I’ve just built my first WordPress theme!
It’s not any ordinary theme, though. It uses the NewHaze for WordPress plugin, to create a really quick, easy games website.
It’s available exclusively through the NewHaze Developers store – for free.
(Taking a full page screenshot has also become a lot easier after downloading “ScreenGrab!” for Firefox.)
On the whole, I’m quite disappointed with the Mac App Store. I was expecting software applications at iOS app prices. But with most apps being over £10, I find that I don’t really want to spend my money on apps unless I really need to. I think this will hold back the Mac App Store from becoming as popular as the iOS store.
Another thing I’m not really a big fan of is all the apps joining the “Applications” folder on my Mac, and joining the dock. Now sure, they have to go somewhere, but I’d prefer a sub-folder, so I don’t have to trawl through loads of applications to find the one that I want to use.
I think if Apple really worked hard to get this product really good, it could be a fantastic leap forward in the way software is discovered and bought, but I don’t think it quite meets the criteria just yet.
The iPad has finally been released for pre-order in the UK. Not only is it months after the US release date, it is from £429. That’s $640! $140 dollars above the US pricing. Man, Apple are taking the p***. The idea of the iPad was so it would be affordable for the average person. In fact, on the iPad webpage, it clearly states “A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.“. It is more expensive than an average PC-based laptop.
For the same price from Dell, you can get a laptop with 4GB RAM, a 320GB hard disk – oh and you can have control of it. With an iPad, you have Bluetooth – but you can’t use it. You don’t have Flash support. You can only use things that Apple personally approve. You can’t really control what you put on it – if Apple don’t like you buying books or apps from another store, they’ll stop you.
If they really want to take control of the tablet computing market, they are going to have to have a fair international price, so that people can’t be exploited because of their geographical location. It’s appalling!
Recently, fibre-optic communication cable updates have been hitting the news. There is no argument about this – it is 100% a good thing. So why is everyone being so slow about it?
I live in rural England, so my internet connection is exceptionally slow. It would be great to have an internet connection even close to the 1 gigabit a second speeds in Japan. In England, the politicians seem to be using this as a method to increase taxes, and oppositions are hoping to use this to win the election in a few weeks.
I have noticed that there has been news from abroad on the subject. With Google announcing to create a fibre-optic network in a city in the US, resulting in cities going to crazy lengths to get their attention.
In my opinion, networks like this should be introduced around the world. It may cost quite a bit, however it should be a priority because of the increasing popularity of the internet. We need to keep up with it, otherwise the internet will not be able to develop, because we are all stuck with 10 kilobit a second connections (yes, it is as bad as that here).
So what are we waiting for? Oh wait, yeah, this is now a political issue. I see, so we could be waiting quite a while…
If you have ever been interested in creating your own games arcade website, you may have looked at various different game site scripts. But are they worth it?
I have recently looked at game site scripts, and wondered why they are valuing themselves so highly. A few details on all of this are included in this blog post.
First point… the cheapest game site script I found was $9 from www.gamessitescript.com. However, you don’t get certain games preset in the site.
Second point… are people really paying for “game packs”? These are simply a collection of games, ready to be added to a user’s site. These can cost as much as $39.99. A downside of these is that loads of sites on the internet have the same sets of games, so the sites have no uniqueness.
However, if you are wanting to just have as many games as possible, then I suppose this method is okay. However, a quicker and easier way of doing this, in my opinion, is writing a custom script and doing a mass-import of the tens of thousands of games in a feed, such as the Mochi Media games feed.
Third point… $20 for installation? Isn’t this just copying and pasting, then running “install.php”? If not, it should be. These scripts shouldn’t be over-complicated.
Fourth point… do these scripts look very good at all? If you are paying upto $600 for one of these scripts, surely it should be okay-looking? In my opinion, they look terrible and clunky. How come if you visit a free website like Facebook, Twitter, Google or pretty much any other half-decent website on the internet, you get a quick, clean, (almost) bug-free service. However if you spend $600 on a script then it is clunky, slow and written in very poor English.
Fifth point… game site scripts seem to limit the appearance of these sites. They all look samey, have the same features, the same games and the same appalling default template!
In my opinion, game site scripts are a waste of money, and only degrade the website. Until a free and far more open game site script comes out, I think the most logical solution for site owners is to build a custom script. Hey, I’ve managed to do it twice, so other people should be able to do it easily too! 
