On Friday, two of my most anticipated games are set to launch - Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire and Super Smash Bros for Wii U. The excitment is now building up as the moment approaches. I can foresee my entire weekend being spent playing Super Smash Bros and all the time on the bus spent playing Pokemon.
I just wanted to express my love for these games and eternalise them in a blog post.
I've updated a few features on the site, particularly I've had to remove the snowflakes animation as it was slowing the performance of the system that was browsing the site - not good for usability!
I've also added a more friendly settings panel as pictured:
When the settings button is clicked this appears as a modal dialog like a lot of other features across the website.
I've also changed the search box, and whilst it looks the same, it is far easier to maintain and should appear better on older browsers, including old versions of Firefox and IE.
I am always banging on about a better web, especially through the Twitter Hashtag #BetterWeb, but the technology behind the web is becoming better and better. Nowadays things like being able to access system information such as the battery life are becoming a real thing - meaning that the native app may soon disappear to the already multi-platform web.
If you do not already follow me on Twitter, please do so that you can get my latest ideas for improving the web.
Just last week I was speaking to my brother about a new software venture that will involve us using a platform independent language such as Java to develop the software hosted on this site from scratch again. This would mean great things such as being able to use it on Mac OS X and Linux. It would unfortunately mean using Java, however - and many will know how I dislike Java.
However, in recent events, Microsoft has chosen to make the most shocking, but one of the best, changes to .NET Framework, which is the common language runtime (CLR) that all of my applications run in. They have chosen to make the language available on all platforms, without needing some external framework such as Mono to do this.
This will mean that soon I can get these applications up and running with the new .NET Framework 5 and working with all the main OSes. It will likely mean that after years of supporting Windows XP, I will have to finally cut the support.
I have updated my search box on my site four times since the start of 2013, and I'm never entirely sure what design to go with. I currently like the design of my search box but it is so flawed that it's become such a site hinderance. Even now, as browsers get better and better, things just don't always work the way you planned with websites.
Tomorrow evening I will begin a new search box. You can tell me what you think in the feedback form.
I have noticed this time and time again, but for all you people who have never experienced the Mac experience, this is how your PC looks from a Mac's Finder:
This is how Macs see PCs
In just under 30 minutes, my Halloween theme for my website will be coming down and the site will return to the normal form.
I hope you have enjoyed my site in it's 2014 Halloween form. As always mid November it turns to a Christmas theme.
It also should change automatically without me needing to do anything, provided the time on the local computer is correct, as I chose to write this in JavaScript rather than on the server - giving your computer more work, not mine!
In somewhat sad news, Motorola, one of the largest chip manufacturers in the world, has been bought by Lenovo.
You can read more at Lenovo's blog found here.
The following is another simple to use BlackRabbit Script sample.
//Copyright JBALFOURDTP//28/10/2014 //BlackRabbit Script version: 2.2.2.467 function main() //main method goes here output("Hello world"); $x = 11 $y = 11 if($x == $y) output(True) else output(False) endif //Incrementing variables will not instantiate them. They must be instantiated prior to use. $i = 0 while($i < 10) $i++ output($i) endwhile endfunction
Whilst not necessary, I do build a lot of customisation features into my website. One such feature is the Invert Colour feature that inverts the colour of the page and it's contents - using a black background and white text making it easier to read. All features are used throughout the browsing session of the site or you can choose to store them in a cookie on your computer so that every time you visit the site these features are enabled.
Now I'm adding another customisable feature to my site with Dark Mode. Dark Mode is a similar functionality to Invert Colour. The only difference is that it only affects the menu. Please take a look at this:
