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I doubt most of the people who’ve found my blog realise the rotates.org history of pretty-but-useless splash pages. Essentially, the original purpose of this site was to display my current ‘cool thing’ that I’d created. It’s actually a huge passion of mine and great fun to knock something up in a few hours that looks really nice and is uncomplicated and pretty much pointless. I suppose that fits the bill of ‘art’ – thankfully I’m not so pretentious that I’d label it under that banner!

Anyway, after a major hiatus, I’ve created a new ‘splash page’ (for that is all that it is, and will likely ever be) for the online gaming clan I’ve been a member of for 10 years:

www.clan-sqs.com

Really, there’s nothing to discover, it’s exactly what you see. I’d love to have the patience and the skill to work on something akin to Windosill but alas it doesn’t slake my desire to see instant results. If you’d like to see some of my previous splash screens, you can view them here.

I hope you enjoy these little bits of my history – I’m hugely proud of all of them, and they serve to really show how I’ve come along in my profession as a web designer.

P.S. I’ve spent the night drinking Leffe Blonde and listening to Devin Townsend – Ziltoid the Omniscient – awesome 😀

… or lack thereof! Sorry about that, but I’ve been incredibly busy with work recently and I simply haven’t had time to work on my own stuff. I promise in the next few weeks to start releasing some less vaporous material!

Now, back to the grindstone…

Dear Apple,

First let me say I love your iPhone, and I admire what you’re doing in the gadget market – it’s simply brilliant work and I’m behind you 100%. I do however have one small request:

LET ME TURN THINGS OFF.

Not in the next version – NOW. If you introduce a feature, have the common sense to realise there are some people in the world who would like to toggle that feature. When you implemented say, the repeat message alert, did you think there may be occasions when a user may not want to be reminded that he or she’d received a text at 3am in the morning, and their iPhone is in its dock on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM, and so that means getting out of bed and looking at the damn thing just to shut it up?

Oh and you didn’t just slip up with the iPhone. What about when I’m using remote in iTunes? Say I want to have iTunes hidden well away in the system tray while I’m working on my PC (and I don’t want to look at it because its interface makes me cry) and then I may decide I want to pick a tune from my songs playlist. Why does iTunes have to pop up to say hello? If I minimised it, and I’m controlling it via Remote, is there ANY good reason why it has to appear on my screen? Just let me keep it minimised where I want it Apple, it’s not a big ask!

I understand that in many cases you know best, and you invent novel – nay genius ways to interact with your products – I’d just like the ability to once in a while be able to choose to use some of these features.

Cheers,

Lew

It’s been nearly 5 years since I upgraded my PC, and last week things came to a head when my creaking old system started wiping its own backup drive randomly. So, I set myself a budget of £1,000 and went to www.scan.co.uk and built up a machine. To cut a short story even shorter, I ended up getting the following spec:

• Intel Core i7 920 (4 cores @ 2.66GHz)
• 6GB of CAS7 RAM
• GTX 275
• 300GB WD VelociRaptor

And installed Windows 7 RC1 (which is absolutely fantastic – well done Microsoft, about bloody time!) on the whole caboodle. The results are highly pleasing – it can cope with the 21 megapixel raws I throw at it all day long now! The moral of this story is this: these days, you can get a hell of a machine for a lot less money than it used to cost.

Oh, and on an unrelated note… if you’re a web developer, you may want to check this out. I’ve created two sites with it now and I’m never going back to the old ways. This thing makes putting websites together lightning fast and the results are joyous in all browsers – yes, even IE6. Marvellous! Give it a go!