The great Hamble beach cleanup

I quoth:

The late Bill Hicks (I assume that's the correct Bill?), didn't much care for the beach: "The beach. The beach! The beach! What the f**k's the deal with the beach? I don't get it," he said. "It's where dirt meets water..."

"Where dirt meets water" is a true and inspired observation. It is what it is - and it's an important part of many people's lives, especially those who live upon the various coastlines of our green (and sometimes pleasant) land.

In the general absence of any kind of 'real' local government (or heaven forbid, national government!) interest in the preservation and general up-keep of our most treasured landscapes and icons, it increasingly falls upon the public to do things for themselves, form groups, and get out there and do something.

Well, that is happening this weekend. If you live on the hampshire coast, if you know where Hamble is and if you have a problem* then please consider an hour or 3 in supporting the great Hamble beach cleanup of April 2009.

For more information, visit www.ilovemybeach.org


* Sorry, that sounded way to A-Team, although I am reliably informed that if you want to turn up in a black and red van then it won't be held against you.

www.ilovemybeach.org launched (new site)

We're pleased to announce the launch of ilovemybeach.

ilovemybeach is the brain-child of Tim & Lucy, and we hope to see good things happening with their great idea.

If you're into being green, like doing good and fed up with rubbish, then head on over and join them on their quest to make our beaches a safer, cleaner and nicer place to be.

They have some great names getting behind them such as Surfers Against Sewage, and we're pleased to be involved. Look out for lots of additions to the website as they grow, along with other media outlets.

Go on.....support them.

Us Brits love our sport!

If there's one thing us Brits love (sometimes more than our own families) it's our sport! Football is without doubt the nations favourite, and our love/hate relationship with the England team continues to delight, despair, frustrate and annoy, but the success of Lewis Hamilton has catapulted Formula 1 back into the limelight - "Fantastic!!!" as our very own Murray Walker would no doubt proclaim (and indeed did, I am led to believe).

With Formula 1 returning to it's natural habitat of the BBC this year and a World Cup coming up next summer, we are delighted to be working with a client on a project to benefit both of these sports and your ability to affordably attend the events (even with the credit crunch).

More will follow at a later date...

utopia 365 and Internet Explorer 6

In a decision that I personally would have made a long time ago, we have finally made the call, and are announcing that we are no longer supporting IE 6 for any websites or projects.

Of course, our customers can still request that their website is compatible with IE 6, although we will be advising of it's pitfalls and charging for the additional time required to support a dead browser that breaks all the rules and benefits neither us, our customers or internet users at large.

The reasons should be self evident to most, but if you are unaware of why IE 6 support has to be dropped, Google is your friend and will help you find all you need to know.

We urge all IE 6 users (or users of other old web browsers) to upgrade to a more modern web browser immediately. In order of preference, we suggest:

1. Safari DOWNLOAD (Mac OS X and Windows - some Windows users may prefer the 'look' of Firefox to Safari)
2. Firefox DOWNLOAD (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and others)
3. Opera DOWNLOAD (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and others)

4. Google Chrome DOWNLOAD (Windows - Mac OS X and Linux/other versions are likely to follow at some point)
5. Internet Explorer 7 or above DOWNLOAD (Windows)

* We don't mention version numbers for Safari, Firefox or Opera because we know that users of these browsers make it their responsibility to have the latest version installed.

Please remember to keep your web browser up to date! Mac OS X and Windows will attempt to ensure that you always have the latest version of Safari or Internet Explorer installed, but you can always manage things yourself by visiting the download links above periodically and ensuring that you have the latest version installed.

Thank you for your time!
The good men and women of utopia 365

PS. Or you could tell us to get stuffed and join the IE 6 Supporter's Club (video below)... looks like a fun meet! :-)

SDK 3.0

We're really happy with the new iPhone 3.0 SDK and have already begun experimenting with some of the new features being opened up to us developers.

Sure, we 'could' get access to some undocumented areas of the iPhone, but this was not really a great area to explore.

Now, we have access to a few more api calls which will allow us bring more great features to our Apps and our customer Apps.

As an iPhone user I am also looking forward to seeing some of the Apps I use get updated to make use of the new features...

Apps like Omnifocus, RunKeeper, fringe or AIM. I'm also really pleased to see copy & paste which will allow me to operate in a more natural and intuitive way.

Thanks Apple - it's looking good.

Want an iPhone App?

Do you want an iPhone App?

No, it's not an offer of a free iPhone App download or anything (for a free download you need to look to iChoose).

"Want an iPhone App?" is our offer to all of you companies out there that are looking to out-source iPhone development for your wonderful products and ideas.

Maybe you don't have the time to develop iPhone versions of your existing products? Or, maybe you're primarily a design/advertising company/agency that doesn't have the in-house skills required? Or, perhaps you're a great ideas person that needs a hand?

Whatever your situation, get in touch and ask about our iPhone Development Services.

utopia 365 and EquinoxApps

We've recently been working on a number of iPhone projects (some that we can't talk about just yet) - including working with EquinoxApps on some of their iPhone Apps.

For Aphrodite, TransJakarta and Vibrazor, we have been putting the projects together in Xcode, building the framework and writing the actual code, working with specs and designs from EquinoxApps. It's been a positive agreement for both companies (with a few late nights thrown in!) and we look forward to working on more projects together.

An example of how we can work with you to get your iPhone App ideas and projects developed.

iPhone Development - Changing direction (being agile)

Here in utopia we are finding a steady increase of customers asking for iPhone Apps.

It's a great arena to be in, and one that we're thoroughly enjoying.

Beginning

Starting out, it was very much about producing and launching our own iPhone Apps. In all honesty our thoughts were:

• Write some Apps for the iPhone
  
• Release
  
• Get rich
  
• Repeat
  

However, we like so many others found it does not work that way (it can, and has - but it's the rarity not the norm).

That's when we had to take a long hard think about what we should do. Give-up and just concentrate on the other side of our business (Web Apps, RoR, Design and Development) - or, persevere.

Changing Direction

After some research and a little browsing we soon found that there were people out there with lots of great ideas for the iPhone, but no way of getting those ideas developed.....that's when we realised we could help.

Roll on several months and we are in the thick of developing iPhone Apps for our clients. We've produced several that we can say about, and several that we can't. Some people like our Apps to appear as if they have developed it themselves rather than out-sourced (Agencies etc). We can accommodate that.

What we are proud of is repeat work and being told our code is of a higher standard than others they (the agencies) have used. If we're developing it then we certainly do not want our Apps full of bugs or under-performing.

It's our name, and we're proud of it.





p.s. We're still developing our own Apps in the background. In-fact, we're working on something that could change everything....