I’ve been working feverishly away on this project for a while. It’s still technically beta, but here it is: World Cup Predictor. Plug in your World Cup match predictions and see who you think will win…
Archive for the ‘ Web – General’ Category
World Cup 2010 Predictor
Monday, May 3rd, 2010Evony’s best banner yet
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
Online strategy game Evony has already made a reputation for itself with its wildly inappropriate and inaccurate banner ads.
I played Evony once, for about ten minutes… not long, however I played enough to be sure it’s not a Leisure Suit Larry-style game set in Middle Earth (although maybe there’s some mileage in that concept).
Previously the blatant cleavage shot of a buxom stock photo model was a favourite Evony ad, but I think this new one takes the cake. What does this haute couture model have to do with a medieval strategy game? Sex sells I guess.
Some more on the wonderful Evony banner ads at Tokyito and Coding Horror.
Accessibility guideline #1: Don’t claim it if you’re not
Saturday, July 14th, 2007The Google Blog has a recent post entitled ‘Overview of our Accessible Services‘. Last time I looked at Google’s search code (which was only last week actually) I remember it being a particularly messy mix of invalid HTML and table soup (but this is Google: who for some reason are exempt from producing structureless mark-up on their main website in the 21st century, unlike almost everyone else on the planet).
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4oD? Not on a Friday night.
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007(Alternative title: My-quest-to-watch-Peep Show-as-soon-as possible- as-I-almost-certainly-miss-it-every-Friday).
Channel 4′s 4oD was down last Friday night at 11:30pm. This really isn’t that surprising it was just after the latest episode of Peep Show had aired, and I imagine thousands of people over the UK were wanting to watch it after getting home that evening.
Thankfully it was up again on Saturday morning and I downloaded the new episode without a hitch. Of course until I tried to watch it around 12pm, when quite possibly everyone else burned the night before were attempting to download the episode yet again.
Now this is where DRM (and bad design on the developer’s part) really bugs me: the video file was on my hard drive somewhere in some mystical format and location, but without being able to connect to the 4oD site, I couldn’t watch it. Madness. Surely it’s easy enough to change the service so you can watch downloads offline, but if this was a torrent download (or any regular download) then this offline business wouldn’t even be an issue.
In similar news, the BBC’s iPlayer is coming later this year, apparently.
Stuck!
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007Looking for hotels tonight on Radisson Hotels website and I quite literally got stuck. Trying to select a date range, the pop up date picker conveniently hides behind the big flashy Flash banner like some shy child cowering behind a parent’s leg.
Manually entering dates is also frustrating as some part of the Javascript intermittently clears the field when changing focus between the fields. Initially I honestly couldn’t get a date in. I’ve since tried again and it worked (barely). Just as well there’s a fairly obvious Reservations link in the top bar.
By the way, anyone know of any good hotels in Calgary?
Microsoft Live Mail Redux
Saturday, November 4th, 2006Well, perhaps not quite a redux on my previous Live Mail post, more just a recent observation.
However, as I said in the last post, I am still compelled to check Hotmail now and again as I still have a few emails of importance coming in between the far more steady stream of spam. Clearing my inbox today I noticed the Live Mail team have changed the way the inbox interface is laid out. The main difference is that the checkbox for each item now shares its place with the new mail icon:
Basically both icons toggle depending on whether the email is new and/or selected. In practice this is just really bemusing to use. If you want to select messages to delete or move, there is no obvious checkbox. When you work out they’re hiding between mail icons (emphasis on hidden here), the actual task of selecting the check boxes requires a high degree of accuracy: the checkbox is sitting on anchor block linking to the email message, so if you’re slightly off target with the small checkbox you end up opening a message as opposed to selecting it.
And my last gripe is that the checkbox/mail icon column doesn’t line up with the master select checkbox in the top left corner. There is actually room for the checkbox to sit next to the mail icon and be underneath this master selector. Wouldn’t that make far more sense?
I don’t know what the rationale behind the design of this is, but the caveat here is that this is a beta product after all. Although I made that point in my last blog entry as well, after pointing out Live Mail was purely IE6 (now IE7 as well). Windows Live Mail now loads in Firefox 2.0, although load is a pretty abstract concept:
24 errors/504 warnings? Nice.
And for the record, Live Mail is still long way off the simplicity and usability of Gmail.
44.0 KBPS
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006Alas, I’m on dialup. It’s been so long. I must say, when the modem connection sounds piped out of my laptop, I nearly shed a tear.
Almost.
Broadband come back!!
Disconnection
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006I got sent a link today from a work colleague to www.vox.com — Six Apart‘s latest offering. The email described the site as MySpace for ‘thinking people’, which I couldn’t help be amused by. I visited Vox, and lo and behold, it looks exactly like that: another promising Web 2.0 social networking site, complete with snazzy pastels and rounded corners.
And that’s where the anxiety kicked in. I felt it coming. Then I heard a voice from within my head: “Oh no, not another site to figure out and keep up with”.
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The Darker Side of Flickr
Saturday, April 29th, 2006Looking at the most viewed photos in my Flickr account, I discovered something disturbing — the top photo is one I took on the Mekong in Laos entitled “What’s a boat trip down the Mekong without some naked kids?”. Going through any waterways in South East Asia you see many families washing themselves in various stages of nakedness — it’s part of the cultural experience. I posted this photo to illustrate this, yet I’m in two minds now about keeping the title (or the photo in general) due to the obvious fact that people are finding this based on the search string ‘naked kids’. It’s not wildly popular (82 views since February 2006 to now), but nonetheless it’s a worry.
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Yahoo! 7? I have been out of Australia too long
Thursday, April 27th, 2006Yahoo! Australia and Channel Seven seemed to have teamed up to create Yahoo! 7. To me that sounds like an Enid Blyton-esque series about a bunch of seven young hooligans who like drinking Bundy on the gold coast. I wonder when this happened? I only left Australia in November! Of course it makes sense for Channel Seven to hook up with Yahoo! to compete with Nine MSN.
What’s next — Ten Google? I seriously doubt that, but surely Channel Ten will follow suit soon. The Big Brother site is currently hosted by 3, perhaps Ten plans to focus more on the mobile market rather than the broader web market? Considering that Big Brother was previously partnered with iPrimus, the shift in sponsor could well indicate this strategy.