I keep seeing the smoke clouds from the battle on used games vs the developers and I think it's gotten to a point for me to pick up my rifle and start firing in all directions. Before I line up my shots and firing I'll give a bit of back story to those seemly uneducated. Game developers (or publishers but lets not go into that) despise people who buy used games and don't want nothing to do with them, that they are the scum of the earth because they get no money from them.
Now listen up mister game developer, you feel cheated, someone else is buying your game and rather than buying it from you they are buying it from someone else, who originally bought it from you. Understand that this is the same original product and not a duplicate thus no theft has actually occurred. Sure you could argue that given that person didn't have the option to buy second-hand they would have bought it brand new. The same could be said for the opposite mind you mr developer, that person could of opted to not buy said game because they believed it was not worth X dollars but Y dollars instead and that so happened to be the cost of the second-hand copy.
Before profanity and disgust are to be flung at these second-rate customers you mr developer should look at the situation before going on record for being a jerk to these people. Maybe the price of the game isn't worthy. People understand value and if something is too much they simply wont buy it, fact of business. If that doesn't sit well how about the fact that some people think your game is good and when the next one will come out they'll buy it brand new on launch day, collector editions are in a similar fashion right? If all else how about you shut your mouth and be happy people are playing your games and be glad it's not through piracy, and trust me I have a lot to say about that but another time and place.

've had it with Tumblr. The guys have a great site and all but it's so damn slow. I spend as much time trying to post the actual post as writing it. Seriously, responsiveness is a function and [at least for myself] is seriously lacking. There were a few things that did annoy me, one being I had to sign up to Disqus so I could allow commenting. Disqus is a great service but I didn't sign up to one service just so I can sign up to another for features that are trivial as commenting, please. The kicker feature I found [but have yet to use] is when you upload certain types of content that it will upload them to other services you associate with your account. For example, if I upload a photo it to Posterous it will upload that same photo to Flickr (if you have an account) and bam it's there. That's fucking brilliant! This is how the next generation of web services will dominate their respected markets, interoperability.

Sites such as Facebook are great for what they do but if you look at Facebook who uploads videos to it? I certainly don't and I would much rather upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo or at the very least have it uploaded to Facebook and my choice of video hosting. Instead of trying to create one site or service that is everything you'll have one site that will act as the interface to all these other services and let them do what they do best. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next wave of the internet. Question is, who will do it first ;)

PS. I like with Posterous how I can email blog posts or anything and it'll handle the rest, no need to log in or visit a website :)

…you make it hard for me to defend you when your Flash player is shit. I fully sympathise with how Apple has been treating you of late if it weren’t for the fact that they are right, Flash is a resource hog. Watching videos online with Flash is like waxing, it’s not too bad until the strip gets stuck and that’s when it becomes painful. The way I see it is either you can fix Flash and make it an experience worth having, you can accomplish this task however you want, open source flash, hiring eskimo’s, I don’t really care, just do it! Or your other option is to can Flash all together, fire it into the sun and be done with it, otherwise it’s going to be like a hurdle runner running out of stamina that just keeps smacking into the hurdles until finally collapsing face-first and ends up making us feel awkward watching.

Now Adobe, you may be reluctant to take any action because you will have to invest more money into Flash, or not want to lose what you have already invested. I can understand, but you have some amazing products and some really talented people under your wing. You folks still shape today’s web and there’s nothing that is slowing your momentum except yourselves.

o I’m finalising all the issues for Bill Split and the interface to properly launch the beta and it occurred to me that there are limited web tools to actually make the web. There are a few on the horizon which do look promising but they are just pieces of the puzzle, well I’ve thought of a piece that either hasn’t been done, hasn’t been done well or I haven’t heard about it. What I am referring to is a web-based stylesheet editor. This may not be as crazy as it sounds, there have been many times I’ve wanted a tool that made it easy to see and edit a stylesheet in all the web browsers that I work with instead of building for one browser and second-guessing the others till comes testing. So I’ve started with the basics for the moment which loads from a page via a bookmarklet and allows you to choose which stylesheet from the page you wish to edit. Of course I also want to allow you to create a new stylesheet which will load into the page and then allow you to save the changes but that is still far off. You may think it’s not much but I’ve had to deal with many browser security issues (particularly with cross-site restrictions) and am proud of the approach I’ve taken. Hopefully this isn’t an issue which will get resolved later on but we’re taking baby steps for now.

On another topic, started a new job which has flung me back into Ruby on Rails 1.2.3 and all I can say is I can’t wait to get back to reality :)

seem to always start my post apologising for my lack of enthusiasm in writing more posts, but who am I kidding it’s just the way I roll. Lets move on. Firstly, you may notice that Tumblr is my new home now and not that old Drupal site I had running for years. The reason is I really wanted to keep my focus away from working on my “presence” and focus more on my “projects” and not have to dick around with connecting with Twitter or Facebook etc. I setup a Tumblr account a few months ago and seemed pleased with the concept, though it’s speed is annoying it isn’t something I’m going to spend much time on. I couldn’t be bothered migrating my posts from the old site into Tumblr and rather just start anew. That’s the beauty of being unknown, it’s not an issue to just start from scratch because no one cares :)

So with the idea of focusing more of my time on projects I’ve been working on a small and simple bill sharing app recently, and apart from a few minor issues I need to fix it’s almost ready to hit prime time. This project I speak is Bill Split and if you want to have a play your more then welcome to register, just be warned there are issues which I’m happy for you to e-mail or post in the comments what they are. Another thing which I am aware of, I have spent my time styling for Internet Explorer, so if that is your browser your probably going to have a bad time.

Bill Split is more of a sandbox or more an experiment then an app. Yes it will be functional but I using it as an opportunity to try out new thinks like HTML5, RightJS and Google’s new Font API. If you goto the site there are basically no images being used it’s all CSS (even the gradients!), apart from the icons and background. I want to also create some more UI widgets such as a currency input box and make it more ajaxy so it’ll have more bling and eventually work on an iPhone/iPad version of the app as well.

I already have my next project in mind and am really excited to start working on it but I promised myself that I would get Bill Split running properly first so my and some friends can use it. I do feel bad about Bandalive being put on hiatus but it is a big project and I’m stuck on a few ideas I need to iron out before I continue.