However, I’ve had chance to play with them a few times and someone in work has one. As with most Apple products, it looks good. I like most Apple products apart from the computers (had a lot of issues with them in the past and find OSX to be difficult to work with), and the iPad is no exception.

I was privledged enough to have a play with one before they were released. I wasn’t too impressed with it. Ok, it seemed great when I slid the slider across and got to the menu, but that was about it. Because it was pre-release date there were next to no apps for it available, and those that come with it are fairly limiting. I was bored in less than 3 minutes.

I have since played with a few iPads that have been loaded with apps though, and they do, for the most part, seem pretty good. There are a few decent games, some of which have been ported over from standard platforms, others have been made specifically. Command and Conquer, for example, is pretty slick.

As much as I do like the product, I cannot justify buying them. People who own them swear by them, but whenever I ask them when they use them the only answer I get is “on the toilet mostly” – so it seems to be an expensive toilet break. I think I’d rather spend the money on a new laptop that I can take anywhere and run anything on. It probably won’t look as cool, but I’ll be able to run anything I want, wherever I want, and if I want 3G support I can just pay £5 a month for a dongle, rather than the ~£25 that Apple ask.

As with most Apple products, from day dot there have been a large number of iPad Accessories available, things like iPad socks, sleeves, screen protectors, etc. As with any touch screen device I would highly recommend getting a screen protector to try and protect against scratches. These things get grubby and marked very easily, so it is important to try and protect them.

Take a look at the article in question: electronic cigarettes

Because of the website’s uniqueness, it has been spotted by a lot of the nation’s councils. We now feature on nearly every of the UK’s council’s websites, and generate a lot of interest in cycling from all ages.

We are often receiving requests for new routes in people’s areas, and we’re thinking of streamlining the site a little so that cycle enthusiasts and upload their own cycle routes, as was the original intention.

Check out the cycle routes website, have a look around, and get out on your bike.

Because of this I’ve just launched my blogger account, it’s over at Mike on design. Over here you’ll find chat about latest design finds, logos and lots of nice looking things.

Enjoy.

More recently though, at least in the last 4-5 years, frameworks have been popping up left right and centre. From CakePHP, which is generally considered to be a little unstable, to the super-reliable ZendFramework, built by Zend – the PHP company.

Zend and Cake are not he only frameworks though. After trying a lot, I find my personal favourite to be CodeIgniter, which is built by EllisLabs.

CodeIgniter comes with libraries and helpers that can be activated at any point within the framework. These helpers try and simplify many tedious tasks involved with making web applications. Things like form validation is a breeze, and the functions used are much more powerful than something that can be drummed up quickly in any normal PHP app. Image manipulation is made easy, and emailing through PHP can be done well without needing to load in the bloated PEAR, which the documentation recommends.

CodeIgniter uses standard MVC (Model > View > Controller) to create it’s systems. Although at first glance this can seem a little silly and over-thought, but it makes life a lot easier for everyone involved. The MVC structure is standardised, reliable and fast, and every developer should follow suit with it very easily.

CodeIgniter also makes debugging applications very easy. The built-in profiler shows all of the POST, and GET data, aswell as all database queries. I used a customised version of the profiler that I tweaked to also show SESSION data.

When working with lots of small, simple queries CodeIgniter also makes life easy with active records, their database library. It allows queries to be written with a fraction of the amount of code. Let’s say we want to pull off everything from a table, simple: db->get(’table’) – no need to write a full query to do it. Active records do support large queries with unlimited amounts of JOINs, but my personal preference is to compile these myself and throw them into a normal query using the DB library’s db->query() method – probably because I’m used to the structure of the queries and the syntax so I can spot errors more easily. If you’re not hot on SQL though, you’ll probably benefit massively.

My personal framework recommendation is definitely CodeIgniter, but make sure you check out all of the others available too. CodeIgniter has a massive community that helps solve any problem you may have, the community includes forums and live chat rooms, which the EllisLabs developers often frequent.

My new venture is something a little bit more large-scale. The football badges application gets around 250,000 new unique visits (at time of writing) per month, my goal is to syphon some of these over to the new project, the football forum. At time of writing the number one slot on Google for ‘Football Forum’ only has 25,000 members. This may seem a lot, but when you consider it’s only a tenth of my average monthly traffic on the football badges application, you’ll see that it’s entirely possible that it could be beaten.

Within 3 weeks of launching the forums already have approaching 200 active users. This may not seem like a lot, but consider that this sort of website is viral, and the rate of growth will only increase over time.

If you’re interested in football and want to speak to some like-minded individuals, then head over.

Football Forum

A project I started some time ago, which was started fairly randomly is the pub directory. It’s a website with (nearly) every pub in the UK listed. Although the search function isn’t great at the moment, there is the ability to search for a city and pub name – but everything does share the same search box, so searching something like ‘Winchester’ might bring up a few unwanted results.

Other than that the site is doing well. The pubs are all categorised by region, so it’s quite easy to find pubs around you. There are also several nice features, including the ability to add a review to the pub. The pub reviews don’t require any sign-ups, and are protected from spam by a reCaptcha form, which works excellently.

Have a look and see if you can find your pub: Pub Directory

Head over to the site to take a look.

Electronic Cigarette Reviews

So why buy one of these things? Well the base unit costs about $50, not as cheap as a cigarette. The cartridges though, they cost around 70c, and are the equivalent of about 15-20 cigarettes. That’s a massive difference in price. The average smoker (20/day) saves around $2,000.00 per year using these things.

Not only is it easy on the wallet, but the electronic cigarette is harmless, and contains none of the nasty things that you’d normally find in a cigarette – there’s no tar, no carbon monoxide/dioxide and they don’t stink, give you bad breath, or make you go yellow.

The e-cigs look and feel real. When you take a pull on one the end lights up the same as a real cigarette would, and the device even smokes just like a real cigarette, the only difference is that the device’s smoke is actually water vapour, making it totally harmless and odour free.

Electronic Cigarette

I wrote all of the content myself, which took around 4-5 hours. I’m hoping this unique content will pay off, but I’m currently not seeing much traffic.

Check the site out, I actually learnt quite a lot about British History and past Kings and Queens of Britiain whilst writing it.

British Kings and Queens