The selfish blog – just about us.
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.
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
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.
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.
