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Over the past month or so I have had the latest release of Grand Theft Auto on pre-order. I decided to opt for this as I would be purchasing both of the downloadable content games on one disk. Something I prefer to do, as a hard copy on a frisbee like disk is better for me than a data file on a hard-disk.

I am still yet to complete GTA4, mostly due to work taking over my free time. I’m just not motivated to do anything when I sit down at eleven at night. Making myself a promise to gamernate just fails.

Paying £24.99 for the two mini-games is a reasonable price for me, especially as it dropped £3.

Well, this entry is short; and point-less. I’m not writing a review or anything. Dum de dum. Maybe I’ll edit later, after playing.

For the past few months I have been trying to purchase a copy of MoH: Airborne due to thoroughly enjoying the game the previous time I was on it. However, this isn’t as easy as one would dream (we haven’t quite made it to thinking yet); as the game is either out of stock; or just too highly priced where I live.

I tried to locate a copy on-line, but gave up since it meant actually looking for sites that would sell one; or registering on ones I did find.

I have an account with Game, as I have utilised the reward card since the day the Redcar branch opened several years ago. Sending an email to them came back negative. She wasn’t pregnant after all. Phew.

Wait, what!?

Quick, mention a game and side-track them.

In short, they don’t have stock orders for anything further than a week ahead. So they have no idea if a copy will arrive. The price currently loiters on my WishList at £14.98; which is a payable price. Heh, I actually want to give money away for once, and no-one is around to take it. :p

There are several other games on my WishList too, including; but not limited to:

• Wolverine: Un-Caged Edition;
• Assassins Creed 2 ¹;
• Saint Row 2 ²;
• and Max Payne 3 ¹

I remember back when games where half the price they are now. What’s with the mark-up eh?

¹ Un-released; and can’t afford the pre-order price.
² Yea, I still haven’t purchased this; but I have little monies and no tree to grow it on.

Over the past few days, I have been working on a handful of up-dates for two of my Windows Live Messenger skins; All Woollie Sheep and Enhanced Live.

Enhanced Live simply reverts a number of changes, as well as a bug fix or two, with nothing new being added.

AWS, at this time, has also had one or two fixes; and one or two reversions, but I plan on up-dating compatibility to the latest version of messenger (9.0). I’m not sure on when this will be, as I will need to re-learn a few pieces; and actually up-grade;¹ and extract the resources; and see what 9.0 looks like; and plan on the best attack; and possibly other stuff. It will take a while.

I have also up-dated the screen shots for use within the projects, and made some thumbnails for light-box. That was ‘fun’.

¹ After this, I will cease designing for 8.5.

WordPress:

WordPress is now in the beta stages of 2.8, which should be a nice release. The team has been hard at work again to bring us users a great piece of software. A list of new features can be seen on the codex.

I have somewhat been waiting for the 2.8 release more than the others, but I have no idea why. :/

IP.Board:

A few days ago, the first release candidate for IP.Board 3.0 was released to customers for additional testing and bug finding. Having installed the release to test out features and fixes I’m a little happier with the work put in than I was previously. There is no e.t.a on the final release, but I’m starting to get excited for it, as I will finally be able to update the community forums; since they appear to be a little neglected at this time.

Over the following months I shall attempt to keep up to date with both of the above software’s, and maybe actually give a better opinion on them.

Two, maybe three days ago I set to work on finishing up/cleaning/updating the main style sheet used within the sites and weblog; since I often became side-tracked by other items and what-not.

Testing the fresher design locally, I was quite pleased with it, aside from one or two minor pieces that I would iron out a day or two later. Or at least I thought, until I updated the lightbox style sheet; and proceeded to upload both that one, and the main style sheet to the live server.

Oops.

Not what I had planned, but oh well; it looks great at the moment and can hold off a week or so for any tweaks I decide to make.

Each of the form elements; text areas, inputs, drop downs, etc have had a makeover; and are better that I thought they would be. It’s nice to have that feeling of accomplishment.

On top of the style sheet updates, I have started to use jQuery to achieve a couple of nice effects; most notably Lightbox and the toggle features available on the Projects pages. As I discover more plug-ins, I shall decide whether it’s worth adding or not; and I may also be using curvy corners in some places soon.

These where part of the minor tweaks I wanted to have finished first, before updating the site.

Having  just removed beta 1 a few weeks ago, skipping beta 2 with the intention of waiting for beta 3, I have installed beta 3 into a test directory.

I’m not sure if I’m convinced with version 3 yet or not. Yes it looks new, and some areas are good; but at a first look there is too much content stuffed in, for no reason at all.

Looking through the admincp, I can see the board is still tied to the 2.x series; which is a disappointment. Many of the features could have been enhanced, and operate better than they do/have done.

Load times, wow. In the admincp these are sloooow. One of the main features for the update was reduced load times. Fail. Hopefully everything runs smoother in the final version.

Comparison to ZetaBoards. This really surprised me actually, many of the features in ZB outweigh IP.Board quite a bit; and I’m not being biased here, these are the features that are tied to the 2.x series that should be overhauled, since IPS has the ability to make awesome software run flawlessly.

The ZetaBoards admincp is less complicated, it took me about 40 minuets on and off to work out where everything is; whilst the IP.Board admincp is cluttered; awkward; flow-less and painful to navigate.

I haven’t tested the board much, as I just couldn’t be bothered. I had more fun setting up my secret lair.

I’m planning to upgrade our community forums some time after the 3.0.1 release of IP.Board, as this gives us a chance to see through the updates; and check out any new modifications. I’m also aiming to design a theme this time. I never found the time to do it for 2.3.x

The alpha preview of IP.Board 3.0 has been opened to the public for about 19 hours now, and I must say it looks very nice.

• There has been a mass re-design of the colours and images, which will take an hour or so to get used too;
• The layout has been improved, with emphasis on navigation;
• Speed wise, I’m using my bandwidth with other things so it currently seems similar to 2.3.6;
• The flow of the board is really nice, everything seems to fit together well;

As this version is still only alpha there may be a lot of work to do before a beta is released, although there might be something within the next few weeks. Either way, we shall install a test environment to fiddle with the admin side of things; and work out the new layout a bit more. Keep a look out for updates to this!

You can check out the new software as a guest, or if you’re registered with IPS then simply login.

This new release seems very promising, and is a definite plus to IPS. We look forward to the release.

Just looked through my feeds and spotted something nice from IPS, news of their pending preview to IP.Board 3.0.0

Some time next week (possibly Wednesday) the preview will be online for us customers to take a look at, and prod, the latest updates to the forum software. This is great news, as I can finally decide what features to re-add and what to leave out of our newly installed forums.

Hopefully there are some great out-of-the-box modifications installed, with a decent handful of new features as promised. I’m looking forward to seeing the new designs and layout of the board, especially as I will begin creating themes for IP.Board due to the process becoming simpler. (I’ve only held off this long as to avoid updating).

We will always have version 3.1 for feature additions and one of the best parts of 3.0’s architecture is adding new features, along with upgrading, is much easier than the 2.x series so upgrades can be developed and released much faster.

That is a bit of good news, updates to the software will be released much sooner with new and better features.

Depending on how the public preview goes we will begin releasing downloadable betas. Expect updates on the beta release schedule in the week following the public preview.

So hopefully in a little over two weeks time we shall have a beta release to install localy. Although I am slightly unsure of upgrading this early, as some of the modifications may not be available or compatible. That shouldn’t be an issue though, as they can always be added in later.

As this version of messenger is now out in the open, skins will eventually need to be updated to fit the new layout and underlying code etc.

Patchou has informed us of a new Messenger Plus! Live version, to be released soon, that will address the new beta:

..a new version of Messenger Plus! will soon be released to let you update your skins for the new Messenger 9 Beta.

.. this is good news, as we can continue to release new designs for a popular application.

As for the current designs, they will be updated to fit both 8.5 and 9.0, with a few tweaks included as normal before an update release is made. Ubuntu Live is still un-finished, with work taking over there has been no time to complete everything.

There are plans to make a start on a new design, that will be created to look similar to another popular software, using the colour scheme; icons; and basic layout; etc etc. There is no definite start date for this, but hopefully before Christmas.

How unlucky can this be. I recently installed the latest version of our beloved, yet pain-in-the-arse blogging software, only to be shown there is now another update. Argggh!

I wouldn’t generally have an issue with this, but after the last weblog wouldn’t ever update (ever!); and the fact that there is no changed files download (only a full installation), it gets slightly annoying having to do everything from scratch.

I’ll have a look through the Trac page and see what files need updating, and just see what happens I guess.

If things look squiffy when you read this it all went wrong.

Update (Nov 28th 08): Nothing went wrong with the previous updates, after I had found the trac page again.

We have since been updated to the latest stable release aswell.