Well, this is a strange feeling. I’ve been twenty for a day now. And it feels exactly like being 19. Aren’t birthdays meant to be more momentous? I did go out to Wagamama’s with friends though, which was nice. If you guys are reading this, you’re pretty cool. Thanks The numerous emails from various organisations [...]

As a student working from my bedroom, I surely qualify as an ‘indie’ developer. If there’s one thing I’ve struggled with over the last couple of months of developing (or attempting to develop) apps is a certain lack of support. I don’t feel like I’m part of a community – there are extremely nice people [...]

I made a tweet recently talking about how I’ve learnt so much re: web design and design in general over the last couple of years. If you happen to have been following the various incarnations of this site over that time period, you’ll know that it’s looked pretty much the same throughout (dark with splashes [...]

Imagine this: someone visits a webpage on their phone, taps a link and it launches an app. Great, right? From what I gather, this kind of thing (“app urls”) is already available to devs in Android and iOS, but unfortunately it’s not in Windows Phone. Or is it? There’s a poll going on at the [...]

Most of today was spent planning out my first app for Windows Phone. I’m making a client for GetGlue, a service which lets you ‘check in’ to TV, films, books and some other stuff too. I’ve not got much to show right now, but one thing I can say is that OAuth is extremely confusing [...]

One of the things that has been keeping me from releasing my own WordPress themes is the fact that there’s no way to automatically notify their users of updates. The advantage of such a system is already evident in the official WordPress plugin and theme repositories, which make the task of keeping things up to [...]

I’ve had a Nokia Lumia 800 for about three weeks now, courtesy of Windows Access All Areas. And I have to say, I’m a little disappointed. Controversial, maybe, but let me elaborate. I’ve owned a Samsung Omnia 7 for just over a year now. It’s been a really good phone: strong and reliable; I’ve lost [...]

Warning: lame personal post coming up. For the past 19 years, I’ve led a pretty vanilla life. Everyday, y’know, just the usual. And that, of course, means that I’m a pretty normal guy. I can’t say I’ve accomplished that much, though that is always the goal when I start yet another project. It’s unfortunate, really, [...]

Another day, another set of apps. This time I’ve mostly chosen apps from smaller developers. Here we go…Here’s part one, and here are some game recs too. Artist Info by Johnny Westlake | Free Using Last.fm’s database, this app gives you access to extra information on the songs and artists you’re currently listening to. You [...]

Xbox Live is a major selling point of Windows Phone; the integration with XBL friends, avatars, the achievement system, etc is quite unique in the market*. Not all games are XBL certified though – far from it. The marketplace has a problem in that it’s hugely biased to show off XBL games over indie ones, but [...]

Having owned an Omnia 7 since January, and recently acquired a rather nice Lumia 800, I thought it would be good to list a few of the apps I’ve found useful over the year. Hopefully it’ll contain more useful apps than all the other lists! I plan to make a couple of posts in future [...]

I added Windows Phone style tiles to my site (and also Dust, my upcoming theme – more about that later) over the weekend. You may have noticed, if you use a browser which supports CSS3 3D Transforms (i.e. Aurora/Firefox 10, Chrome, IE10, Safari 5). For the benefit of those who don’t have such a browser, [...]

This is not about technological convergence, though that would be a pretty interesting thing to blog about.

Instead, you may have noticed that this site’s not what it once was. As in, it’s no longer rikkitooley.co.uk.
Way back in February, when I bought new hosting, I decided that I would use rikk.it as a personal blog of [...]

I knocked this together for myself just now, and I’m putting it up here in case anyone’s looking for one in the new style. Et voila.

We’re developing a smartphone app in one of the modules I’m doing, and it’d be much appreciated if you filled in this survey.

http://is.gd/bath_g4ip_survey

Let me know in the comments if you did! You’re in with the chance of winning an imaginary iPad 2.

This was a nice surprise. Definitely buying direct from Ultimae again.

So, if you’ve been following my Twitter feed then you’ll know I went to Bestival over the weekend. It was my first ‘proper’ music festival – I went to a few small ones when I was young, but nothing like this – so I was pretty excited. It was great experience, a festival I’ll definitely [...]

I’m relatively new to Foursquare, having used it for only a month. And I must admit, checking in is moderately addictive. Being rewarded with arbitrary points just for going to a place is, for some reason, quite satisfying. What’s even more satisfying, however, is reaching the top of the weekly leaderboard. It’s pleasing to know [...]

I’ll start my summary of day 2 by summarising the event. It was great. Everyone was friendly and nice, and the talks were interesting and informative. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, and it will be only the first of many WordCamps to come. But the people weren’t the only positive: some of those people [...]

Having won a pass to WordCamp UK via Wonderthemes, I ended up there today. This year it’s being held in the lovely city of Portsmouth This is/was my first ever proper conference, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Any expectations I did have, however, were met and beaten to a pulp. This thing [...]

Further to my last post, I’ve finally finished coding up a WordPress theme for my portfolio. It looks roughly the same, but I’ve fixed a lot of styling bugs too. From now on I’ll be posting anything design or development related on there, and other stuff here. Sorta like a personal/ business split. (update: yeah, [...]

After a long, arduous process, my site now runs on WordPress. Well, I lie when I say long and arduous, as it was more a case of studying for exams and socialising providing too great a distraction. Either way, now that it’s easier for me to display my work and talk about it, you can [...]

Having administrated a phpBB forum for the better part of two years, a couple of things have always bothered me. The first is the weird and wonderful templating system. Why attempt to separate PHP logic from the HTML layout when the template tags are more complicated and less flexible than straight PHP would be? A [...]

Q: What’s wrong with fullscreen browsing? A: It makes a lot of sites look worse when compared to the windowed version. Of course this is a matter of opinion but, since I purchased a monitor so I could work dual-screen, it’s something I’ve been noticing a lot more: there’s just not much point running a [...]

So, on Thursday I went to see Janelle Monáe at the O2 Academy in Bristol with a uni friend. And it was. Bloody brilliant. I didn’t know who the support was until the day before, but I was pleased when I found out it was CocknBullKid – she was one of the artists I had [...]

When developing websites, it’s useful to see how your site looks as you edit your code. Adobe partly solved this problem with Dreamweaver’s Live Preview feature, though it always doesn’t render pages as intended. This makes it good at giving a rough idea of what your page will look like, but it’s not much use [...]