Gareth Jones

Well, I’ve moved to Burscough lock, stock and barrel to live with Nicola. It’s a nice little village – very leafy, very tidy, though a bit on the small side! It’s not too bad though as Southport isn’t too far away and neither are Liverpool nor Manchester.

Moving out of the flat has enabled me to let it out, and my first tenants moved in a week after advertising the flat on Gumtree. A very nice couple – a Romanian girl and an English guy – are now living in what was once my home! It’s a strange feeling at first but you quickly get used to it. I’ve had to buy some extra furniture for the flat of course, as some of the original furniture made its way with me to Burscough.

Moving to a new home has enabled me to improve a few things, such as now having twin 22″ monitors for my computer, a reclining sofa in the “cinema room” (oh yeah!) and saving loads of space by having an attic in which to store everything!

Since the completion of both Name that Note and Name that Note: PRE a while back, these games have been available to play for free on Quak Multimedia’s educational software section. The idea was that people could try the games and get a feel for how they played before deciding if they wanted to buy them for their own music-based website.

Since launch the games have racked up literally thousands of plays between them and although have proven pretty popular among the above-mentioned websites, the logs showed that there was a lot of traffic from certain locations that hinted at the games actually being used for educational purposes rather than as the trials they were meant to be.

I wouldn’t have minded too much if these users were contributing at all to the development of these games by providing us with some feedback, but despite requests, the comments sections have remained empty and we have received no email feedback on these games.

Quak Multimedia doesn’t exist to provide a free service – especially not to people who refuse to contribute anything back – and for providing educators with the necessary tools to help their students perfect their skills I’d have expected some comments and feedback at the very least – or preferably some sales figures that better reflect the usage statistics.

We could have made the games time-limited trials, but doing so would have meant putting more time and effort into developments that are already finished at a time when we are already busy, and all because a minority are happy to abuse good will. It just didn’t seem to be the right thing to do at this time, so instead the games have been removed from the site – but are still available to buy to anyone who wants to support us.

Thanks.

Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers.

Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too). Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using their website.

I use the software to sync files between home and work, and if I want to show someone what I’m currently working on then I can send them a link to that file from within Dropbox too. I can also invite specific people to share files and folders like in Google Docs.

You get 2GB of storage free initially, but there are payable options if you want more space. This limit also increase by 250mb for every successful referral, so if you do sign up then please use the above link!

My girlfriend, Nicola has recently decided to go it alone and has set up her own accounting services company in Burscough, Lancashire.

Harrison and Company offer accounting services at very competitive rates with a friendly and approachable manner, and they’re very flexible and happy to work in whatever way suits your business.

Nicola is very experienced. She joined her previous employer in August 2002 as a Trainee Accountant and successfully qualified in February 2006 with first time passes in all papers. She was made an Associate of the firm in April 2008 following her valued contribution and effort within the Practice and continued as Practice Manager until leaving the Practice last week.

She’s currently running an introductory discount that makes her pricing even more attractive than usual, but you’d best be quick if you want to take advantage of it as places are limited!

Among the many new features announced in Flash CS5 is iPhone support. Adobe claims that the new version of Flash will be able to compile native iPhone applications that don’t need the Flash player. Apple prevents the iPhone from running Flash so that its users can’t play Flash games for free and instead need to buy non-Flash versions from its store, so this is in theory a great feature.

As I said it sounds great in theory, but I am concerned that perhaps they’re spending too much time chasing headlines instead of spending their time on fixing the stability issues with the Flash IDE. Flash CS3 was buggy and crashed often – Flash CS4 is worse. CS4 even crashed at the pre-launch demonstration that I attended in Manchester earlier in the year, and the Adobe rep asked everyone to please forget what they just saw. What he should have said was to get used to that screen because as CS4 users you’d be seeing it a lot.

I really hope Adobe doesn’t mess this one up because having iPhone development available in an environment that so many people are already familiar with – and one that DOESN’T crash every 30 seconds – would be great and would lower the barrier of entry to iPhone development even further, which would naturally result in even more applications and games finding their way to the platform.

With the launch of the PSPgo, Sony has also launched a new range of game available only though download – the minis. These titles all cost less than £10 and are designed to be quick bites that run on both the standard PSPs and the PSPgo.

Having upgraded my PSP 3000 to firmware 6.1 today I was eager to take a look at these minis and see if there was anything worth buying, but I ran into a problem in that I couldn’t find any reviews for these games. Google yielded plenty of news and opinions on the new option but nothing in the way of actual game reviews.  I certainly wasn’t going to buy anything from PSN without reading some reviews first, so I was relieved to finally find pspminis.com – a site that has been specifically set up to bring you minis news, previews and reviews! They currently have two reviews on there – for Fieldrunners and Kahoots – and I did end up buying Fieldrunners as a result of reading that article.