2011 is looking good so far! We have just moved to Hoxton Street office and the office in Krakow is moving in a few days to a much bigger space in the historical Jewish district. New website is in progress, new procedures and tools. Alina has joined our team in London and has already helped enormously with the current workflow. Watch this space for more happy announcements!
A lot has been happening recently. We worked hard to get this new Vivitar website ready for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (CES2011), one of the largest trade shows of this kind. The new website has been completely redesigned and built by us. Under the bonnet there is a custom and extremely user friendly content management and Zend Framework.
We just went back a hundred years and created an old school desktop application! Refreshing trip back to the old school times. Check out more details here.
We decided that it would be nice to get out there and do something interesting. And get extra office space at the same time, and meeting facilities close to Old Street. The Cube is a very interestig place, it’s a business centre which manages to avoid the corporate and feels more like a creative club. And it’s next to Spitafields. All good news!
the Cube website
We have just launched a new website for video production team Scissorhands. It’s our own design implemented on Wordpress platform. Check it out at www.scissorhands.tv.
First of all, it’s impossible to install Internet Explorer 7 on Windows 7 unless you use Win XP compatibility mode. You may also experience problems in Vista or XP if you’re already running IE8.
However, there is a very simple way which works in most of the cases if you’re interested in seeing the differences in rendering of HTML and CSS. It may not work 100% but seemed to work fine for me, see the image below – explains everything.
Well… it doesn’t explain the fact why IE7 and IE8 render pages differently in the first place.
FireFound is hands down the best security add-on for Firefox. It is a recently launched add-on which can track the location of your laptop if lost or stolen. It shows you the approximate geolocation along with the WiFi Network it last connected to.
Here’s the plugin homepage or just download it from here.
If this is boring for you, lingerie with GPS tracking is a good alternative.
P.S. We have donated the suggested $0.99!
Love it or hate it, but it’s definitely a very original idea:
http://acidcow.com/pics/4553-dead-flies-art-15-pics.html/
And we just heard directly from the author – here’s his website, check it out, some great photography there!
Well it’s not every day we buy software from Microsoft, but unfortunately we need those Windows and we’re big boys now so can’t just download a crack…. We went for Windows 7 Home Premium, as the difference between Home and Pro is tiny, especially if you’re not running one of those Microsoft servers. Anyway, here are some or our findings, it’s not a review but just a quick list of what we like and dislike:
WE LIKE:
- Firstly, there is a nice plastic lunchbox included with each copy – it can easily fit two sandwiches when you take the discs out
- 32-bit and 64-bit discs included
- Very fast and smooth setup, 99% of the drivers are included so you don’t need a motherboard driver CD anymore
- Doesn’t hang or slow down like Vista, it’s actually as fast as Windows XP
- Fast start up, even the fancy UI works quite well
- Auto detects multiple monitors, ASIO soundcards, SPDIF audio, etc
- Love the new taskbar and start menu, some of the UI features are actually useful
- Nice and big icons for the printers and other devices
- Some of the functions have been simplified indeed and work much better
- Great simple function allowing to toggle between destop wallpapers every few seconds or minutes
- Stable, also the 64-bit version
- Grouping folders under libraries works well for my needs
WE DISLIKE:
- ridiculous leftovers from the old user interface, some of the screens haven’t changed at all since Windows 3.11
- 10 years should be enough time to upgrade the calculator and character map 
- networking sucks big time, unreliable and even more confusing than before, still having problems between two Win 7 PC
- XBOX still can’t see any of the Win 7 PCs although firewalls are off and Media Sharing is on
- can’t apply own icon to a folder, there is an option in the folder attributes but it just doesn’t work
- ZIP archives can be read, but RAR is still a mystery
WE ABSOLUTELY HATE:
- Microsoft TV ads
It seems like this is a perfect game for the bored office workers who are not allowed to install any games on their PCs. It’s a bit like going back to Pentium III gaming, but hey, it runs within the browser.
Apart from being a great game, it’s definitely a taster of what may happen soon with all the games and application, it is already possible to run most of the desktop programs on a web server and access them remotely, and it makes much more sense to share the resources online and use them when you need them rather than buying boxed software and installing from a CD.
The new Qrupa.com is finally online.
Please leave comments about content, design and whatever you like, feedback is really important and will be taken with pride or shame.
And we never claim someone else’s work, so if you feel any of the credits are incorrect, just let us know.
Not often we see good Flash effects, especially image galleries. However this is a nice one and despite being quite complicated it actually works pretty well! And the description on the flipside of each photograph is quite cool as well.
You can get a free version which is pretty good or upgrade to pro.
Vivitar is a company with 70 years heritage, and a current manufacturer of one of the best vintage film cameras. This $160 camera is a manual clockwork with no electronics apart from a very primitive light meter made of two small lights. However, it’s very pleasant to use and beautifully designed and it was a pleasure to test it out.
The photos ended up on the Vivitar website in Photographer’s showcase section!
We’re proud to announce that we have just completed a major project for one of our most prestigious clients, Xtreme Information in Soho. The website called “the Reel” is an online media library containing over 30000 TV ads from the past few decades.
Good desktop wallpapers are always needed. We really loved these, especially the Junewind abstracts. It’s a very good blog by the way, despite looking like Wild West themed video game – don’t get discouraged!
