I’m moving on to new pastures as a designer, and the stock photography website which I launched almost a year ago is now up for sale. Check out the auction or take a look at the sale website and let me know if it interests you!

Our Stock Works is a fully completed stock photography website which launched in 2006. It currently has over 8,000 photos, and 600+ contributors who have uploaded images and are registered on the website.

What are we selling?

The sale will give you all the rights to Our Stock Works, including:

> The domain names ourstockworks.com and ourstockworks.co.uk
> All database files
> All website (PHP and HTML) files
> All photographs (over 8000)

Please note that the photographs are not being sold to you - the rights to these remain the photographers, but you have the ability to market and sell them under the ‘Our Stock Works’ banner.

We have a hosting agreement with a provider which offers the technology required to run the website and 40GB disk space and 150GB bandwidth per month, for 43 (around $80) pounds per month. We recommend keeping this package as the website is designed to run on this server - but you can obviously move elsewhere if you wish.

The website uses PHP and MySQL, and an advanced knowledge of these is essential to take over and run the website.

Read more

I received an email today from PayPal informing merchants about an impending update to the look and feel of the PayPal website:

As one of our valued PayPal merchants, we would like you to know in advance that PayPal will soon be adopting a brand new look.

We thought it will be useful for you to know about this sooner, especially if you have a website, so you can prepare to use the new PayPal logos and buttons.

What to do

If your site features hosted buttons and images with PayPal logos, you don’t need to take any action. These will update automatically.

If you host buttons and images with PayPal logos, we recommend that you replace the current images on your site with the new ones. In a few weeks when the new images are available, we’ll send you instructions on how to download them from our website.

Why it’s important

We’ll be educating all PayPal customers about the new look. By updating your images soon after the day of launch, you will let your customers know you are a current PayPal merchant and it will help them feel safer making online purchases.

PayPal is such a cornerstone of modern online trading, any alterations to the design of their site will be interesting. Will they be adopting more standards based design? Integrating some more AJAX and front-end functionality? We’ll have to wait and see - should be interesting.

The Financial Times is reporting that O2 will be the carrier of the iPhone in the UK. It’s a debate which has been going on for an awfully long time now, and I would be very surprised if FT would go to press with something they weren’t more or less 100% certain about.

I’m fairly indifferent with O2 being awarded the contract. I’ve had both good and bad experiences with them as a customer, but spent some time doing work experience with them a year or two ago and was impressed with how the organisation is managed internally.

The main thing I’m keeping my fingers crossed for is a data and call package which relates to the one offered in the USA. A sentence which worries me is:

The contract, which was signed by three European mobile operators in recent days, requires that the operators hand over to Apple 10 per cent of the revenues made from calls and data transfers by customers over iPhones.

I hope that the revenue from data and calls originates from the contract, rather than any additional fees for data usage. I feel strongly that an iPhone without unlimited data included would be a serious time waster, and it may even put me off purchasing one.

Let’s hope O2 pull the stops out and set a new standard in carrier service with the iPhone!

When iWork first came out, I was quite excited and looked forward to having a play. Despite my best efforts and enthusiastic attempts to like the program, Pages was a disappointment. It was slow, bulky and just not up to scratch compared to Microsoft Word. I’ve always been a fan of Keynote and think that it runs circles around Powerpoint, but Pages really didn’t impress. I found tasks that were simple in Office took much longer to achieve and whilst documents always ended up looking much better, the additional time didn’t make it worthwhile.

I was a little skeptical about iWork 08 for the reasons above, but obviously thought it worth giving a try. Boy am I glad that I did. So many little improvements and enhancements have made this program run rings around its predecessor. Pages is completely re-worked and it a breeze to use. It’s faster, more logical and buttons are better laid out. But none of that compares to Numbers.

Microsoft Excel has been around for quite literally as long as I can remember. It does the job that it is designed to do, but I can’t put my finger on any real major improvements it has provided since Office 97. Nothing is fresh and new, nothing really makes it easier to use. Five minutes after opening Numbers I was pretty sure that Excel would never be needed again - far from the experience I had with the original Pages.

The way that sheets are laid out just makes so much more sense than Excel. The same can be said for formulas and formatting tools, charts and graphs. Everything is straight forward and easy, and the program seems to perform very well. The way that print previews can scale is revolutionary and will save Excel users such a headache. I haven’t tested it under heavy loads and huge spreadsheets (I have no need to), but for my purposes it’s a breath of fresh air for managing finances, shares and all my other information.

Microsoft Office is still a massive cash cow and is more popular than any other software package, but it’s being gradually chipped away. With continued improvements and advancements such as this one from Apple, it runs the risk of looking outdated in the very near future.

One of the reasons I have always held Apple in a high regard revolves around they have offered an international service, and rarely favoured US customers above those in Europe. Of course, there have always been price discrepancies between countries but that is an acceptable part of business and we have come to accept the increases in price in the UK. Whether that is to do with exchange rate, tax, or the fact that we are happy to lay down more cash - I don’t know.

Recently, however, it seems that this strength is deteriorating. One of the first announcement and services which completely bypassed us as Europeans was the iTunes Music Store. This was pretty disappointing at first, but it didn’t take too long for a UK version to be offered. This was followed by Apple introducing TV Shows and then Movies for sale through iTunes. This was back in 2005, and to this date it is still not possible to purchase any video in Europe at all from iTunes (aside from music videos). I can understand how Apple need to negotiate rights and all the legal issues surrounding video sales - but it does seem that if they really tried they could sort that out hastily enough. They managed to fine in the USA…

With all their new products (Apple TV, Video iPod, iPhone to name a few) focusing around video it is really quite staggering that they still don’t offer any video in Europe.

The latest product to hit the USA way before Europe is the massively anticipated iPhone. Apple went ahead and announced it in the US, placed all the promotional material on their website and even redesigned their site in the wake of that announcement. The European websites are still the same, and there is little or no mention of the iPhone. Apple haven’t announced a carrier, or given a specific release date at all for Europe.

I think that as a company, it really is time to start placing more value on their European customers. Come on Apple, start feeding us some information and keeping us in the loop! You can’t grow and expand without your customers across the pond.