Archive for February, 2009

As from today you can now contact us directly through Skype. You can add us to Skype and contact us when you are online. Try it out, click the button below to add us to Skype now! Or if you wish to add us another time you can always easily find the button on our contact page.

See you soon, on Skype!

See link at the bottom of the post for information on how to download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, or just go straight to the Microsoft Visual Studio site here.

The next major release of Microsoft’s Visual Studio development environment is apparently going to be developed with the front end GUI written in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Much of Visual Studio will still probably be written in C++, there will be significant portions of it developed with C# and WPF. WPF as many of you may know is the new Windows Forms API that is set to supersede the current version that has been around since the .NET 1.0 framework was released. Although there are other existing fully fledged applications developed in WPF, one of which is Microsoft’s Expression Blend 2, Visual Studio 2010 is certainly going to be the largest application that makes use of the new WPF technology. WPF has attracted a lot of attention over the last year or so as it is based on a completely different structure to the more traditional Windows forms. Here is a run down of just a few of the features available to WPF developers:

• 2D and 3D support baked directly into WPF.
• New and more flexible structure for handling events (via ‘Routed Events’).
• All Form elements are vector based and so resize to the parent container without loss of quality.
• Many new layout controls for a much more flexible UI. Things like fluid layouts (similar to web applications) can be developed very easily).
• Separation of the UI design from the code behind. The UI is designed using a new language called XAML (pronounced ‘zammel’).

This means that you will have some cool IDE tools available in Visual Studio 2010 such as being able to resize the code window (zooming in and out) rather than having to select a specific pixel size for your fonts. continue

Our first WordPress Plugin – ‘WP Content Filter’ version 1.0 has just been completed, and is available now for download.

It is compatible with the latest version of WordPress 2.7.1, and is designed to filter out any profanity (swearing to you and me!) and any other keywords specified on the Plugin options page.

The WP Content Filter Plugin has now been uploaded to the WordPress Plugins Directory. Also check out our WP Content Filter page for more information on this Plugin.

Installation instructions

Click for installation instructions and demo of Plugin

If you have any comments or suggestions then let us know. We will be adding many more features to the Plugin in due course so your suggestions are welcome.

Anyone who has been visiting our site recently will have noticed there are a lot of changes happening! This is a very busy time for us as the site undergoes some serious development. So we just wanted to say a big thank you for putting up with all the changes – not just with the site design, but also with the layout. We hope swapping things around hasn’t hindered your navigation around the site too much.

The good news is that most of the major changes have been made, and the tweaks that will be happening over the coming weeks and months will be much minor. You will still notice changes going on from time to time, but hopefully you will agree with us that these are for the better!

Enjoy the new site!

As always, please let us know your thoughts and comments. I can assure you that your messages WILL be listened to, and will help form future layout/content. If you wish to contact us, simply leave a comment or use our contact form.

Today we installed a new feature on our site for visitors – a multilingual content translator. Wow, that’s a mouthful! Basically it means there is now a very easy way to translate ALL the textual content on gwycon.com, from the default English language, to any other language of your choice (well, almost any). This can be simply done at a click of a button, so it is very quick to swap between languages.

Try it out right now, it can even be fun just to see what other languages look like; even some that you have never seen before.

If you hover over any text that has been translated you can see a pop up displaying the text in the default language (English in this case). Users can show the original English text again by clicking the ‘View original web page’ link at the very top of the page, or by clicking the ‘Original Page’ item from the drop down box. continue

We’ve listed 10 of our biggest bug bears that we hate to see on websites – or at least those we can think of straight off the top of our heads! These aren’t necessarily in any order of annoyance, and we’d like you to feel free to comment with any of your own pet hates. Take these with a pinch of salt of course, as everyone’s tastes are different!

1. Not everyone has access to a fast broadband connection or a whizzy pc – so your fantastically amazing graphics may well irritate the hell out of us while we’re sitting there patiently waiting for them to load!
2. We don’t all use the same internet browser – so make sure your website looks as good in Internet Explorer as it does in Mozilla, or Opera, or blah blah blah! You might be surprised at how differently your website can look in different browsers – so make sure you check it out!
3. Repeat after me: “Less is more when it comes to design”! And that includes colour too!
4. Splash screens – OK haven’t we moved beyond these yet?! There’s a reason there’s always a skip button on flash intros – so give people the option to view your lovely flash pages, rather than sticking them on your home page and forcing us to come via these page!
5. This should be your mantra – “set up a site map”, “set up a site map”, “set up a site map”! Seriously check out Google’s easy site-map generator tool for doing just this. You really don’t have an excuse now!
6. We love the use of media in websites, but make sure you use sound intelligently. Clicking on a website and suddenly being exposed to loud music/noise can be startling in the extreme! So make sure you use your sound effects wisely and for the benefit of all!
7. Broken links are a no, no! Seriously, why would anyone bother returning to a web page if the links are broken? Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy!
8. Using Ajax can interfere with your browser’s history, so if you use it on your home page and someone clicks on your Ajax link within the home page, they may not be able to click back on their browser bar to return to the home page. This is very annoying people! Don’t forget – usability is key!
9. Websites that are slow to load. In fact, we hate these so much we may just not wait around. Repeat after us: “My website must load in under 8 seconds!”
10. We hate websites that are hard to read – that means hard to read fonts, use of badly contrasting colours, and horrible background images that obscure the text!

Any more you can think of?

There are lots of things to consider when setting up a new website. So we’ve outlined just a few that we think are key and which you really need to keep in mind when setting up a new site. So whether you’re setting the site up on your own, or using a web designer, just make sure you’ve got these covered!

Objectives and Target Audience

Your objectives and audience will dictate the look and feel of your website. So think carefully about what kind of web presence you want. Take into account all your current needs and requirements, and factor in any future expansion you’ve got planned. Give careful consideration to the purpose of your site. What are you trying to achieve, what are your main aims and objectives? Maybe you’re selling a product, or service, or using your site to market an off-line business. Your objectives and your target audience are going to drive the look and feel of your site, so make sure you know what they are before you start building your site. That way you can make sure your website achieves them all!

Website Design

Give careful thought to the design and structure of your website. Do you need a content management system (CMS)? Even a small website can benefit from a good CMS allowing you to easily develop and expand your website – it can be difficult to update static sites, and a good CMS can save you money in the long term. continue

Microsoft Excel is such a flexible and powerful tool that you can use in all manner of situations. Below, is a screen shot of an Excel spreadsheet application we have developed that encapsulates the quadratic equation. It plots the quadratic graph over a specified range, and displays the chart data. The coefficient input for the quadratic is entered by the user and also displayed. Then, immediately after the user has entered the coefficient data, the graph updates and the solutions for the quadratic equation are calculated and shown in spreadsheet cells B6, and C6. There is also a button control on the spreadsheet to take you to the developers home page which, in this case, is us, at gwycon.com!

Quadratic equation spreadsheet. Layout of controls, data, and chart.

As mentioned above, whenever the spreadsheet updates automatically the quadratic equation solutions are calculated immediately and displayed to the user. This happens by means of a custom programmed spreadsheet function to calculate the solutions to a quadratic equation. If the solutions turn out to be complex, the function returns the string “Err!”. continue

This is a simple Flash based paint program that shows how fully functional applications can be put together quickly and deployed to the web for easy access – this example is coded using ActionScript 2.0. This is the great thing about Flash, the immediate availability of content. Once it has been created, all you have to do is embed the Flash file into a web page – and that’s it! No installation needed to be done by the user, they can use the application straight away.

Here below, we have a paint application that can be used to create a drawing by using the mouse. Different colours are available, and the line thickness and opacity can be controlled. The user can also clear the picture and start again!

Try it now! Click on the canvas and drag the mouse around. Select different colours and line properties. Enjoy!

The core code needed to render the canvas area is shown below: continue

Ok, so any self respecting site developing applications for the desktop and the web needs to be able to display code clearly. This means formatting it so it is laid out in a similar style to the code editor it was created in. So, mono-spaced font type and code highlighting is essential to making your code readable to others. Of course this doesn’t simply mean covering HTML and CSS languages to code highlight, and be assured that will be posting code snippets in a whole range of programming and scripting languages!

With this in mind we have implemented a system to highlight code written in many different programming languages. See below for a couple of quick examples:

Here is some formatted C# code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
 
namespace WindowsFormsApplication22
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }
 
        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

Below is some more formatted code. This time XAML (XAML, or Extensible Application Markup Language, is the new mark-up language used in Microsoft’s WPF language).

This time no line numbers this time, so this gives us flexible options for displaying formatted code:

<window x:Class="WpfApplication6.Window1"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
  Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
  <grid>
    <textblock Text="Hello" Height="21" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
     Margin="10,10,0,0" Name="textBlock1" VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
     Width="120" Background="Coral" TextAlignment="Center" />
  </grid>
</window>

continue