Bit unfortunate really - looks like this forum was directly linking to one of my images and stealing my bandwidth. What a shame I changed the image to something a little bit different to what they were after. Whoops!
Anybody got any suggestions of other messages you want to see me put in my image on my site? Oh what a pity it would be if somebody else happened to be linking to that image without asking me. :p
In what can only have been a marketing stunt to get iTunes out to as large an install base as possible, Apple have been bundling their music store service with Quicktime for the last couple of years.
For users like me who have no interest in iTunes this has been very frustrating: every time I update Quicktime I have to manually uninstall iTunes straight after.
No more! At last there is an option to download either Quicktime with iTunes or Quicktime on its own on the Apple website.
I think that’s just made my day.
Half heartedly in the tradition of wartime radio comedy, It’s That (Time) Again: The updated park websites have started to go live in time for the beginning of the season.
Blackpool Pleasure Beach’s went online a few weeks ago, showing off their new logo. Some people have been quite critical, but I think it’s good to see Microsoft Wordart still being used so many years after it ceased to be cool.[/sarcasm]
Today saw the launch of Thorpe Park’s new site for 2006. The changes are not all that substantial, probably because last year’s site worked so well in the first place. The look has evolved slightly with extra bits of Flash animation dotted around. There’s the option for non-Flash version for those who don’t like animation and a low graphics version for people who, erm, are scared of pictures hung up in the air.
Last year’s site was a vast improvement over 2004’s. This year’s promises more of the same high quality and great features, with a more substantial customer reviews feature than last year (prepare for funky database driven antics). The only disappointment is they’re still using the crappy 2004 “scary” industrial ride descriptions on a few of the ride pages. If they get rid of the last remainders of the Liquorice website and brought back the Rangers, Thorpe’s marketing would be perfection itself. OK, maybe that’s going a little bit too far…
Over the last few years, Thorpe’s websites have been a good indicator of the season the park can expect. In the RMC days, the site was basic and so was the park. Along came Colossus in 2002 together with a very innovative website (who remembers the Virtual Ride?). 2003 kept the same great site with some extra improvements and Thorpe had another great season. 2004 was a disaster in terms of season and site. In 2005 the website returned to something approaching normality and so did the park. 2006’s site evolves the brilliant 2005 site into something even better with some new bits and bobs. If anything, the flash animation makes it look a little “busier”. So, using the accurate WSP (Website Season Predictor�), I predict this year’s season at Thorpe will be even better than last year’s, but perhaps a little more crowded.
I expect the Chessington site will be seeing some changes in the next few days. It will be interesting to see whether Drayton Manor and the smaller parks have anything planned online for this year too.
Flamingo Land lost their classic Schwarzkopf at the back end of last season, with Magnum Force going to make way for Kumali.
A few weeks ago I got an e-mail asking if I could do a recreation in RCT3. I’ve now had a chance to have a go. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever done, but I think it at least gives the impression of the mighty triple looper. Unfortunately RCT3 doesn’t have enough track elements to encapsulate the smoothness of transitions in the original. The lifthill is also rather dodgy, because there is nothing like the right coaster with a curved tyre lift.
Download the track and let me know what you think. (It goes in your Coasters folder, usually found in My Documents\RCT3\Coasters).
You’ll find it under the Looping Roller Coaster category in the game.
Is this the world’s largest error message?
I’m not sure whether I find that more amusing or the comments below it which seem to quickly degenerate into another flame war!
I’ve been using Internet Explorer 7 for the last few days. So, what’s it like?
Well, in short it’s a lot better than IE6, both the original and the version included in XP SP2. It’s finally been given most of the “arrrghh - why doesn’t it have that” features, like tabbed browsing and vastly improved CSS2 support.
Although Microsoft are selling it as a designers dream, there are still (as at Beta 2 at least) some annoying differences between CSS presentation in IE and, say, Firefox.
Talking of Firefox, with the imminent release of IE7 it may just be time for the Mozilla browser to return to second place technology-wise. Unless Mozilla are on the ball, they could be left playing catchup.
IE7 includes some good ideas not yet included in rival browsers. The security status bar is an excellent addition, giving extra information to more novice users about security threats than available in other browsers (how many people understand the consequences of accepting invalid security certificates?). Security-wise, the two most useful features for all users are probably the Phishing Filter (detecting suspicious websites and comparing them against a list of known phishing sites) and the IDN display protection included with the new support for IDNs.
Browsing-wise, I’m finding the zoom feature hugely useful - ever been frustrated that an image is too small or text is too hard to read (and adjusting the text size screws up the page layout)? Just use the new zoom feature, which let’s you zoom in on the page Microsoft Word style.
The new interface takes a little bit of getting used to. Since the early days of the web, we’ve all been used to the back, forward, refresh, stop and home buttons being in the same position. Microsoft have taken it upon themselves to shift them about. It’s annoying at first, but then you realise how nice it is to get some screen real estate back and reduce the ever increasing toolbar creep.
The RSS support sounds very promising, with Microsoft providing a central location to dump newsfeeds and enclosures. Potentially this means that every newsreader works with the same data, meaning no more re-reading of messages you’ve already seen. At the moment, the big problem of keeping them in sync across multiple machines still exists. Could we see data synchronisationbuilt in to a later version of the RSS platform?
There are a few signs of Microsoft being “too helpful”. There is now a requirement for all windows to have an address bar. I see their point - it makes it a lot easier to tell which website you’re actually on, and thus more secure. However, it’s still damn annoying. I wish Microsoft would make this permanent address bar optional.
Overall, IE7 is a huge leap forward for Microsoft’s web browser software. If they’re right about the new robustness in their code, IE7 should be much less at risk from security flaws than before. I’ll be especially interested to see how good their new URL handling engine and security protection architecture turn out to be. However, we’ll only see that in the months after the final software is released later in the year. The interaction between IE7 and Windows Defender (the new version of MS AntiSpyware) sounds a bit hand-wavy at the moment.
Will version 7 return IE as my default browser in preference to Firefox? That’s not actually an easy question to answer. When I moved over to Firefox it was due to the promises of fewer security flaws. That promise has only half been kept with FF having it’s own buggy code issues exposed, but I’ve now got used to “the Firefox way”. However, IE7 contains most of the Firefox features I’ve come to love, plus it’s got a few I’m finding useful that are currently missing from its rival. Obviously I’m not going to rollout the beta to my everyday machines, but as for the final version … so far I’m not 100% sure I’ll immediately say no.