Playgroup | Helping brands build genuine brand equity

After lots of planning and hard work the Playgroup web site is finally here. Working closely together with Jamie, the design lead, we just about hit the deadline. The site essentially started out as two independent mini sites comprising of an about us section and a blog section. As development progressed and it became apparent that content from both sides crossed over we amended the original idea and now have an integrated custom built solution which we are all happy with.

This is only phase one of the web site and we hope to roll out the next iteration in the next month. New features will include a full site search, tagging of news and portfolio pieces (as well as the current blog entries) and full pagination and archiving across the board. There will also be some subtle design tweaks.

For those of you who are technically minded: the site is coded in Object Orientated PHP 5 with a MySQL database backend.

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After swearing I would never use a Mac I finally succumbed last week and have been using an iMac at work for the past 7 days. Being in an office where you are one of only three people using a PC you start to feel like a dying breed.

I have never been a hater of Macs per se; I usually find the users of the machines the actual problem. They tend to be annoying individuals who love to show you their shiny new toy at any opportunity. As Charlie Brooker excellently put: "Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui."

Despite this, every six months I consider buying a Mac, before meeting one of the aforementioned and decide it’s best to stay clear. At my last company my colleagues found it hilarious to stick post it notes on my machine saying "MAC’s rule". Notice the inclusion of the non-required apostrophe and capitalisation of a non-acronym. I didn’t feel the need to respond, a two worded insult with two grammatical errors tells me all I need to know about that person: drama student, Mac user.

I have been finding using the iMac an experience, both good and bad. The screen is like its own little ecosystem, pink and greens spouting up bottom left, air bubbles popping up top right, I could sit mesmerized all day. I cannot sign off without mentioning the lack of a hash key on the Mac keyboard though, utterly unforgivable. I know Apple like to give us little and charge a lot (£300 locked 2.5G phone springs to mind) but what's going on?!

All in all, so far so good.

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