creativity that I found in using it! I've been slightly obsessed with always bringing the camera with me and my Amazon wish list is growing long with camera equipment and new lenses. I love it!

Finding a new hobby is great fun and people should do it more often. I know it's not easy to just go out there and get one. I was lucky, mine came to me. But this has made me start thinking about the refreshing and wonderful feeling it brings when you find a new hobby. You dream about it, you bore you're co-workers under you lunch break with it, you spend all your money and time on it. I guess it's bit like falling in love. So go find a new hobby now! I recommend it!

foto by xdjio

There's a lot of blog posts out there that talks about apps on social networks. I've been involved in a few agent-client related facebook applications and I've started to see a patterns amongst them. So here's a few issues where I see, from a developers point of view, room for possible improvements.

Design 

Most clients want to use their house type face, their own colours and preferably all the functionality we're used to deliver in your average microsite.

"Is it possible to make that blue facebook stuff in the top go away?"

Now, this is only things that makes the application look and feel bad, we can live with that, after all it's been proven many times before that a website doesn't need pretty design to be successful. But please remember, we're building an application, not a billboard or TV ad.

Integration 

It's very hard to build a useful application for a client that merely sees the app as a 'presence' and a link of to their main website. And isn't willing to offer their full services through the application.

"Can that link there go to our products page?" 

Make your application extend your current services, not beeing a limited version of them.

Maintenance 

Since these social network platforms are constantly evolving, then so should your app. Putting your brand on facebook seems to be the new microsite, the clients project managers are the same and the money comes from the same budget. Only microsites are something that can be planned, executed and forgotten about, social network applications can not.

The fact is, if you turn your back on it, your application will sooner or later stop working in the sense it was intended. These platforms change, functionality is added daily, features that your app relies on is removed, and your app will start breaking the platforms terms of service. Your apps discussion board is going to be full of disappointed users, bad-naming your brand. Creating an application is a commitment, would you for example still use Mac OSX if Apple stopped updating it? 

Wow, this is really cool. Quick Silver Screen has a large archive of user uploaded films, most of them full feature movies that are free for you to watch.  The picture quality is superb. This is the best use of stage9 DivX player I've seen so far. I'm sure we'll see more of these things in the future as Flash Player upgrades it's video support to H.264.

Wondering how long this will stay online though. I'm sure there are a few people out there who wants to spoil our fun. 

I'm solely working on mac nowadays, and usually I run Windows XP through Parallels Desktop to check my stylesheets in IE. There are however quite a few services that offers to show you what your web page looks like in different browsers on multiple systems. A couple of years ago tryed a few of them out and I came to the conclution that this is absolute crap.

Today I read a post on Web worker daily, testing a heap of these services and there was actually one that cought my eye. IE NetRenderer is a completely free service that renders your site in IE5.5, IE6 and IE7. It can also give you a mixed view ofIE6 and 7 which might come in handy. This is service is also rendering your page in realtime, which makes it far more faster than other similar sites.

So if you don't have access to a copy of Windows, this might be an option for crude css testing.

At my office there is a rule that we can not sit in the same spot for  more then 6 months. Today was shuffle day, and yay I got a spot with a great view over london!

For quite some time we've been working on a new website for Poke. The result is a blog/portfolio site. The site design was mainly made by Nicky and some help from Cookie and Buzz, and I built it. 

This project really made me fall in love with jQuery. Excellent javascript library! Be sure to check out the site.

Last week me and my girlfriend went for a trip to New York. I had never been before and I loved it! I really liked Cildo Meireles' Zero Dollar bill on exhibition in Moma.

Another funny (disgusting) thing we saw was these bacon flavoured chocolate bars. yuk!

And finally to round things of, a piece of nostalgia, Zoltar the fortune teller from movie Big. The AI in this one is out of this world!