Tell us what you think the perfect working environment is, then add some free parking, wooden beams, natural lighting, spiral staircase and a wooden floor and you've got something close to our new office.

We have a lot of changes happening over the next two months, we've registered as a limited company finally, we'll also begin to charge VAT on all our prices from March 2010, our pricing structure is being made easier on our inhouse software and probably the best news for our customers is that all of this comes without price increases.

Usually the saying goes 'Good things come to those who wait', in our case Version 2 of our product 'yourcms' has taken a small delay on the launch, only because we wanted to make sure that the new software we release is the best of the best and that our customers enjoy the new and improved features without any fuss or problems. We'll be announcing the release of version 2 very soon and ill make sure we get some screen shots published on our site before it goes life to get our customers excited!

Its going to be an exciting couple of weeks ahead of us, i cant wait! Take a look at some photos of our new office below and let us know what you think.

Thanks for reading.

Thats right, you read correctly. Our much anticipated monkey game is finally complete! We're just sticking it onto our current homepage and as soon as its complete we'll be tweeting to get as many people to get online and play as possible. There're seagulls, hot air balloons, aliens and spaceships, magic banannas as well as our magical flying monkey! Here's a screenshot for your tastebuds and as i said we'll tweet as soon as we've got it online!

A special thanks to carbon studio for creating this for us!

Finally a real rival to Microsoft's mighty Windows may be just around the corner. Following on from the debut of their Chrome web browser Google are developing it into a fully fledged operating system. This slimmed down system concentrates on web-based applications and has one distinct advantage over Windows: it is free.

Engineers from the firm said the first computers running the system would be available before the end of 2010.

"We are trying to offer a choice for users," said Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management, during an event at the firm's headquarters in California.

"This model of computing is fundamentally different."

The event follows the recent launch of Microsoft's Windows 7 and Apple's operating system upgrade, Snow Leopard.

We wait with eager anticipation...

2009 is slowly coming to an end and we've begun the preperation of our launch party for version two of the yourcms product. We've learnt a lot over the past 2 years about whats been good about the system and what should be improved and after a good long chat with our resellers we've started putting together the main structure of the new version.

We'll be announcing features sometime in december along with details about the launch party we're planning (there'll be a free breakfast!). The next blog update we'll add some screenshots to get your taste buds going but if you'd like to know more details about the current version of the cms or you'd like to book a demo simply email us or leave a comment on the blog.

Speak Soon!

With Windows 7 only 10 days away from launch date I thought it might be good to share some thoughts over the subject. Unfortunately I've just found out the hard way that 2 users logging onto our blogging system chucks the previous user out (me) who at the time was writing this blog for the first time.

A good way to think of Windows 7 is an update from Windows Vista, unfortunately its an update you have to pay for but i think its absolutely worth the money. Microsoft have been really good at creating better price plans this time round and if you were quick enough you could have picked up a copy for less than £50. However! If you're a student, or if you work in education and have an email address that ends in .edu or .ac.uk then you can buy a copy for a mere £30. I understand that's quite a bit of money for a student in these hard times but i think that's a fantastic discount from the retail price of £160

So prices aside, what about the actual software? Without going into too much detail, i haven't found a bad review about it yet. I'm so confident I installed the Release Candidate version on my fathers computer (now that's brave!). My copy arrives next Thursday and ill be performing an install that weekend, it couldn't come sooner! If you haven't read any reviews about it yet i suggest you head over to Engaged and take a look and the first in depth review and decide for yourself.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/12/windows-7-review/

• Try to leave glasses in the same place… it’s quite tricky to look for them when you’re not wearing them
• Save contact details of useful people in your address book instead of searching through old emails to see if they have an email signature at the end
• Stop flitterting between emails and social networking sites and get on with the job in hand
• Eat breakfast
• Drink more water
• Ring people instead of emailing
• Meet people whenever possible
• Keep internal meetings to half an hour or less
• Ask more questions…
• Have one place to keep your to do lists, not 5 different notebooks and sets of Post-Its

If you have suggestions or additions to our list we'd love to hear from you!

If you are an Orange customer and you want an iPhone, but you didn’t want to change to O2, then there is some good news today. Orange has announced that it has signed a deal with Apple to allow it to start selling the smartphone/iPod in the UK. In fact Orange have even setup a website so you can register your interest.

The announcement comes just when O2’s exclusive contract for distributing the iPhone in the UK is coming to an end. Orange made a brief statement about the deal where it said that Orange and Apple have reached an agreement to bring the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS to Orange customers in the UK. The iPhone will be available through all the normal Orange outlets including Orange shops, the Orange webshop and Orange telesales channels as well as selected high street shops.

Orange is no stranger to selling the iPhone in Europe, where it has distribution rights in Austria, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Such a wide distribution network makes Orange the perfect partner for Apple in the UK.

As of yet there is no word from Orange on pricing, we can assume that Orange will want to target O2 in it’s pricing, but how aggressively it will do this isn’t yet clear. It is known that the pricing is partially controlled by Apple in that they expect a certain amount of money for each iPhone sold.

My French isn’t that good but a quick look at the Orange France website seems to tell me that the lowest monthly subscription for the iPhone is €39 per month with €99 up front for the iPhone 3G 8GB. That is about £36 per month which is in the same ball park as O2’s current offering.

If you want to register your interest then goto http://www.orange.co.uk/iPhone.

While everyone was predicting and pontificating about Apple releasing a Tablet this month (which they didn’t but they probably will in February) Microsoft have been secretly working on their own tablet. Called Courier it it is more than a tablet, it has two screens hinged in the middle and looks more like a traditional book or filofax (remember those) than a tablet.

According to the technology site Gizmodo, Courier is a real device and is in the “late prototype” stage of development. It has two 7-inch multitouch screens which work with a stylus as well as your fingers for flicking, flipping and dragging.

The Courier, was until recently, a secret project inside of Microsoft with only a few people in the know about the project. It now appears that Courier is at the stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies which is something it has done before with products like the Zune and Xbox.

According to a video on Gizmodo’s website the Courier is quite sophisticated (maybe complex) using both screens simultaneously with a mixed use of stylus and fingers. The video shows contacts, images and parts of web pages being copied from the left main screen to a journal on the right.

Is it all fake? Probably not. Will it make it to be an actual product, maybe. Will it be released ahead of Apple’s tablet, almost certainly not.

[Image source Gizmodo]

One week ago today we launched our brand new website and Flash interaction homepage, the response we've had is fantastic and we appreciate all the feedback given about Rupert, our new virtual employee. (The boss is pretty pleased with his wage packet too...)

The one thing that's come back several times regarding Rupert is the (in)ability of him being able to hold a conversation with you. We're aware people don't want to treat him like a fountain of knowledge but rather have a chat to him about life, how his day has been and maybe the odd question about codeworks such as "what's their secret?". So in light of this we will be re-programming his brain over the next week so that he can talk to you rather than at you and so that you can ask him what his favourite colour socks are if you really wish to know.

Over the next couple of weeks we'll be adding more projects to our portfolio, gathering feedback from our existing clients and pushing to get the new flying monkey game finished! If you have any more suggestions for any areas of the site then we'd still love to hear from you. At the moment you'll have to email us directly, but we'll soon get these comments going so you can leave your thoughts directly on our blog posts.

A special thanks goes too Design Tribe who helped us by deisigning the new layouts of the blogs and many of the pages you see before you. Their site is worth a visit so click the link!

Finally, you may have noticed we've started using Twitter to its full capacity! We try to get at least one update out a day, if you'd like to follow us simply click the twitter link to the right hand side of this post! After that give us a tweet @codeworks

I better get on with some work now, so once more a massive thank you for all your feedback.

That old chestnut of finishing your own work on time. Isn't it funny that when a client asks if something could be completed for yesterday you always go that extra mile to meet their request and deliver more than they ask for if you can. Yet when it comes to your own work, your own project or task everything gets left until tomorrow, then tomorrow turns into next week, then a whole month goes by and you still haven't even started anything.

Well its been a bit like that for a couple of personal projects with codeworks. We've been planning our new site since January 2009, we realised nothing radical needed changing, however we did need to find a better way of delivering information to our customers and the potential customers who visit our website.

So we went about this by setting up a meeting with Carbon Studio March 2009, (see 2 months had past already!) where we outlined what we were looking for and how we wanted to approach it. The concept we came up with was an interactive area that loaded fast and didn't keep the visitor waiting. We wanted to deliver information fast but also give the visitor something to do while they were on the site. We hope we've achieved that with what you see today, introducing our new interactive office, with the ability to ask our virtual employee Rupert questions about the company (and more), a news ticker that delivers up to the minute information about what's going on, a show reel of the latest projects and products going on at codeworks and finally the flying monkey game, which were hoping to finish over the next week or two.

Alongside our new virtual office we've introduced our "What's New" area that brings together company news, the latest technology announcements from the computer industry, reviews for gadgets and software, and personal blogs from the staff of codeworks.

We've also taken this opportunity to show off our latest projects in the portfolio section with a brand new carousel view and easy to navigate tag system which can also be seen throughout the site.

There is more, but this blog is becoming much too long for a first blog.
I really hope you enjoy the end result as much as we do in the office.

Your comments are very much appreciated.