MyChristmas Will Fill You With Holiday Cheer

Rated: 8/10

"Whether you are already riding a holiday high or still looking for something to get you in the spirit MyChristmas has everything you need to celebrate the season." - Allison Glennon, from App Craver.

"MyChristmas is an all in one holiday app by Talee Talee and it has everything that you need to make your holiday bright. This app is jam packed with whatever you are going to need to take you through Christmas right into the New Year.

When you open MyChristmas and go to the main menu it becomes clear that you are in for a pretty thorough holiday experience. The full list includes: a Christmas Countdown, “A Christmas Carol” eBook, Christmas Carols, Music, Games, Entertainment, New Years, and iChoose Choice".

MyChristmas Review from iPhone App Reviews.net

A review of MyChristmas from Michael over at iPhone App Reviews.net:


I don’t know the people at Talee Talee, but after poking around MyChristmas for a while it’s pretty clear that they took a good look at the mess of Christmas apps hitting iTunes and they came to the conclusion that it’s all just soooooo unnecessary. And they’re right! Seasonal apps are usually very lightweight and have a pretty short shelf life so why not roll them all up into one download?

And thus was born “The Christmas Compendium” that is MyChristmas. This kitchen sink app includes all of the following:

- Two Christmas Countdowns
- “A Christmas Carol” eBook
- 18 Christmas carol lyrics
- 7 instrumental Christmas songs
- 2 pretty good Christmas games (Solitaire and Match)
- Ding-’em-yourself Christmas Bells, pretty cool
- A flickering Christmas candle
- Mistletoe with smooching sounds
- 2 Christmas sounds (Santa and Rudolph)
- New Year’s Eve Countdown
- Auld Lang Syne lyrics
- A fireworks display

Whoa! That’s a lotta holiday crap crammed into one application.

By themselves none of these apps-within-an-app will blow you away, but as a collection it’s pretty impressive. You’ve got your countdown, the eBook, the music, the lyrics… it’s Christmas overload! But it’s way more efficient than installing 10 different apps that you’ll be deleting come January.

The best parts of MyChristmas are probably the music, the Solitaire and Match games, and the Christmas Bells. The mistletoe could also come in handy if you’re “that guy”, the one who’s always ramming your tongue down a girl’s throat when she thinks she’s leaning in for an innocent holiday peck.

An interesting thing that Talee Talee built into MyChristmas is its ability to “talk” to iChoose when you can’t decide what part of the Compendium you want to play with. On any menu screen you just tap on “iChoose Choice” and the app will temporarily switch to iChoose (which you have to have installed already), make a selection for you, and then kick you back to the selected MyChristmas section.

It’s true that a lot of the apps included in MyChristmas can be had for free and some of them, like the Snow Scene, are pretty underwhelming, but you could do a lot worse for a buck. If searching the iTunes App Store for various Christmas apps sounds like a pain in the ass that you just don’t want to deal with, spend $.99 on MyChristmas and be done with it. Even despite a little lameness here and there, MyChristmas comes with plenty of value to make it worth buying.

Top Christmas iPhone app lists

A quick round-up of 3 top lists of iPhone Christmas apps from the interweb:

File Cluster - Top 5 iPhone apps for Christmas

"This last application is actually a compilation of Christmas games, bells, holiday music and a New Year countdown. The developers are also offering MyChristmas free until 14 December, so you better hurry and install it on your iPhone."

OnSoftware - 10 iPhone Christmas apps

"Compendium of classic yuletide games and festive fun"

Sleek iPhone - Top Free Christmas Apps for Your iPhone this Holiday

MyChristmas is available now from Talee Talee.

My Christmas climbs

MyChristmas has been spotted at number 32 of the most popular free entertainment Apps.

Let's see if this helps in anyway when the free-promo ends and it returns as a paid app.

SPOTY

It is the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year award this sunday. SPOTY has a hard time this year. The prime award is offered to the best British sports star in the last 12 months. With this being an Olympic year (in which we did so well) that it is a hard task, and an often biased task, to decide who should win the award.

The main award is a public vote. It will be decided by the public phoning voting system, the BBC may have a slightly tarnished recent history on public phone votes, but all will be good and decided by the voters. That's good democracy.

There are only two winners. I say only, because there are far more candidates that deserve a chance. We have fabulous Cyclers, amazing Rowers, but there are only two winners for the public to decide upon for this award. They are Lewis Hamilton and Rebecca Adlington.

My sports are Football and Motor Racing. Lewis is exceptional. Perhaps he should show a little more humility at times, but he is destined to be one of the best drivers of all time. Certainly the best British driver. I grew up watching F1 with Mansell and later Damon Hill. I watched (teary eyed) when Damon won his title in '96. I do not mind admitting that I shed tears, it meant so much to me and the man who was never the best, but worked his socks off to get his job done. Lewis is different to Damon, he has the natural talent and ability, he came into F1 at a young age and in one of the best cars. I admire Lewis, I respect Lewis but I cannot vote for Lewis this year.

The F1 decider this year was a fascinating race. McLaren were far too cautious. Lewis was out of it, although I know they say they knew that Glock would falter at the line - I cannot believe you would let it go that close!

Lewis deserves his title. He would have deserved last years' title even more, but, and I stop my personal preferences now, Becky Adlington has one chance every 4 years for stardom. We did not have a lot of belief in our athletes going into the games this year, and we certainly did not expect such a performance from a British woman in the pool. We knew we would do well in the cycling, we knew we would do well in the rowing, the pool? No. That was such an amazing performance, in one race she was thought not to even enter.

Becky Adlington, we the nation, announce you BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Well done girl! Amazing to watch and my sporting moment of the year (even though I did have to get up early to watch it live).

VOTE FOR BECKY ON SUNDAY.

That is all. :-)

Football silly season(s) and stupid transfer exclusives and what not

I love my football, but I also despise some of the rubbish that goes with it. Non-stop press "EXCLUSIVES" and the occasional outburst of utter drivel, probably as this article is.

David Bentley is a quality player. He is also a prat and the opinion he gives is that he thinks more of himself than he should do. The ability to kick a ball about for a salary of somewhere between £40,000 and £140,000 a week (yes, a week!) is a nice job if you have the talent to play in the Premier League. Although, the unfortunate side effect of so much money being earned by people who do not know how to handle it, is that they become somewhat lacking in their attachment to the real world, who wouldn't be?

Bentley was considered the replacement for Beckham. The phone-in shows were full of it. "Beckham is finished", "He's too old", "He can't run", "What has Beckham ever done for England?". OK, the last one is really stupid, as anyone with a brain will realise - but I tell you, I have not only heard phone-in shows spouting such trash, but have also heard first-hand from people with that belief. What? Well, quite.

Anyway, back to Bentley.... no doubt that he moulded himself on Beckham. He can play a beautiful ball, with some (not too dissimilar) style. But, he also refused to play for the England under 21's. He took a pay rise for joining Spurs and when Ramos was in charge, didn't look like he could be assed to play for them.

So, from the BBC, comes today's "gossip" column, with this little beauty being reported by the Daily Star...

New Real Madrid boss Juande Ramos will return to his former club Tottenham to try to sign wingers David Bentley and Aaron Lennon in January. (Daily Star)

Sorry. Am I really thick or something? Bentley couldn't be bothered to play for Ramos at Spurs. Why would he now want to sign him at Madrid? He doesn't, does he. End of silly season for this rumour. Things have picked up for Spurs under Harry Redknapp, and in no small way that is simply down to the players doing a bit more of what they are paid for.

It's also fair to mention that before Bentley was the "Replacement for Beckham", the previous candidate was Aaron Lennon, and before that (everyone forgotten already?) was Shaun Wright-Phillips. All good players, I prefer Shaun myself because I think he works for his place, but really, Becks is still going. Did anyone tell you he's joining Milan next month? Sure, it's for money, and to keep an option for his England place, and Milan are doing it for the same reasons probably. I will say though, nobody and I repeat nobody has ever played in an England shirt who could 'bend it like Beckham', and I think everybody knows that now and will miss him like hell when he is finally is gone.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing

As Chris mentions below, all of our iPhone and iPod touch apps are free this week.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and with our newly discovered 20-20 vision into the future, we realise that we should probably have made MyChristmas free as an introduction, rather than doing so now.

We put a lot of effort into ensuring that our apps are not only functionally sound, but also well presented and enjoyable to use. We are professionals and are primarily in this business, as you are in whatever your business is, to make money. This is part of our job. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed just as you do.

Our policy on providing free apps remains steadfast. Although everybody wants everything for free all the time, in practice that is not an option. We provide high quality products with good levels of support for a modest price where applicable. We do not believe that to be unreasonable.

iChoose is and always will be free because we believe it is best suited as a free app. It does what it says on the tin and it does it very well. An awful lot of people enjoy using it and we are very happy to have provided it for the iPhone and iPod touch community. This policy is not something that can be applied to everything we release, unfortunately that is the way of the world. We will continue developing both paid and free apps and hope that you enjoy using them. If you support us and help make us rich then we will give you back lots of free apps, that's a promise.

Enjoy this offer while it lasts.

Free!

The festivity must be getting to us because for a very limited time (until the 14th) ALL our Apps are FREE! Yes, we've made them free!

This is for 2 reasons (and we're not shy saying why).

1) The Apps are buried in the App Store, so unless they are popular they are not found. Allowing them to be free for a while will hopefully allow people to use our Apps and see they are great. Hopefully in the future more of our stuff will be found, seen and purchased.

2) We love Christmas and we like being generous.

Merry Christmas from Talee Talee!

Oops...

One of two things has happened. Either we have annoyed Apple to such an extent that they have removed us from the App Store, or (much more likely!) my own personal stupidity has resulted in our apps not appearing on the App Store at the moment, or indeed for most of the day.

We have rectified things (hopefully) from our end and they should start filtering through again soon. As far as we know the App Store links from the Talee Talee website work fine again now, although you may have trouble seeing us in iTunes.

Hope to be back soon!

Sorry, I won't do it again :-)

Spread The Cheer With Your iPhone

Over on iPhone Nuts (www.iPhoneNuts.com) is the nicely titled: Best Christmas Application For Your iPhone

We agree.


"Well as I sit here typing this wishing I had a caramel apple spice drink, I’ve got the perfect iPhone Christmas app to let you know about. This app really has it all under one roof. The app is called MyChristmas, and for everything this app will do for you this Christmas it still comes in at a cheap $1.99. "

"My favorite part in the entertainment section was the Bells. There are seven sleigh bells you can tap and play your own Christmas song."

- Ryan Ray, iPhoneNuts.com


You can continue reading more of Ryan Ray's post on the iPhone Nuts website.

Christmas is nearly here, so get into the spirit right now with MyChristmas.

More information about MyChristmas (including additional screenshots and videos) is available from the Talee Talee MyChristmas website:

www.taleetalee.com/MyChristmas/

iChoose still going strong - it must be update time then!

It's quite amazing really, when you think about it. Despite the fact that iChoose has been knocking about since July now, it is still going pretty strong and is currently the 52nd most popular entertainment app on the USA iTunes store.

We're still getting reports of quite a lot of downloads, and that's brilliant.

We believe in updates, so you'll be pleased to know that yet another iChoose update will be winging it's way to you shortly. What's new we hear you ask? Well, we'll tell you...

1. We've updated the UI a bit

2. A lot of people wanted 'shake' to make a decision, rather than just touch the screen. It's in now.

3. iChoose is now integrated with some of our other apps. MyChristmas and iChoose play together nicely, so that you can use MyChristmas to ask iChoose what music to play, what game to play, what entertainment to use and what carol to sing along to, etc. We think you'll like it very much. And, vice versa, from within iChoose you can ask it to choose an aspect of MyChristmas for you to see. (Obviously you will need to have both MyChristmas and iChoose installed on your iPhone or iPod touch for this functionality)

4. The same functionality integrated with uSnap! Can't decide which type of game to play? Let iChoose decide for you.

5. Following on from a wonderful comment from a bloke that downloaded iChoose, we've added in Turn Left or Turn Right decision making. This guy deliberately drives round getting lost so that he can learn the area and the streets! What a concept. Now you too can get lost with iChoose. It's sort of like a reverse sat-nav.

OK, so that's on its way in a few days when it gets through the App Store process - updates to iChoose (v2.1), MyChristmas (v1.1) and uSnap! (v1.1)

And, we have one more idea for another iChoose update before the end of this year. We're going to put in some GTD stuff - the iChoose way.

Christmas Bells for your iPhone

Talee Talee bring you Christmas Bells, for your iPhone or iPod touch.

Christmas Bells is a free introduction into the joys of MyChristmas, available now on the iPhone App Store.

Christmas Bells has been released and should appear in iTunes later this week. Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas! :o)

New review

Just a little post to mention a new review of MyChristmas.

Head on over to AppleiPhoneSchool for a look. There is lots of other great info and reviews on this site if you're an iPhone/iPod Touch fan.

Enjoy.

MyChristmas Discount, this weekend!

For this weekend, MyChristmas is 50% off on the iPhone App Store. For just $0.99 (£0.59) you can get this wonderful Christmas compendium, for holiday fun this season.

Hurry though, offer ends Monday!

iPhone App Store link

MyChristmas on Apple iPhone School

Click here to read more

uSnap released

uSnap! was released on the Apple iPhone App Store today.

Visit the Talee Talee website for further information, screenshots and a demo video.

Remember, it's only £0.59 ($0.99) for a limited time!

Talee Talee website update

We've updated the Talee Talee website, giving it a fresh look and added in some information about our native iPhone and iPod touch apps - uSnap!, MyChristmas, iChoose and a preview of the soon to be released native version of utopia solitaire.



The legacy web app versions of utopia solitaire, iChoose, iTouchStar and Blitz! can still be found in the Free Stuff section, along with some nice free MyChristmas wallpaper (for iPhone, iPod touch, Mac OS X and Windows).

uSnap

Coming this week to the iPhone App Store, is... uSnap!


It will be the most fun you have this week, with your clothes on. Although, hmmm, strip snap!? That might work!

uSnap! is being introduced at a special reduced price of £0.59 ($0.99), so get it quick!

Keep an eye on the Talee Talee store page on iTunes, and the Talee Talee website which will undergo a massive makeover in the next day or three.

The Woz

Here's a nice little interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Steve sometimes gets alot of bad press but this interview shows Steve informally and having a genuine chat about his career and his love for Apple....

You can grab it here:

Announcing MyChristmas (iPhone Christmas app)

Hot of the press we can announce that MyChristmas, our latest iPhone app has been successfully added to the iPhone App Store.

MyChristmas is a collection of great little apps, all rolled into one (like iChoose) to create your 'Christmas Compendium'. 

FEATURES:

- Christmas Music: 6 fabulous Christmas music tracks (courtesy of Kevin MacLeod) that can be played and stopped whenever you want them to be. They are: "Deck the Halls", "Jingle Bells", "Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem", "Oh, Christmas Tree", "Silent Night" and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"

- Christmas Games: Snow Solitaire and Christmas Match. Snow Solitaire is a twist on Klondike solitaire and Christmas Match is a traditional 'match 2 pieces from the grid' game with a Christmas flavour and saved scoring.

- Christmas Countdown: A visual countdown to Christmas and a 'Sleeps till Christmas' for young Children, we fully expect the immortal phrases of "How many more sleeps until Christmas, mummy!" and "Is there anymore sleeps to Christmas, daddy?" to bring much joy to parents and children alike.

- Christmas Entertainment: Musical Bells is a great deal of fun and you can use the seven bells to play your own Christmas tunes (such as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star). Snow Scene is, well, a Snow Scene. Our very own Christmas Candle, it looks great and you can zoom in/out for 3 different sizes. Mistletoe is a virtual sprig of mistletoe, complete with 'sounds', and Christmas Sounds provides a bit of amusement with a Honking Rudolph and a Merry Santa.

- "A Christmas Carol": An eBook that let's you read the classic Dickens story on your iPhone or iPod touch, complete with a single bookmark feature to remember where you were! A little hint, always remember to use the 'Update My Bookmark' button every now and then to save where you are, you can then get back to that point from the 'My Bookmark' option in the eBook menu screen.

- Christmas Carols: A collection of words (and Wikipedia information links - internet required) for popular Christmas Carols.

- iPhone New Year: A countdown to New Year, the words to Auld Lang Syne (Auld Lang Syne music coming soon) and a Fireworks display!

- And more.....

More information, some screenshots and QuickTime video can be found on the Talee Talee website.

We're going to try and get version 1.1 out soon also! 

For less than the price of a Big Mac you can get all festive!

NVC Launches

We're pleased to announce that the new site for Northview Computing has gone live.

This is a re-design with fresh content for NVC. The site makes use of a few different technologies including; Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and a CSS based design.

It's driven by our own, very simple to use CMS system which allows NVC to update services, products, news and customer testimonials. 

The site also allows potential customers to gain an estimated support quote.

NVC provides outsourced IT support for companies, organisations and charities in the Hampshire area. Their aim is to provide high quality, cost effective services to the SME market at the same level of innovation and robustness that is expected and experienced by larger organisations.

A little quiet.....

We've been a little quiet lately, not because there is anything wrong, but because we've been so busy.

Firstly, let's just say a quick 'Hoorah!' for Lewis Hamilton.  Well done, but don't do it like that next year please!

So, where is the app we kept saying we would release (utopia Solitaire). It's really, honestly almost done. However, we have another 2 apps nearly, honestly done also as we are deciding to release 3 apps together. Without being biased, they are great! 

Keep an eye on things as we will be releasing very soon.......

Grabbing clean screenshots...

The ability to capture on the mac is really, really easy. Using 'Grab' or the key-combos to capture a screen/area has been thought about and implemented in an excellent way (the joy of working with OS X).

However, there are some nifty utilities out there that can assist even more. One of which is called 'paparazzi'. This little gem will allow you to specify a webpage, an image size and then when you set it to work will produce a lovely screen grab (minus the browser window etc.) for you to use. 

It's really simple and handy when you want to grab and archive/use pages from websites.

The only issue I have found so far is that it will not render any embedded flash in the page.  

Déjà Lew

It's Déjà vu time for Lewis Hamilton. Just as happened last year, he goes into the final race of the season (Brazil), in two weeks time, leading the championship by 7 points.

Hamilton can now win the title in any of the following ways...

- Finishes 5th or higher, regardless of where Massa finishes (including Massa winning)
- Finishes 7th or higher if Massa finishes 2nd
- Finishes anywhere ahead of Massa
- Massa fails to finish in the top 2

In Formula One, if the points are equal at the end of the season, a 'count-back' is performed. The driver with the most wins would be champion. If the number of wins are tied, then the driver with the most 2nd place finishes would be champion, etc.

The only way the points can be tied this year is if Massa wins and Hamilton is 6th in Brazil. If that were to happen, Massa would be champion because he would have 6 wins to Hamilton's 5.

Here's the positions that Hamilton and Massa have finished in, so far:

Remember that Kimi Räikkönen won the title from Hamilton last year in exactly the same circumstances in the final race.

Lewis, please don't do anything stupid this time mate! We're backing ya to bring it home! Let them Ferrari's go, and probably Alonso as well - sit nicely in 4th and stay out of trouble. Come on Lewis!

Who's to blame? You decide.

Formula One Management have released footage of the incidents involving Lewis Hamilton, Felipe Massa and Sébastien Bourdais from the Japanese Grand Prix at Fuji last weekend.

Lewis was penalised for his first corner move, being judged to have blocked Kimi Raikkonen and prevented him making the corner. Massa was penalised for driving off the track and spinning Lewis as he came back on and Bourdais was penalised for spinning Massa going into the first corner as Massa attempted to get round the outside as Bourdais came out of the pits.

For what it's worth, here's my two (three) cents...

1. Not sure. Lewis was locked up and made it impossible for Raikkonen to make the turn, but 'similar' incidents happen at the start of virtually every race, in virtually every category. Lewis was undoubtably stupid, and by being locked up did impede Raikkonen, but where do you draw the line, especially for first turn incidents where everyone is trying to get the upper hand?

2. Correct call. Massa went wide, went completely off track and hit Lewis, who was taking the correct racing line.

3. You are joking, right? What was Bourdais supposed to do? The rules are pretty simple, you are supposed to stay on the race track and he was right on the inside, it was up to Massa to take a different line or not attempt the move. They were racing for position and Bourdais had every right to stick to the inside. Had the roles been reversed, there is no way that Massa would have been penalised for doing the same to Bourdais.

Glims

I have been playing with Glims for Safari from machangout. This is a 'plugin' for safari that adds a whole host of useful features to increase your browsing pleasure and productivity.

Upon download and installation it adds an additional preference tab to the standard safari one where you can configure various options. Currently I'm running with the defaults.

Glims will add thumbnail images on your tabs (which change to an X on mouse over), and a useful max-window option from the safari window (very useful!).

The built in search window in safari gets SAYT (Search as you type) with icons, a handy feature.

Google (and yahoo) search results now also come with handy thumbnail previews which makes choosing the right page often much quicker.

Time will tell if this plugin continues to impress me (and maintains performance), but for now.... I love it.

Mad Man

Ladies and gentleman, this is Chris 'jumping' out of a plane. Madman!

"I never did not though go and push him though, innit"

Apple and their spell check

Spell checking across any application in OS X is implemented by the OS. That in itself is a fabulous feature, but have you ever thought to wonder about what is in that dictionary?

Apple products (and others) are in there.

Create your email, TextMate file, iWork document etc. and enter your favoured Apple product name.... no 'that isn't a word' here mate. iTunes, iPhone, iPod, MacBook, iMac, iLife, iBlah *, iWork, and even YouTube are all validly spelt words. Isn't that good thinking?


* iBlah is a bad word, with a red line under it to tell me I was wrong when I typed that.

Happy

We like it when people are happy. We like it when people who use our apps are happy.

We like these reviews (and there are many, many more like these!)....

Thanks all for the great feedback. New version coming soon with some amusingly unique features.

Also, lookout for the wonderful utopia Solitaire....

Di Resta gets McLaren test

Paul Di Resta has shown some exceptional talent in the DTM over the last two seasons, and has been rewarded with four days testing in the McLaren F1 car. He has single-seater experience from Formula Renault and F3 Euroseries, and If Paul can show his pace and make a transition into F1 then we may have a potential future world champion here.

Go Paul!

From Autosport:

The McLaren Mercedes team will run British driver Paul di Resta during four days of testing later in October.

The 22-year-old Scot, currently in second place in the DTM standings, will take to the Silverstone circuit today and tomorrow and again on October 20-21.

McLaren are bringing di Resta in as part of the Young Driver programme that allows teams to carry out further testing during the season without the burdens of mileage and tyre restrictions.

The 2005 McLaren Autosport BRDC award winner is currently racing for Mercedes-Benz in the DTM.

Liquid Lush

What a great idea - so simple and yet so useful. Wow.

Yep, that is Liquid Mongoose. If you have not seen it, or tried it then head on over to their site and start creating.

Home users, businesses etc. could all make use of the service.  Designers can design for it and CD/DVD racks all around the world can slim down.

Hoorah for Liquid.

Shut up moaning!

An astonishing load of of whining and whinging from Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo! Put them toys back in that pram young man, or no sweaties for you, and you just wait until your father gets home!

The Singapore Grand Prix received rave reviews. It's an F1 street circuit so there was never going to be loads of great overtaking, although come to think of it, even with Spa and Monza, the overtaking is more than somewhat limited these days.

Di Montezemolo has launched a scathing and very childish attack on the Singapore Grand Prix, suggesting the track "should be in a circus" and describing the event as "humiliating for F1". What? The only thing humiliating about the entire weekend was Ferrari and their complete inability to get a little green light to come on at the right time without sending half a refueling rig down the pitlane. Oh, how the McLaren boys laughed!

"The tracks too bumpy!" cried Di Montezemolo. "I'm telling my mum about you!".

Get a grip man, I know it's hard for the little F1 darlings when they can't race on a snooker table surface, but really, I don't remember seeing too many drivers hitting the walls because the bumps were too much for them (although Kimi did, of course).

Singapore was a wonderful event, superbly organised and held in an environment second to none. F1 cars racing at night, racing under the city traffic, pure bliss. What an event for the local residents - F1 on your doorstep! At night! The turn out was good, the safety cars made for a fascinating race, we got another season winner in Alonso, a career best 2nd place for Rosberg and a fine 3rd for Lewis. What more does Mr Di Montezemolo want? Apart from something red on the podium, maybe? Oh, that's it, isn't it? I just worked out why he's acting like a 3 year old.

I feel sorry for Massa though. He's lost a title chance because of Ferrari's stupid pit light system. But, they won't be using it again - if they don't pull it themselves, the FIA will now after this latest shambles.

Luca - stop spouting such a load of old tosh and grow up!

Ferrari furious over Singapore GP

UPDATE:

Bernie (via an Autosport article) responds.

Ferrari use a lights system instead of the traditional "lollipop", and Ecclestone suggested the team should try to simplify things.

"If I wanted to be a smart-arse, I'd have devised a system so that the light goes green to release the driver at the same time as the coupling hose comes off the car," Ecclestone added.

"If it's a matter of turning a switch, which I am led to believe is how it works, then why not stick with the 'lollipop' man of old? Why do you want to have some other piece of technology that can go wrong? It's over the top."

Well said Bernie. Spot on, you tell 'em.

Track that Mac

I was going over 'what if' scenarios the other day, and one of them happened to be 'what if my laptop got stolen'.

Mostly, there is nothing you can do other than ensure you have good passwords and great backups. However, you can install some software that 'might' help you locate your machine should it fall into the wrong hands.

There are lots of services out there that offer machine tracking and the ability to locate it once stolen. I came across Adeona which is free and open-source. I like that.

It comes in two flavours for mac; One with camera enabled, and one without. I opted for the first.

Installation was a breeze and it outputs an encrypted file that you store somewhere safe (not on your machine!). It will then periodically sign in and take a picture (the green light does briefly fire up, but it is very brief).  This data gets stored on secure servers and is encrypted to keep you safe.

I attempted the retrieve by running their software and supplied it my special 'OST' file. It went away and recovered the data including a mug shot of me, the IPs (Local and WAN) along with network information (it picked up the names of my routers etc.). 

Now this isn't necessarily going to help if your laptop is stolen. Many people may re-install the OS, or the tech savy may check for software like this before launching onto the internet. However, for free, surely it's worth it - just for the 'what if it actually works!' scenario.

At last!

I know Apple has many things to work on, but something that annoyed us (and many other developers) was the review system in the Appstore.

It was WIDE open so anyone could go and write 'tat' without actually purchasing and using an app.

What this meant was you had very silly people writing nonsense reviews and rating apps at 1 star. Often this would be a rival application developer or just someone who really needs to 'get out more'.

Well, now you at-least have to purchase and install the app in order to review it. As this post from Macworld points out.  

Ok, it is not going to get rid of some of the stupid reviews but at least it will take a little effort to review now (and that should deter some).

Do you read reviews? We do, and love to look through apps that have got great reviews and then in amongst you'll see a 1 star 'dumb' comment. It's obvious what's going on, and hopefully obvious to the more sane public!

ThaiCats at the Southampton Boat Show

A picture of the ThaiCats CC and TT boats at the Southampton Boat Show.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Valentino Rossi, for winning his 6th MotoGP title at the weekend (his 8th in total, including his 125cc and 250cc titles)!

The word legend is banded about all to often these days and few are truly deserving of the honour. Rossi however, is the true epitome of legendness.

Not only has the man dominated top-flight motorcycling for almost a decade, not only did he decide to leave the comfort zone he had at Honda to drag an under-performing Yamaha to the top, he also retains not only a great sense of humour but a lot of humility. Valentino is a genius.

His track record is stunning. One year in a series to work it out, and the title in the second year and onwards.

In 1996 Rossi made his 125cc debut. He won the title in 1997.

In 1998 Rossi made his 250cc debut. He won the title in 1999.

In 2000 Rossi made his 500cc debut, guess what? he won the title in 2001 (the final year of the 500s). He won the first 990cc MotoGP championship in 2002 (add 2003, 2004 and 2005 to that) and now he has his first 800cc title.


Valentino Rossi - 6 times MotoGP champion, and a nice bloke. Well done sir.

McLaren ready for first F1 night race

From Thursday's press conferance...

Q: (Tomas Richtr – TV Nova) To the McLaren drivers: could you please quantify the advantage from the headlights that your team at Woking installed on your car last week?
HK: Yeah, I had a chat about that with my engineer but I still prefer the aerodynamic advantage, so I will keep the lights off.
LH: For me, I thought I needed a bit more downforce, so I’ve opted to use them.

Capturing a single window on Mac

I love the way screen-capture is integrated into OS X. It's another of those tasks that they have thought about and made really 'slick'.

I just found out though that capturing a single window is really, really easy too.

All you do is this:

- Command + Shift 4, then hit Space

You'll then get a nice 'Camera' icon where you can select the window (it does not even have to be in the foreground) and screen-capture will handle the grab.

Simple.

Tags?

I have been playing with 'Tag Clouds' and this is what our Blog reported....

A real mix of words from a real broad range of articles!

I also had a quick go on one of our client sites 'Mastersparesonline'

And as I liked the results so much decided to try our latest client Thaicats also.

I hope I'm wrong but....

It seems Nick Faldo is being controversial for the sake of being controversial.

Europe has always fielded strong, though-out, gritty teams for the Ryder cup. A team based on what works best, rather than who might individually be very strong or 'the best'.

Leaving out Monty and Darren seems strange - they are great team players. Day 2 sees Nick drop Westwood and Garcia who actually played really well on day 1. Why?

Nick was a great player, and is a great coach but the choices he is making do not seem right. 'Hopefully' I will be proven wrong and Europe will come good over the next couple of days....

London to Paris completed

The London to Paris ride has been completed.  Hooray!

A long and tough ride - but good friends made and obstacles overcome.

The ride involved a nasty accident on day 1 which then broke my bike but after being able to use a spare bike I was able to complete the ride.  We rode at a good pace which meant it was a good challenge, although the hills regardless of distance where always a challenge.

What's next....that cancelled skydive!

iChoose 2.0 - now available!

Free Torchwood from the BBC

As part of their Big Bang (no, it's not what your thinking!) Day, the BBC have produced a one-off Torchwood radio special. Broadcast this afternoon on BBC Radio 4.

The episode, entitled "Lost Souls" (40 ish mins long), is now available as a free MP3 download from the BBC Radio 4 website. Given that it's an MP3 link, it may be available to those outside the UK as well - I don't know.

Get it here - be quick though, it's only available for 7 days.

Busy redecorating

We're busy redecorating right now - our new utopia 365 website will be up within the coming days (or weeks - you know how it is).

We will also be launching a much needed update to our Talee Talee iPhone and iPod touch website, including details of our native iPhone Apps.

In the meantime, if you'd like to subscribe to our notifications service, pop along to the website and enter your email address. We'll let you know when the new site is live and keep you up to date with what's happening in the world of utopia 365.

Thaicats brochure

The Thaicats website is up and running, and we've also worked with them to design a brochure for the newly imported catamarans.

Visit them at the Southampton Boat Show and take a closer look, or arrange a test drive.

Mastersparesonline going strong

It has been a few weeks since the launch of the new Masterspares website (http://www.mastersparesonline.com).

The site provides hundreds of spares and accessories for various Domestic Appliances, along with many finished goods including top brands like Dualit and Miele.

Utilising the functionality of ruby on rails along with a very clean design the site is becoming popular with consumers. Mastersparesonline enables people to repair and update their appliances rather than dispose of them - saving money and being environmentally friendly.

Given that there are literally hundreds of thousands of parts and accessories it's very important for Simon (the owner) to be able to quickly add items onto the site when they become available, or if someone contacts him for a part.  Using a custom designed admin tool enables Simon to do just that, even optimising the output for Google to aid in SEO.

A nice feature for users was the 'Search as you type' facility implemented into the main site search. As customers enter a product or model/part number the search instantly starts to display the top results directly below.

You can find out more, or better yet shop online at http://www.mastersparesonline.com.

A busy week ahead

A busy week ahead for us.

iChoose should be released any day now. We received correspondence from Apple asking us to 'tweak' a couple of the images as they did not meet their terms & conditions. This has been done and the latest version uploaded.

utopia Solitaire development continues with some lovely and unique features being put in by Andy. We hope to release this week.

I will be cycling to Paris from London from Weds in aid of The Rose Road so that will have me busy for a few days!

My skydive which I was due to do last Saturday was cancelled due to bad weather. It is re-scheduled for a couple of weeks.

Keep an eye on this Blog for the latest news!

Thaicats launches

We are pleased to announce the Thaicats website.

We were approached to design the site which includes branding (logo and colour work). The site uses a range of technologies including Ruby on Rails, Flash, CSS and XHTML.

We were also asked to design the logos for the catamarans. 

You can find out more by visiting http://www.thaicats.co.uk