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Here's a photo of Manchester Arndale that I took last night using an iPhone app called TiltShiftGen.

It doesn't do a bad job of mimicking the effect of a Tilt Shift lens or PhotoShop.

I took the photo from the top of the car park at Shude Hill, an excellent free view of Manchester!

For the next month, Hollywood is in town filming part of Captain America on our street, Tariff Street, and the surrounds.

The film is set in 1940's New York and the Northern Quarter in Manchester is know for it's similar architecture. 

Orchard and a couple of our friends teamed up one lunchtime to create a photo blog documenting the filming, so if you're interested, take a look.

Captain America Filming in Manchester

Emily Hutchinson was lucky enough to be picked out the hat and win my Spectrum 48K Plus.

As you can see, it's all in working order.

Your Spectrum, complete with tape player and Dragon Ninja are in the post Emily!

I'm giving away my beloved Spectrum 48K Plus!
It's in full working order (we've tested it/played it a lot in the office) and we'll even throw in a few games. 

All you have to do to win your own piece of computer history is retweet the our Twitter post. 

The winner will be picked at random on the 22nd July (I promise it won't be either of my brothers).

Good luck! 

We were very impressed with a site called Adverputt, who let you place adverts on their mini golf course. They also let you download a smaller version called Micro Putt to host yourself and skin as you wish, which we've done below, so put you leather glove on, and have a round before luncheon.

If anyone has wondered where we get our server names from, they're taken from islands in the Isles of Scilly, a beautiful and peaceful place I often frequent.

The isles of Scilly are 28 miles from Lands end, and made up of arond 140 islands and rocky islets, 5 of which are inhabited.

The climate in the Isles of Scilly is sub-tropical, winters are the mildest in the UK, allowing for all manners of flora and fauna to flourish.

To be reminded of the islands, a couple of years a go I built a small Flash application for an internet radio alarm clock called a Chumby. The application rotates web cams on the islands on a small screen. I also gave the application to an artist on the island of Bryher called Richard Pearce, to place on his photo blog website.

You can view the application below:

If you want to catch up on the wonderfully slow and happy pace of life in the Isles of Scilly, I suggest you view Richard's Photo Blog - Scilly Web Cam or listen to the highly entertaining Radio Scilly, oh and if you do ever visit, be sure to get a pint in the Turk's Head, probably the best pub in the world.

The .co domain, orginally the Columbian top level domain, is being opened up to everybody. It's available now to globally registered companies, but from June 21st it will be opened up to everyone.

However, don't go rushing to get a popular .co domain on June 21st unless you are willing to spend lots of money. From June 21st domains are available in a "Landrush" phase, where you can order a domain, but if someone else wants the same domain, it will go to the highest bidder in an auction. Domains prices are this stage are likely to be around £200 and this gets refunded if you don't win the auction.

If you can hold onto your horses and hope no-one else registers your domain, the general ablity phase begins on July 20th, this will operate on a first come, first served basis and is likely to be cheaper.

Orchard Hosting will make an annoucement when we begin selling .CO domains -it's likely to be from July 20th but feel free to open a support ticket if you want us to purchase a domain on your behalf during the Landrush phase.

April 1, 2010 – April 20, 2010: Sunrise A will allow registered Colombian trademarks to apply for exact match domains.

April 26, 2010 – June 10, 2010: Sunrise B will allow trademarks of national effect to apply for exact match domains.

June 21, 2010 – July 13, 2010: Landrush will allow anyone to apply for domain names of high commercial value.

July 20, 2010: .CO domains will become generally available.

Magento is a feature packed, open-sourced (and therefore free) ecommerce system that's been available for nearly two years.
I have built many ecommerce sites using various software packages such as osCommerce, CubeCart, TradingEye, ZenCart and more, and Magento has proven itself mainly because the amount of built-in advanced features. (SEO friendly URLS, ajax search functionality, wish lists,  product comparisons, Google Merchant Centre product integration, and the ability to run several stores from one installation.)
However, Magento isn't for everyone. It's quite fiddly to install compared to other stores, it's performance isn't always great without a lot of tweaking of settings and it can take quite a long time to edit the styles as the online documentation isn't great.
If you're a developer, Magento is probably for you, you'll get a lot out of it's MVC architecture.

Pros

• Popular (over 1,000,000 downloads this year).

• Won a lot of awards.

• Free and open-source - this means programmers over the world have developed free add-ons. If you have a specialist requirement of your shop - it's likely someone has already done it.

• Customers can create Wish Lists.

• Customers can compare products.

• Customers can submit reviews.

• Built-in newsletter system - you can email all your customers on regular basis.

• iPhone interface.

• Seach Engine Friendly.

• Can be integrated with Google Analytics.

• Content Management System for non-shop pages on your site.
• Clear admin dashboard which makes it easy run your store and process orders .

• Possible to brand different parts of your shop or run multiple shop from the same admin area.

• Supports multiple currencies.

• Updating and installing extensions is done very neatly through the connection manager.

• Good support for multi-language.

• Easy integration of payment gateways.

Cons

• Can be a little slow and needs tweaking out of the box.

• Magento is more of a developers platform.

• Not for the faint of heart.

• Detailed understanding of the MVC framework needed to make customisation.

• Magento is not well documented. The MagentoCommerce website has a wiki, forums, and user guides, but developers are left to reverse engineer and discover how the application works without an SDK or developer guide.

While most of Manchester seems to have stayed at home, us at Orchard Hosting have all managed to trudge into work.

Here's some photos of the snow, hopefully I'll get to make a snowman later.

Orchard Hosting office in the snow.

Oldham Road in the snow.

If anyone is interested, images were take using the iPhone application called Hipstamatic.

Adam and Joe, our position on the matter.

Admittedly, I've been addicted to many versions of The Settlers, from the first time I played it on the Amiga, to version four on the PC, so I'm a little biased, but, I really think they have finally got a portable version right with the release on the iPhone.

Settlers is a town-building, resource-management and military strategy game. You have to gather and manage your resources to build a lively and bustling settlement, which in turn will help build up the strength and numbers of your miliarty units ready for you to defend or attack the enemy.

If it's your cup of tea, The Settlers will eat away hours from your life, so be careful when you choose to play if you're in a relationship.

The game costs £3.99 which is quite a lot for an app, but in all honesty, it's well worth several times that.

For further information or to purchase, visit Gameloft.

The lovely people at JAMpr treated Orchard to a most excellent evening at the Northwest CIPR Pride Awards last night held in the right posh surrounds of the Hilton, Beetham Tower.  The food was delicious, the champagne flowing, and glasses clinking when JAM won the silver award for Outstanding Small Consultancy!
Jaime and the team at JAMpr have worked so hard this last year through tough economic times, and really deserved a pat on the back.  Obviously, I helped them celebrate, it would have been rude not to!

I attended my first Northern Digitals last night, and I must say it was an excellent and educational evening with a lot of like minded and interesting people.

The highlight, a part from all the prizes, was an honest talk by Fudge about project management and scrum.

The evening was setup a year ago as "a monthly meet up where digital creatives from in and around Manchester can get away from their screens and talk to other digital creatives over a pint."

If anyone is thinking of going next month, you should, and come over and say hello.

Hi,
We launched the new Orchard Hosting site a few days ago and we received a great response, everyone seems to like it!

While we did spend a lot of time testing the site in different browsers, we got a few of you contacting us with bugs in the site which we'd obviously like to iron out.

For this reason, I'd like to use the forum as a way you can submit any bug you find, with a screen shot if possible, along with your browser type and operating system,  so we can then replicate the bug and do something about it.

Orchard Hosting's Site - Bug Reports

Thanks
Tom

It's been confirmed, in late February, I will be jetting off to Tanzania and spending several days climbing Kilimanjaro for charity.

My chosen charity will be LivLife, who alleviate poverty through education, improved health, the provision of basic needs and income generating programmes in Tanzania.

There will be more information in the weeks to come, and a way for you lovely people to sponsor myself and the team taking part!

I have to say, I'm aprehensive, but very excited!

Here at Orchard we've recently been testing out a new email client called Postbox and so far we are very impressed. It's built on Mozilla technology so users of Thunderbird will be familar with configuration process but similarity ends there.

Postbox box has an extremely powerful and easy-to-use search facilty even allowing searches such as "after last Tuesday" or "from:Orchard Hosting". Seaches can be saved and kept open in tabs which makes switching between emails a doddle.

Another great feature of Postbox is the File/Image/Link system which allows you to view attachments in a Gallery so finding that atachment again is a breeze.

There are many other great features, such as assigning topics, message threading and to-do lists, check them all on the Postbox site, we love it.

From time to time at Orchard, we like to visit further afield than the Soup Kitchen for our lunch.

Today we went to Walrus in the Northern Quarter and sampled one of their delightful Bentobox Deals. For £5 you get all this:

Thumbs up we say!