StyleSuites is a website I have had a hand in for the past couple of years. It’s basically an online collection of reviews, of user interface styles for Windows XP. There are also literally hundreds of associated downloads of skins, wallpapers, icons etc. My part in this new version has involved creating the design and layout of the site, as well as writing a few reviews and the applications section. This is a brief history of the site:

31st May 2003 - The original idea for StyleSuites was concieved by Simon in the Aqua-Soft forums in this post. Although a mock-up for the site was made, interest waned and the project was effectively shelved.

4th January 2004 - Dave Appleyard launches Milk-XP.org.uk, a site dedicated to the well-known Milk theme. It proves incredibly popular and interest is expressed in a larger site in the spirit of Milk-XP, but covering a wider range of themes and styles. Enter Simon once more, with his original StyleSuites idea.

12th January 2004 - 8 days later StyleSuites.com is launched with Simon and Dave collaborating. Even with just a few Suites and a small forum visitor numbers climb and the site grows in popularity.

2nd March 2004 - Major hosting troubles, with bandwidth being the main offender. This results in StyleSuites being offline for a number of weeks. Know It All Hosting generously steps into with a deal and the site returns just over a month later.

March - October 2004 - The site goes from strength to strength, with visitor numbers steadily increasing and new content added regularly.
October 19th 2004 - The site takes a new direction, reviewing the themes as well as providing skins. The current site is effectively put on hold.

30th June 2005 - The new StyleSuites.com is launched, complete with an all-new design.

It has been a little hard to motivate myself to work on this new relaunch, mainly due to the fact that I’ve been very busy recently, and now work on a Mac (so I don’t really have any interest in the whole Windows XP skinning process!). Hopefully the new launch will be a success though, as I enjoyed managing the huge amounts of traffic we had to the old site (over 23 million hits to date).

I’m not going to lie, I’ve got several reasons to be biased towards Safari over the upcoming IE7. I’ll do this methodically. Firstly, Safari is great at CSS, where IE7 is, well, sketchy at best. Secondly, Safari looks much, much cooler than any version of IE has ever done. Judging by what I’ve seen to provoke me to write this article, that’s going to stay the same way for some time. Finally, Safari is already here! IE7 isn’t going to be arriving any time soon.

I’ve already made my views clear about Longhorn’s user interface. I found a demo screenshot of IE7’s RSS support earlier today and was just as shocked and appalled as I was when I wrote that previous post. Just looking at it - it seems - well, wrong! Colours are nasty, the layout looks like a huge step back from Windows XP - They’ve gone back to 98! Another few aspects caught my eye as well. It looks like something I’ve seen before…

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Not often does an album come around that I just can’t stop listening to. Most of the time I give an album two or three listens and decide that, sure it’s good, but it’s not that great. This one really blew my mind, and I’ve been very impressed with James Blunt’s voice, lyrics and songwriting capability. It reminds me slightly of David Gray - they have similar types of singing style.

As with all albums, some songs on Back To Bedlam are better than others. Particular favourites are “Wise Men”, “No Bravery” and “High”. Give it a demo listen on iTunes and see what you think. I’m sure you’ll be able to tell whether it is for you or not by listening to the samples available on there.

He’s also got an absolutely fantastic website. The first page is awful, but once you click on a link, it’s very impressive. Have a look.

There was a day when adverts on a website flashed, spun and jumped to attract your attention to the product they were selling. This wasn’t a huge problem to me, cause after a while you just get used to scanning over a page to find the content you are interested in straight away. Adverts like that only really worked on people new to the Internet, or someone who was genuinely interested in the product in question.

If you’ve visited Hotscripts.com recently, you will probably have noticed the banner advertisements at the top of the page. If you’ve got your speakers turned on, they actually talk to you - speaking an advert for the product they are trying to plug. This, in my opinion, is a new level of intrusion and annoyance. No longer can you just look away, and let your eyes scan for what you are looking for. Now, you have to try to block out the sound of this talking ad!

Fine you say, just turn off your speakers. That’s a fine solution if you aren’t watching a film, or listening to some music. Then you’ve got an intermingling of whatever you are trying to watch, and the advert! I hope this doesn’t catch on, but if it does, I’ll be the first looking for a Safari add-on to disable audio in the browser.

It really has put me off visiting and using Hotscripts, which is a shame, because they are a really good database of PHP/SQL applications. I hope they come to their senses soon and revert back to the normal bearable level of advertising.

The same SimplePhotos version number is available for download, but you can now follow these instructions (included in the new INSTALL file) to enable caching of thumbnails, and add a description to a photo:

Enabling Caching of Thumbnails

1) Create a directory named ‘cache’ in the root of your webspace (right at the base level, not inside your SimplePhotos folder)

2) Chmod it to 777

Adding a Photo Description

To add a description to an image, follow this procedure.

If you have a photo named photo1.jpg in a folder, simply upload a text file with the following filename:

photo1.jpg.txt

Enter the description for that image inside the file. I appreciate this isn’t necessarily the best way of adding a description, but it does work.

Remember that if your photo had a filename ending in .JPG (capitals), your text file would have to end in .JPG.txt

I’ve really enjoyed most of the new features which are packaged with OS X Tiger, but one I have never really fallen in love with is Dashboard. Although there are some useful widgits (calculator, yellow pages etc), most of them are very much gimmicks. I don’t have much use for the majority of them.

This is enhanced even further by the fact that, on my Mac Mini, it takes a good few seconds after switching to Dashboard for all the widgets to activate and start to function. Obviously, the more you have on there, the longer you wait. There have been times when I’ve waited well over 10 seconds to use the calculator. Bearing in mind the calculator application only takes 1-2 seconds to load, what’s the point in Dashboard?

Needless to say, when I found a way to turn it off this morning, I was very pleased. The DashOnOff preference pane allows you to switch off Dashboard (and obviously, switch it back on again). Turning it off showed a major performance increase on my Mac. Calendar loads a few seconds faster, things minimise and maximise without that little delay. Minor improvements, but they all count to make it feel like you’re using a zippier system.