I’m sure I don’t need to inform any of you that the new iPhone was announced yesterday. There was me fully expecting to have to pony up another £269, as well as a more expensive contract, because let’s face it - mobile companies have a bit of a reputation for being greedy buggers.

But get this, O2 have come up with a new business model: (take note Vodafone and the others)

If you don’t shaft your customers, they’re more than happy to spend their money with you.

O2 are going to give me the same amount of texts and minutes, as much 3G data as I can eat (remember it’s twice as fast as EDGE, and EDGE isn’t that bad if we’re honest), and if 3G isn’t fast enough and I need WiFi, I now get BT Openzone as well as The Cloud (which covers pretty much everywhere I will ever go in Manchester and London), all for the same £35 a month. I would have happily paid an extra few quid a month for 3G speed and the Openzone access, but O2 really pulled it off and kept it all at the same price.

And they’re selling the 16Gb model that I’ll be getting for a measly £159 - £110 less than I paid for my original iPhone in November. All they’re asking in return is that I restart the same 18 month contract that I signed up for in November.

So, well done O2. If you and Apple keep this up I’ll more than happily buy a new iPhone every 8 months or so, and you’ve got yourself a customer for life.

As those of you who are following me on twitter know, in a few short weeks, I shall be departing the rainy city and abandoning the lifestyle of a layabout student and moving to London to start work for a small company called RMStudio (yes, I know, I’ll be re-doing the site).

This rather large turning point has made me start to reflect on the four years I spent here and also to think about the future.

The main thing I’ve been thinking about was “did I waste my time doing a degree?”. On the face of it, the answer would be “yes”. I learnt virtually nothing useful on my course (we didn’t even touch any networking hardware until 3rd year - and the degree title was Computer and Networking Technology!), being taught circa 1999 HTML (font tags anyone? I actually got marked down for using CSS in one assignment), how to make basic games in C++ and how ancient processors such as the 8088 worked. Yes, I’m sure some of this is useful to some people, but not to me.

So, what did I find useful? There were several group assignments with me invariably running around people getting them to do work, and of course it teaches you not to leave things to the last minute after you get sick of being up at 5am trying to get that assignment done for tomorrow that you have had lying around for three months. Oh, there’s also the fact that I met some of the best people on this earth up here (leaving those people behind was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make) and will leave with some very fond memories (and some very fond “I think I remember what happened last night, but I’m not too sure” nights too!).

And of course there’s the extra pay at the end of it. Even in my starting role, I’ll be on several grand a year more than I would be if I’d not been to university. That should go some way to help pay off the debts I racked up when I was testing the beer to make sure it was safe for everyone else (what a public servant I am!).

So, what does the future hold for me then? As I said at the top, I’ll be moving down to London in a few weeks to start what should be my dream job - I’ll be making websites and doing other mac related geekery. Yep, basically what I do now, but I get paid for all of it (not just the web bit like I do now). Hai five!

Sure, I could have got more money selling my soul and joining an IT department at a large company or whatever, but I couldn’t face dreading work every morning (and wearing a suit! Yegads! Although I do look pretty good in a suit… ).

So there you go. University was probably worth it since I had lots of fun, met great people and didn’t do a great deal of work for most of it whilst managing to get enough credits to make my way through. Now it’s time for the real fun to start!

So, I thought I’d use it for a project I’ve been thinking about for a while. Say hello to Gluco. It’s the first theme that I’ve made for Rapidweaver that I’m making commercially available, and it can be yours for the bargain price of $12.99 (US). You can find out more about it at firesuite. A screenshot is after the jump.

I’ve also been busy eating toast.

And drinking tea from my apple mug.

I’ve also unfortunately had to read lots…

of pointless…

books.

But, I’ve finally got it working now, and am half way through the report. The end is in sight!

Right, now I’ve absolved myself of all responsibility, time for business. On Flickr there’s no way to directly reply to a comment, so the general practise is to show who you are replying to by putting “@username:” before your comment.

What Replyr does is get a list of all usernames on the page currently active in Safari - no other browsers are supported since this uses Automator (usually the people that have commented before you, but there are some odd cases where it pulls other user names. I might fix it in a later release). It then shows you a pop up where you can choose which username you want to reply to and then copies it to the clipboard.

This gets really useful when you bind it to a Quicksilver hot key, so your hands don’t ever need to leave the keyboard.

Included in the zip file is the original Automator workflow so you can see what it’s doing, or there’s a pre packaged application with a nice icon ready to be dropped into your applications folder.

Things that will break this:

• Activating the app when a page other than an individual photo on flickr.com is active in Safari.
• Using a browser other than Safari.

Download Replyr.zip

Let me know if it doesn’t work in any way. You can get it over at the original post. Enjoy!

Firstly, the markup I used. Ideally you should be using unordered lists for all your navigation since it helps screen reading software and the like.

<div id="header">
<ul>
<li><a href="index.html" class="homecurrent">home</a></li>
<li><a href="resume.html" class="resume">resume</a></li>
<li><a href="portfolio.html" class="portfolio">portfolio</a></li>
<li><a href="personal.html" class="personal">personal</a></li>
<li><a href="contact.php" class="contact">contact</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

All pretty standard so far. Each link has two classes (in this example, .home and .homecurrent for when it’s the active page. This isn’t required, but I used different images in the links to show the user which page they were on).

Now, you’d normally put something like this in your css:

#header a {
display: block;
height:300px;
width:120px;
}

#header a.homecurrent {
background-image: url(images/css/common/home-current.png);
}

#header a:hover.homecurrent {
background-image: url(images/css/common/home-current-hover.png);
}

This will of course work perfectly well, but you will have the pause while the hover image loads, which is what we want to avoid.

To get around this, fire up your image editor and put the images side by side like this:

In this example, each part of the image is 120px wide, so we will only show the first 120px of the background by specifying the width, and we will then change the position of the same background image for the hover. Since it’s the same image, we don’t need to specify another background.

#header a.homecurrent {
background-image: url(images/css/common/home-current.png);
}

#header a:hover.homecurrent {
background-position:-120px 0;
}

I’ll just quickly explain the background-position property since you may not have seen it before. The first value is the change on the x-axis and the second is the change on the y-axis. So here we’re telling the background to move 120px to the left and not change on the y-axis, which will show the second half of our background image.

Well, haven’t I been a busy boy? I’ve no idea why I just asked that since it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll know the answer. Anyway, the answer is an emphatic YES!

Incase you didn’t know, I’m currently in my last year of university. And that’s a pretty busy time, with final project deadlines looming and trying to get a job. And that has meant I’ve let things slip around here - particuarly by using a pre-built WordPress theme. I know, it’s bad for a web developer to use someone else’s theme.

So, I’ve been working on a new one. It’s not quite finished yet, and I’ve not even looked at it in IE yet (although this may be the one where I finally tell people with IE6 to bugger off. I don’t think I can deal with that pain without being paid for it ), but I’m hoping it will be up either this weekend or the next. So look forward to that (I bet you’re all on the edges of your seats aren’t you?).

Speaking of looking for a job for after I graduate (see what I did there?), if you are looking for or know anyone that’s looking for a full time web developer, could you be so kind as to be directed towards my portfolio site at http://grahamgilbert.com. Ta very much my lovelies.

There has been quite a large uproar within the web design community, mainly since if no version is specified, the page will be rendered as if you were viewing the site in IE7 - which whilst not as bad as the steaming pile of dog’s doodoo that is IE6, it’s still not very good at rendering standards compliant code.

Personally, I think this is actually quite a good idea. Every time a new version of IE is released, many sites “break” since the designer has had to hack their code in various convoluted ways to get it to render correctly. This could put an end to all of this, with your site appearing as it was intended for all time (ish).

However, in my (admittedly half baked) opinion, there are two ways that this could be improved.

Firstly, there is the issue of the default being IE7. Supposedly the latest build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid 2 test. This means that for all practical purposes, it’s pretty much standards compliant (finally!). So why not default to IE8? That means that there shouldn’t be any need for conditional comments targeted at IE7 any more and will speed up development times when building your site.

Secondly, there really needs to be support with other browsers. I don’t see any point in saying “my site will work fine in IE7, but I don’t have a bleedin’ clue what it will look like in FireFox or Safari”. As far as I see it, the point of this tag is so that once the site is built, it will look all spangly forever. So, if you have to come back and change the site when a new version of WebKit or Gecko (the rendering engines for Safari and Mozilla browsers, respectively) breaks your site, you might as well fix it up for IE as well.

Taking the mickey out of children? I’m so going to hell. But he is annoying.