Since buying my first Apple product almost 4 years ago, I have been lucky to sample some of the best technical kit on the market.  Apple do truly make some of the best products on the market, and have continued to do so throughout the last decade.  In the days to come I will write about what I think their best product is, however this post is dedicated to the worst I have sampled – the Apple Mighty Mouse.

I was reading the other day that they have actually officially renamed the mighty mouse to simply the ‘Apple Mouse’ due to a legal dispute and perhaps this is actually worthy of what I consider to be Apple’s poorest product that I have used.

It is funny really because to all intents and purpose the product is good.  It is very good on batteries (I have had this one for 2 years and only put 3 sets in I think), has some excellent functionality, but it has one major flaw in the design that ruins the whole mouse really.

The one I have now is a Wireless Mighty mouse but previous to that I have had the wired version.  That broke because of the moues’s problems which lies with the scroll ball on the top.  Everything Apple is usually well manufactured but then they decided to put this tiny scroll wheel that just wants to gather dust all the time.  After my wired version broke I tried to get in the mouse to clean, after following the cleaning instructions and them not working.  I ended up smashing the thing to pieces because I couldn’t get inside and ended up using a Dell mouse for about 6 months.

I then got a Wireless mouse bundled in with  Mac Mini that I bought and again the mouse is great.  Excellent 360 degree scrolling and all the other features but it still has the tiny, weak scroll ball on the top.

I am writing this article today because today the scroll ball on my Wireless Mighty Mouse has also failed in the same way as the other one.  The problem lies in that you cannot scroll down for some reason.  Its wierd because it was the down scrolling with my other Mighty Mouse that was the problem.  Also after doing a search on the internet it seems that I am not the only one that is having the down scrolling problem.

So the question lies with which other mouse do I get?  I have been looking and leaning towards the Apple Magic Mouse which was out earlier this year.  As this doesn’t have a scroll ball on the top then perhaps it would be a good (but a little pricey!) choice.  Anyone got one that would like to share their comments?

Well this week has been a very trying week indeed.  A test of patience, stamina and just about everything else I think too.  My son has been very ill, I have had a very bad cold (which I think my son gave me – thanks Harry!) and to top it all computer problems!

Readers of this blog and followers of me online will no doubt be aware of the difficult first 8 – 10 weeks we had with my son when he was born just under a year ago.  This week has brought all that back as we have  had several nights were we have been up most of the night with him.  We I say we, but it has mostly been my wife who as beared the brunt a I was working all week.  We also wouldn’t have managed without the help of our mums – Harry’s granny and grandma who have helped wherever they can.  I think what made it hard was it brought back all the pain of those first 10 weeks although I think we both new that this would end (still hoping as I hear Harry crying in the background as I write this!).

I have called this post the week before the week before meaning we are currently in the week before the week before Christmas.  Still with me!  Anyway my wife was ill last week (I think she gave this cold to Harry) and me and Harry have been bad this week and usually there is always someone that is ill on Christmas Day.  Therefore I am hoping that with the 3 of us all having coughs and colds that it will mean that we will have an illness free Christmas Day.  Here’s hoping anyway!

So lets see what the weekend and next week is going to bring.  The week before Christmas is always a nice week and in many ways better than the Christmas week itself.

Well I really have gone round the houses with this blog over the last few months.  We have changed domain name, changed designs a few times and now we are back here on the original domain name that we started with, but with a new design.  Let me explain all about it!

First of all I have had a blogging conflict for the last few months.  I have started writing more and more blog articles about WordPress and the Web design and development work that I have been doing.  That in itself is not a problem, but penny4them.com was followed by a lot of friends and family that were not in the slightest interested in WordPress or web development.  Therefore I have decided that I am going to use this a more of a personal blog about me rather than things that are too WordPressy or web developmentish (not sure whether they are words but hey ho!).  I am going to develop the Equal Design blog in order to publish any techy posts that I write.

So why this design?  You are a web designer for goodness sake?  Well that is true, a web designer that doesn’t design their own website?  The thing is, is that I just haven’t got time to design my own site as I am too busy with other projects – teaching and Equal Design.  So I stumbled across this theme from youare.com the other day and really liked it.  Nice and simple with good design features and enables me to do all the things that I want to on my blog.  So after a dummy local install to test the features I have decided to go live with it.

I am an avid Mac user as I believe they are the best platform for developing and designing on.  However there has always been one main problem, that of how to test your sites in Windows environment without switching to a Windows machine.  Well I think I have the answer – meet Parallels desktop for Mac.

It is very important to test sites in a Windows environment as the majority of the visitors to a site will be using Windows.  For example looking at the statistics for this site 68% of visitors were from Windows machines and the statistics for Equal Design show that 61% of visitors are from a Windows environment.  However please don’t confuse what I am saying here about what I wrote the other day about not developing for Internet Explorer 6.  I am talking here about making sure sites look fine on more modern browsers such as IE7 and IE8 (even though I hate them just as much!).

But testing sites in a Windows environment when using a Mac to develop sites is often difficult.  I have been pointed to a number of tools on the web, however all of which never seem to quite do the required job.  It was about 6 months ago that I learned about ‘Virtualising’ machines, which is what Parallels desktop does.  It creates a Virtual Machine on your Mac with the operating system you choose.  Off course in order to install an operating system you still need to valid discs and product codes.  You can also have as many virtual machines as you like.  For this reason I have installed 2 instances of Windows XP.  One with IE7 and one with IE8 so that I can test sites in both version to make sure they display correctly.

It has lots of really cool features, perhaps one of the best being the ‘coherence’ mode.  What this does is, instead of running the virtual machine inside its own window you can run the machine alongside all your other Mac applications which means that to someone looking at your computer they would never know that it is a virtual machine.  Also you can drag and drop files between the Mac and Windows environments as well as being able to copy and paste between the two.

It really is excellent value at just under £50 and I would recommend any Mac user who also needs a Windows environment to take it for a test drive at least as you can trial it for 30 days without charge.

I  am about to list my Dell Inspiron 530s top sec desktop PC on eBay and therefore I thought I may as well list it here as well to get a little more exposure and give the opportunity to give a little more details about the unit with some more photos.  So here goes…

The unit is a 12 month old Dell Inspiron 530s slimline desktop PC with the following specification:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz
• RAM: 4Gb
• Hard Drive: 300Gb SATA drive
• Graphics: 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
• Card Reader: Built in 19 in 1
• Wireless: Wiresless PCI card installed
• Accessories: Mouse and Dell Keyboard
• Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium

This is a really high spec desktop PC that is great for high end tasks such as video editing and working with large photographs etc.  However it will also run all the usual programs etc. and is good for web surfing with built in wireless antenna as well and running Office etc.

The unit is is excellent as new condition and comes with power cable and all the install discs that dell supplied with the unit.  The asking price for this system is £250.

This may seem a strange article coming from a web designer, but yes you have read the title correctly, I think that web designers should stop developing sites that will display correctly in Internet Explorer 6.  In this article I will discuss why Internet Explorer sucks and also why I think that developers should stop developing sites for IE6.

Let me start by saying that Internet Explorer is a terrible web browser.  Why you might ask?  Well quite simply it just does not follow the rules that are set out by the W3C in terms of interpreting code into a web page.  What I mean by this is that you can develop a site that looks near on the same in all other browsers (such as Firefox, Safari, Opera and many more) but in IE6 it looks pants.  It just doesn’t handle transparent PNGs at all and floating elements never seem to display correctly at all.  And last but not least its old!

In fact one of the tests that you can run on a browser to test how ‘standards friendly’ it is, is called the acid 3 test.  When running this test on Internet Explorer 6 it scored a pathetic 12/100.  Firefox 3 scored 93/100 and Safari 4 scored 100/100.  Yet another reason why not to use or further support IE6.  Looking at my web stats for this site I  can see that 16% of users are still using IE6 and for the stats for Equal Design that figure drops to just 9%.  Numbers using it are decreasing and I believe that if web developers stop developing for IE6 these numbers will drop off massively.

There are many that argue web designers should still be developing sites that will display in IE6.  Their argument for this is that there are a large proportion of the web population that are still using IE6 – why I don’t know as it is free to upgrade or use a different, more modern browser such as Firefox.  People are not still using Windows 3.1 for goodness sake so why are people still hell bent on using a browser that is getting on for 5 years old.

So why do I think that we should stop developing sites for IE6?  Well the main reason is that the longer people keep their sites looking the same on IE6 then the less likely people are to change or upgrade their browser.  I mean if they see things looking OK all the time then they are less likely to take the time to get a more up to date browser to fix any visual elements that looks poor.  Therefore by making sites compatible with IE6 we are merely prolonging its life.  Lets take a stance to get rid of it once and for all and stop developing sites for IE6.

Holidaying this year was going to be different as we have Harry.  Never of us really felt like going anyway for any length of time and therefore we decided on a couple of days away, whilst Harry stayed with Grandparents.  However we did decide to splash out a little seen as this would be the only holiday we would get this year, so we decided on the Scotsman Hotel in Edinburgh.

Our trip started out a few months ago when we have to make the decision of how to travel to Edinburgh.  Having done some digging around on the Internet my wife found a pretty good train deal there and back which would be far cheaper than the car.  We therefore option for that since the hotel was in the centre of the city and all the attractions etc. that we wanted to visit were in walking distance.

We set off for the station at around 0700 in order to miss the traffic and arrived in plenty of time for the train.  So much so in fact that we had around an hours wait on the platform at Preston station for our Trans Pennine Express to Edinburgh.  The train was bang on time and the journey was great.  In fact so much so that I managed to code an entire website on the way there, a testament to how coll WordPress actually is.

We arrived at around 1130 in the morning.  Our room was supposed to be ready at 1400 and therefore we had a few hours to kill.  However we had rang previously to check whether the hotel could hold our backage until checkout which they could.  Therefore we made the small walk across the road from the station to the hotel.  After climbing a rather long set of stairs to get to the reception we were greeted by a concierge who kindly took our bags and sat us down for checkin, where we were surprised to hear that our room was ready and that we could go straight up.  It was clear that this was a a ‘posh’ hotel, as ‘Richard’ took us up to our room and explained in every detail about all the luxury services that were offered, including the ‘privacy hatch’ to the room with complementary shoe cleaning services.  There was also a mini bar (which we never touched!) stacked to the hilt with alsorts of niceties including a half bottle of champagne at £26 and a packet of Polo’s at £1.

Once we had got settled we then left for the dungeons.  Earlier in the year we have been to the York dungeons and thoroughly enjoyed the experience and therefore we decided to take a trip to the Edinburgh version.  Having used a Tesco voucher in order to get in half price, we were feeling rather smug and then the experience began.  Now don’t get me wrong there were parts that were quite scary but I think there is something about the fact that you are ready for it that really makes it not all that bad.  The overall visit however was well worth it and not only did we enjoy the rides in there, such as the vertical free-fall but also we learnt a lot about what happened in Edinburgh ‘in the older days’!

Then it was back to the room for a brew and then off the the Spa in the hotel.  The Spa was wonderful and relaxing.  A lovely long swimming pool with Jacuzzi and Steam room as well as a full gym if you wanted.

In the evening we ventured out for some tea and found a pizza express not a million miles away from the hotel.  We both enjoyed a La Reine and Sloppy Guiseppi Pizza with a bottle of red and a Banoffee pudding and that was the end of day one.

Having had a long lie in in the morning we finally set off for Edinburgh castle on the morning of day 2 at around 1045.  Arriving at the castle we joined the queue for tickets.  45 – 50 minutes later we had bought our tickets (a reasonable £13 each we thought) and headed off into the castle for a look around.  There is loads to see in the grounds of the castle making it a worthy visit.  There are also some tremendous views of Edinburgh and beyong and I managed to capture some photographs.

We spent the afternoon wandering around Edinburgh and swimming in the hotel Spa before heading out for tea at Bella Italia.  After a nice meal and a wander up the Royal Mile we headed for bed.

The train journey home the following day was as good as the initial jouney there – on time, comfotrable and about right for the money.  It was great to see Harry again when we returned home after a lovely break to recharge our batteries.