Recently in General Category

Trying out the brand new Yaika service today, freshly delivered from my friends in Estonia.

The sky outside my window...

Yaika is a "lifestreaming" application, a mashup of videostreams, audiostreams, blogs and much else, all wrapped up in a very fresh and attractive design.

For such an ambitious and complex service, it is quite remarkably stable and glitch free.

Give it a try - it's fun!

I'm trying to get Movable Type 4 back under control, as a first step towards making some desperately needed bug fixes and updates to this site. I've gone back to using default templates (not an easy process in itself), so that I can start to use MT properly rather than fight with it.

At least, now, I hope that comments work again. Sorry.

I've been working a lot in the last few days with the new Mac version of Microsoft Powerpoint, and I have to say I am really impressed. Unlike most Mac heads, I never really got on with Keynote, mainly because it seems to be principally designed to make Apple corporate presentations. And nice as they may be, they're not for everyone. The biggest issue I have with Keynote is that it seems horribly complicated to create your own templates. In old versions of Powerpoint, this was not too difficult, although of course creating and using multiple masters was arcane to the point of absurdity.

But Powerpoint 2008 is a huge leap forward. Apparently, it can't do transitions as well as Keynote, but frankly, transitions are about as hip as (old) Powerpoint clip art. Powerpoint 2008 is beautifully integrated with OS X, runs smoothly, and has some really killer features. It is fun to use and inspires creativity, not "death by Powerpoint". It's worth the price of an Office 2008 upgrade, easily. How better can I put it ?

Amazing that the same company can turn out something like Vista...

Well I finally managed to upgrade to Movable Type 4.0.1, after I worked out what was going wrong. Here's a tip: make absolutely certain that you're uploading all MT files in ASCII mode, or it will all go horribly wrong. Whatever Six Apart may say, Movable Type still isn't for the faint-hearted. Then again, for all I know Wordpress is just as tricky.

Anyway, it was certainly worth it. Version 4 is really a huge improvement over its predecessors, at least so far as configuration is concerned. The new administration interface makes maintenance much easier, and I was finally able to sort out quite a few of the nasty glitches in my comment form & response pages very quickly...I hope. Even got captchas working at last, although I haven't yet worked out how to configure things so that a correctly captcha'd comment gets automatically published.

It will be interesting to see how spam traffic is affected.

So, finally I can reveal what I've been working on for the past 6 months. Today we launch the preview of Playyoo, a web social application in the casual mobile game space.

It is a bit of a challenge to explain Playyoo in a concise sentence, as it has several different dimensions. But basically what we have set out to address is to fix the appalling user experience associated with almost all forms of mobile games. We've looked at selection and browsing, especially on mobile, and come up with some fairly radical approaches. We've looked at the supply side as well, especially how we can make it much, much easier to create games. There is a whole social dimension to Playyoo, but it isn't just glued on. Rather, it underpins the whole system.

Today we've just launched the preview, which, by the way, includes a chance to win $10,000 just for creating a teeny little Flash Lite game. This offers only a hint of what's to come, but we are now open to scrutiny, to debate and discussion.

(inevitably we've had a few start up glitches, and just for now we've removed the text message method of accessing the preview site. But you can get at it directly by pointing your mobile browser at: m.playyoo.com)