Exploring Safari 4

Always looking to the future we've decided to give Safari 4 a whirl to see what's around the corner.

The first thing that sticks out is the new 'Top Sites'. This is very much an overview page showing your most browsed sites. That might not be a good thing for some - but for us, we liked it.

This can be edited by clicking the 'edit' button at the bottom of the window.

This in turn reveals some controls for manipulating the results.

Personally I would like to see the ability to explicitly decide which pages I want (not necessarily my 'top sites').

Looking through your bookmarks now gives you to use the ability to search in cover-flow mode. It's useful for certain situations and annoying for others. It takes a little time to update all the thumbnails.

Search is improved and seems rapid from testing so far:

From early testing browser rendering actually seems very similar, more time will be required to determine if we see noticeable speed increases.

Verdict: Thumbs up!

Get on Tracks

Over the last couple of weeks we have been evaluating the excellent GTD web-app 'Tracks'.

Having a nice, centralised solution that enables us to keep track of the ever-increasing amount of work coming in is turning out to be a joy.

What attracted us to Tracks was it's simple design and that it is built using RoR. We were at a stage where we had considered developing our own, but time (well, workload) meant we needed to find a 3rd party solution.

Tracks has it's roots in good old England, but has an ever growing list of contributors.

There are a couple issues, and additions that we would like to see - but they are 'minor' and we can easily work around them. Time allowing, we could add them ourselves.

What we do end up with though is great looking, powerful, functional way of tracking things we need to do, get reporting, a mobile interface and the ability to email our To-Do's ala Basecamp style.

Did we mention it's Free?

Last Freeware Version

Sometimes you need a little utility for one-offs or really in-frequent usage...you find a nice little piece of software and best of all it's free.

A few months later (or even a year or so) you need to run it again and find out that it's moved on from free....

LastFreewareVersion is a nice little site that shows lots of utilities and apps with the LAST version they were free.

It's a great idea and quite handy. Of course, if you use something frequently or it's a real life-saver then there is no harm in moving up-to the next level and paying because more-often than not it is only a few pounds.

Looking good...

It's hard to run your own company. The grass may always look greener, but the real world isn't always the nicest of places to be in. The security of that pay cheque every month from your employer is difficult to ignore. But, and I'm really happy to say this, utopia 365 is looking good!

A big thanks to Chris for all the effort he has put in towards securing the work to give utopia 365 the future it deserves, and a big thanks to all of our clients, who all know full-well that they don't have to doubt delivery of our promises.

We are nicely sorted for more work than you can shake a stick at for the next two/three months and we've been able to build up several very good (and we believe long-term) associations with many people, including; Impatex, Osmotech/Thaicats, Equinox Apps, Thomson Software Solutions and Camping F1 (more to follow on Camping F1 and spin-off projects later).

We believe that our work speaks for itself in terms of quality, effort, timing, support and communication. The fact that our clients (who in many cases become our friends) return to us with new projects and developments backs that up.

In many (if not most) cases, we initially start our relationship with a new client on our work with their website, although we are finding that we start that relationship with iPhone development more and more frequently. The iPhone is a wonderful platform for both developers and consumers. We see a future of promotional applications and brochures that target the unique features of the iPhone, and provide customers/guests of establishments (bars, clubs, hotels etc) with a much needed boost of technology, interest, practicality and fun.

Osmotech website preview

A quick little sneaky peek at the new Osmotech website we're working on. It's got the most wonderful footer!

Banners ahoy!

We've created some animated banners (flash) for our client Thaicats recently. These will be going on a few relevant sites.

They can be a great way to get brand awareness for your company or product when targeted to the correct audience. For instance, with the release of one advert Thaicats saw their traffic increase 450%!! That's a big difference with the stats showing people browsing around their site looking at relevant content.

They don't work for all situations, but they are worth exploring. To find out more feel free to get in contact with us.

Working hard to work for you

It's been a busy few weeks in utopia. Business is increasing which is bucking the trend in todays current economics.

We're also receiving thanks from our customers who are seeing significant increases in their web hits and sales!

The key? Keeping our overheads low, our work standard high and being on the end of the phone whenever they need us.

There has been a massive boom in web and software development. With that came much anticipation, and so small companies quickly became big companies with big budgets and big over-heads. Now, with costs being cut and every expenditure being questioned some of these companies are having to work out where they are going and how they are going to get there.

Our path is simple.