They sell a lot of other field and game sports equipment too!

But it never fails to really, really, really, annoy me how ripped off we are here in the UK.

I know there are countless posts on this around the web especially among UK based designer/developers but we just get totally, totally ripped off on price.

The CS5 upgrade package is priced on the US Adobe website at $599.

It does not take a genius to work out that at current exchange rates this equates to £377.

Now add on 17.5%  ( I am assuming the US price includes no Sales tax) , so this works out at a retail price approx £443 at current  VAT (Nov2010).

SO why is it costing £559.30? Thats a full £116 more than in the US. I hear the pathetic excuses that they need to regionalise a release, regionalise what- the manual you don’t get? The help file – Ok so I can expect colour to be spelled properly not “color”, I fekkin gbet I can’t! All the help is web based (another thing that grates- what if you are not on the web – say on a laptop in a hotel or on a train and need the help info?). I have never found their support to be great- pretty well all web based, hard to get a real person and instant support. Things like Spry are supported by the “Spry Community” ie. lets get our users to support themselves!

Add to this the US currently has a 10% discount offer running right now- what do we get offered- “free shipping”. Well FFS, I can get free shipping ANY DAY OF THE WEEK from places like Amazon so why does a company like Adobe (a huge firm not a lot smaller than Microsoft and Apple) even charge us shipping, never mind feel the need to offer it free as a special offer.

Add further to this, that they could deliver the software over the web, but charge you £14 more for the privilege? Eh? what the fek is that about!? E delivery should be cheaper- it is in nearly every case I have ever encountered!

So are they gonna get my money? Not right now, cutting off my nose to spite my face- maybe in the face of the impending VAT rise , but I need to look into how I can get delivery to the US then ship it in myself, I am not desperate. I know their are delivery address websites that will handle this type of transaction but they are not that cheap for a transaction like this.

I will keep my eye on the main e retailers and maybe grab a mis priced bargain or something, I watch and wait. SORT THIS ADOBE!

Bluestone online also stock Apple computer items, as well as ipod touch, nano, classic and shuffle and iphone items  and accessories.

For the road warrior there are a range of useful in car devices, 3G dongles chargers and adaptor cards and dongles.

Give Bluestone  Online  a visit at their new eshop at  http://www.bluestone-online.com.

Delivery is very fast- I know ‘cos I have bought stuff and its very quick, but better still its free!

Pay Bluestone-online a visit for your digital lifestyle needs.

One thing you really need to get this working is Ajax. You don’t want to be having full page reloads as each selection is made, wouldn’t it be cool to just update the next selection box?

Now no doubt there are many ways to skin a cat but to be honest

1)There are few (if any) out the box scripts on the web to do this that I could find

2) I am a great believer in not reinventing the wheel and KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid!)

3)Most purely javascript scripts I could find “cheated” in that they pulled down a predefined list of data to the browser and used client based scripts to sort and filter it. This is Ok I suppose in a static environment but its not terribly flexible for a dynamically driven site, and if you have a lot of data to be sorted, as potentially I do in my project,you are dumping the whole list for the user to ultimately choose one item. Better to send only whats needed.

For this reason, and for the reason that its handy and available in DW4 as it comes out the box, I decided to use Adobe’s Spry Javascript Framework. DW4 is a pretty expensive package but there is a free trial version for 30 days use if you want to use this, or if you are a student you can get the package (for non commercial use ) for much cheapness- relative to what it costs me!!!

There are a few frameworks out there, Spry, jQuery, Scriptaculous, prototype, but for me Spry was most accessible  as fundamentally I am a non Javascript developer and I have some experience of its use through other projects.

If you don’t have Spry now and you want to follow along, go to Adobe’s website and download the files. In DW4, it loads up the files you need as you use each function, but if you are not using DW4, feel free to dump the whole package on your server in some folder.

For this example I will use a directory called /spry but it can be anything you want.

If you are bandwidth constrained, you can get a minified version of the files too, this reduces the amount of code being sent to the browser, it does not make much odds on a quiet website, but in a busy case it might save you considerable bandwidth fees down the line.

So with the basis of this project set before you, get the bits you need here and next time I will show how I got the multi level search started.

My assumption is you know a little php to run a database query and know how to get that out the database into xml format. For this project i will be using static xml files.

My workstation runs Vista Home Premium. Now really  should have Vista Business but its a long story that I am not going to go into here why I have Home premium.

I do my backups two ways, I run Sync Toy every day to an external drive and I run Windows Vista Backup to an internal drive.

Following a recent crash with my Raid array (a striped set) I went to restore my user data from a back up. I was surprised to find that none of my files with php extensions were there.

Fortunately I had the copies from by Sync Toy images so I was OK but its worth stating that unless all your interested in is the back up of “personal” files- ie images, mp3s and common file extension docs like xls or doc files you cannot rely on the back up tool for Vista to save you. Somewhat oddly it does save html files- probably due to the fact that many programs can generate html files as an output format, that are not deemed as “professional” file types.

Be warned! 

dw8_fix_help_and_support.zip

The Adobe Knowledge base article is 400789 and can be reached here: http://www.adobe.com/go/kb400789

PCS are a company specialising in Datacentre room mtce and support for big network providers and people with data centres, switch rooms and the like. They are getting into the equipment room deep cleaning game too, so might be worth a look if you have such premises yourself. 

Also been using Dreamweaver 8 on some of the newer projects and I think I may well need to go over- though I grudge the appaling upgrade charge being levied by Adobe (formerly macromedia) I notice the UK prices have a 1:1 relation ship witht he US price- so £199 or $199. Their licensing also makes the options fairly limited in what you can do so getting the code from the US isn’t and option.

Pah! Need a few more projects before I think I can afford it… any offers!