Blogging is about to become more sporadic as I enter the Christmas shutdown so I want to wish everyone who reads my blog a very happy Christmas and look forward to great things in 2007.

Whatever your faith, however you spend this time of year, I hope you enjoy it.

I’m Shaun Newman & this is my blog
Peace and goodwill to all!

It’s a bit late I know, and how I missed this until now is frankly beyond me. But here is a superb advent calendar just for web developers. Contributors are the best in the business and the articles are chock full of juicy CSS goodness.

Omar Khan has put together a pretty detailed post over on his MSDN Blog, covering some of what was fixed in SP1 to improve Web development. I was struggling to find any details of the fixes up till now so I figure the more exposure Omar’s post gets, the better it is for us all to see if our issues are fixed in the patch.

One thing I noticed though is that I learned to work around a lot of the issues, I think I’ve experienced almost all of the bugs at some point or another.

If you haven’t applied the patch yet then I suggest you do, it’s not going to be quick but it is going to cure many issues.

I’m hearing more and more about Adobe Apollo lately. The concept is web applications on a desktop outside the browser chrome.
Apollo should give us a bridge between the web and the desktop, and allow web developers to use their existing skills and language sets to build rich internet applications than can be installed and run on a windows desktop.

I like it, I like the idea and most of all I like the proposed freedom of not being tied to one technology for either tier of my applications.

It will be interesting if this may bring an end to the development headache of browser compatibility when developing large enterprise applications where the support requirement is as broad as my current project.

There is a load of information on this in the Adobe Labs Apollo site and this presentation really gives a good introduction to Apollo. Obviously Adobe technologies like Flex and Flash are mentioned a lot and take center stage as technologies of choice but support will be provided for Javascript HTML and AJAX too.

Ajaxian also have a few posts covering Apollo, the latest post has a nice demo vid by one of the Adobe Developers.

Before I get a torrent of abuse this is a bit of self deprecating humor being that I am a Yorkshireman ;0)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJxzDYJ4C3Y]

Dave Shea blogged today about his interesting experience buying a DVD set for someone for Christmas.
His experience highlights one of the possible gotcha’s surrounding the whole debacle of Digital Rights [Mis-]Management. When companies start to put the frighteners on normal law abiding upright citizens, then the whole thing goes wrong.

Here’s a snip from Daves post, read the rest here:

HBO recently produced a fantastic series of historical fiction called Rome, the first season of which is currently out on DVD. I grabbed a box off the shelf with the intention of buying it as a present, and nearly choked on the $90 CDN price tag for 12 episodes. But hey, it’s Christmas, and what better time of year to over-spend on a loved one?

Then I made a nasty little discovery….

[Via Dave Shea's mezzoblue]

If you have never visited A List Apart, then you are nissing out, this is another superb resource that every web developer should guarantee they visit on a regular basis.
The article I want to bring to your attention today is an example of the great stuff you find there. This basically is a discussion on an alternative to fluid CSS layouts that allows us to build pages that appear correctly on all devices. Well worth a read and hopefully as inspiring to you as it is for me.

The introduction of new mobile and computing devices challenges us to look beyond the liquid layout. Marc van den Dobbelsteen offers a way to bring appropriate layouts to a wider range of screens and devices.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

[Via A List Apart]

Well I saw Eragon yesterday and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It did feel rushed though, as if big chunks were missing, the main character went from Hero to Zero a bit too quickly as most of the training and development stage was skipped.  The special effects were great, and in all the film was watchable without leaving me dissapointed.

As with all things Book to Film, the book is far better, but the film is a good effort.

I’m hoping that the DVD comes extended and that the missing pieces are fleshed out a bit more.

Call me a big kid, but I absolutely love Lego Star Wars II.  I really enjoyed the first Lego Star Wars game and still love dipping in to try and unlock the secrets, but with the follow up Lucasarts have surpassed themselves.

LSWII has all the features of the first game, the fantastic humor and in game movies that tell you the whole story without a single spoken word.  The awesome characters and scenery that are right out of the Lego box and incredible ease of play.

Kids will love both games and it’s easy for an adult or big bro/sis to drop in lend a hand and drop out again all at the press of a single key.

LSWII takes you through the original three movies, by far the best story lines, where LSWI took you through Episodes I II and III.

There are several enhancements to this game over the first, one that I think is pretty cool is that any character, except droids, can build items in the game.  You’ll see as you go through the game that some Lego pieces in a pile will be hopping about, move up to these and hit the build key and the character will speedily build you something out of Lego.  Kids will love guessing what it is as they see it building up exactly as it would if you had the very Lego pieces in front of you.  Some parts of the game require you to build up complex machines that you can then hop into and operate.  I’ll not go into detail as it really would spoil the game.

there are secrets galore that will unlock different parts of the game.  the replay value of the Lego Star Wars genre of games is unequalled in the world of gaming as far as I am concerned.

I picked up my copy for £14.99 at Virgin, Play.com have it on for that too.  You can get it on PC, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, GameBoy Advance, Xbox and GameCube.  So that’s pretty much all bases covered then

I never used to be a big fan of rts gaming, favouring the first person shooters. I still do prefer the first person shooters but after Dawn of War and the follow on Winter Assault I have to say I’m getting hooked. I recently got hold of Dark Crusade and recently the collectors edition of Mark of Chaos landed on my desk. Having played the role play and board games from the Warhammer genre as a kid, these games gain an advantage in the fight for my affections ;0)

For Mark of Chaos, expect to pply a little by way of tactics.  Storming the gates of a city all out will cost you a lot by way of troops and you’ll find future missions pretty tough when there’s just you and a horse against 500 seasoned Orks.  There’s no resource management required here, but you do need to ensure you assign your heroe’s experience points wisely and you can do this during battle phases as you win skirmishes and your experience increases.  You’ll also want to make sure to upgrade the armour and weapons of your troops, things will obviously go well for you if they are all on the best kit. (hint hint Mr Blair).

Dark Crusade for me represents risk on steroids.  Those of you that are seasoned rts players will know the format well.  you can skirmish so you get used to how the different factions operate and find the strengths/weaknesses.  you also get to play on different maps and terrains so it shouldn’t get too boring.  The main game phase consists of attacking adjoining territories on a global view map.  when you attack or are attacked the game moves into the battle phase which is pretty much like the Dawn of war games we know and love, you start with the need to build up resources, get your soldiers up and then go kill some [insert bad guy here].
One of the things I love about  Dark Crusade is that you don’t need any of the previous Dawn of War games to play it, but if you do then you can unlock extra races and extend the game, I think this is an awesome feature.

All in all it’s great fun and if you are into the Warhammer genre, you’ll love them all.