BOCC Team Update

We've just updated our BOCC Team website page with the details of our latest team members. This includes Lawrence Stocker - Project Administrator, who will be assisting our Project Director Tim Collingwood, as well as Amandine Basson and David Marrs - Systems Developers, who join our web design, development and systems team.

You can find out more about their areas of expertise on our BOCC Team page.

Developing the Leverhulme Trust Website

We're delighted to currently be working with The Leverhulme Trust to redevelop their main Trust website.

The new site, due for launch in early Autumn 2010, will feature a completely revised visual and interface design; as well as a number of new web features, such as a direct Twitter feed, enhanced information on grant management schemes and updates to news and RSS feeds.

The Leverhulme Trust was established at the wish of William Hesketh Lever, the first Viscount Leverhulme. The Trust makes awards for the support of research and education, emphasiseing individuals and encompassing all subject areas.

www.font-face.com

With the use of Arial and Verdana being a little limited to say the least, the continued popularity of the css @font-face rule is encouraging.

Two main issues that have held this back the are.

Browsers, some support @font-face, some do not.

But ... The latest versions of Safari and Firefox and Google Chrome support @font-face and Opera is planning to support it soon.

Licensing, The biggest reason @font-face hasn't taken the world[wide web] by storm is due to the licensing issues. They simply do not allow it. Some foundries are starting to, at a price.

But ... there are @font face designer font libraries appearing all over the place, FREE. You can even get carried away and look at creating your own font-face.

eg. http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface

The Times' New Website

Far be it for me to be over complimentary about another design house, but credit where credit is due, the team behind the redesign of The Times' new website are to be commended on their work. The new site successfully delivers a marriage of the two mediums print and web, in a manner that had not previously been achieved. Designer's and clients often use the term "magazine look" when attempting to describe a style more akin to beauty of print layout, which I'm sure we'll see far more sites emulate and adopt over the coming months, now that The Times have set the benchmark.

If you've not yet seen it, check it out now, before the subscription service is enforced.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/

iThame

The Oxfordshire town of Thame launched iThame to give residents and visitors on-the-move details of local amenities and facilities.

It is the first town-based application for Apple’s revolutionary iPhone.

Free to download, iThame offers information about heritage and historical walks, sports, accommodation, travel, news and events.

Users can provide feedback on services they want to see introduced in new versions as well as receiving directions to local points of interest.

Citrix Xen Based Client Hypervisor

Codenamed Project Independence, the Citrix Xen based Client Hypervisor is set to revolutionise the desktop pc and laptop. Imagine being able to run windows, Linux, mac, all on the same laptop at the same time, completely independently, interacting with USB devices, graphics cards bluetooth and wireless networking directly without the need for a host OS... well Citrix may be very close to providing such a thing with Xen client.

The idea of dual boot PC's goes back decades, and Apple recently allowed you to run Windows on their Intel based Macs, but the idea of running simultaneously booted installations completely separately on a bare-metal hypervisor has never been done outside the server environment.

Think of the power of switching between personal and work desktops with a hotkey and booting up another operating system in the background, of course you can do all this with a hosted VM player, but until now the bare metal performance has been missing and having to rely on a host OS to provide all the driver support and hardware interaction, hitting performance hard.

So we have to say "well done Citrix", this sounds like an amazing product we just can't wait to get our hands on and all we can say is please hurry up and get a release out!

Tim Berners-Lee on the Next Web

At a recent TED conference in February, the Father of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee, outlined plans for his next project. Building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

Really interesting idea, check out the video: