I took a trip to Scarborough at the weekend with a friend to do a photo shoot for a new project we’re working on. It’s a really long time since I’ve been there, and it was good fun to be wandering round. There is a lot of interesting content to shoot - anything from lighthouses to candyfloss. We’ve got a great new site in the pipeline, but now isn’t a good time to start rambing on about it. Expect some shameless self promotion nearer the launch.

A while ago, when I had a copyright issue with Design Shack, I contacted GeoCities about a rip-off of the website. That was well over a month ago. I had expected a fairly prompt response, and immediate action to be taken against the blatantly offending site. I received this, today:

Hello,

Yahoo! respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our
users to do the same. Yahoo! may, in appropriate circumstances and at
its discretion, disable and/or terminate the accounts of users who may
be infringing the intellectual property rights of others.

If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes
trademark infringement, or your intellectual property rights have been
otherwise violated, please provide Yahoo!’s Copyright Agent the
following information:

1. an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act
on behalf of the owner of the trademark or other intellectual property
interest;

2. a description of the trademarked work or other intellectual property
that you claim has been infringed;

and so on…

First of all, I can’t believe it took them so long to reply. One month is completely unacceptable when dealing with a problem such as this. Secondly, due to how blatant this is, I’m amazed they have not just dealt with suspending the account outright. I’m very, very disappointed with Yahoo/Geocities, and I am in awe with their incompetence in this matter!

I’ve read a few articles today, and managed to get Apple’s great Front Row software working on my Mac Mini. I’m pretty pleased, to say the least. It’s fantastic - everything Windows XP Media Centre should have been. This is a quick guide, taken from here on how to get it up and running:

STEP 1.
Download JacksonBrown’s patched Front Row STW.

http://rapidshare.de/files/6669514/Front_Row__k_.zip.html

His brilliant patching work makes Front Row run under 10.4.2 without having the iMac’s remote present.
There are three files inside this .ZIP
- Readme.txt you may now ignore, as it is out of date.
- Front Row.app copy to the Applications folder
- BezelServices.framework copy to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ (if this is already present, you don’t need to copy it)

STEP 2.
Open Script Editor.app (located in Applications/AppleScript) and paste in the following code.

tell application “System Events”
tell application “Front Row” to activate
key code 53 using {command down}
end tell

Once you have done this, save it as an application named openfrontrow.app in your applications folder.

STEP 3.
Now go to macupdate and download the program named Xkeys. It is freeware.
Once you have the file downloaded, install it and then open it up. Inside the program, configure your F8 key to run your openfrontrow.app file you created in STEP2.

STEP 4.
Now go into System Preferences. In the Accounts preference tab set up front row.app (the one you downloaded, NOT to be confused with openfrontrow.app that you created in STEP2) to be a login item.

STEP 5.
Logout and log back in. When it turns back on, press the F8 key and hopefully you will be experiencing Front Row! Pressing F8 again (or a lot of other keys on the keyboard) will close Front Row.

Make sure nothing else is mapped to F8, or this won’t work

For me, everything except the DVD playback works. I’ve also written/modded a Salling Clicker script to get it working on my K700i. I’ll post that in a bit. I hope it works for you, it’s really breathtaking!

It’s been a while since a post, I know. Work, life and other projects seem to be taking over at the moment! I’ve just managed to get my hands on an account at Wordpress.com, and am pretty impressed! It’s the best free (hosted) blog tool, and the work they’ve done modifying the administration section is very impressive. One thing missing is the ability to make your own theme, although I can see how this would be amazing hard to implement.

It should be interesting to see how it progresses, and whether they (in time) introduce new features that they charge for. I wouldn’t blame them, the work they’ve done so far is worthy of a commercial application.

I have one invite, and the comment that makes me laugh gets it. I don’t laugh, it doesn’t get sent

Well, Design Shack was featured on Digg.com yesterday and it has shot through the roof. Literally. Sorry for all the posts in relation to this project, but it really is quite exciting. We had over 80,000 hits yesterday alone. Bandwidth could pose a problem if these sort of numbers continue, but hopefully things will even out.

Amazing how much publicity one link can generate! Total design views are now over 116,000!

Today, we passed both the 200 featured designs mark, and the 50,000 views milestone. Almost exactly one month after the site launched, and it’s been a great success. Two big promotional achievements were being featured on the front page of iStockPhoto and Joshua Ink. I’ve done the math, and we have averaged out at about one visitor, per minute for the first month of the site being online. It will be interesting to see how it has grown in another 30 days time.

I’m amazed with the response I’ve had from the site. Lots of people are submitting their designs, which is the main thing. A showcase site is nothing without good designs to showcase. Thankyou to anyone who has sent things in.