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We've moved!

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2008-05-15T16:06:32+01:00

Our new offices are now located at:
RMStudio Ltd.
16 Manette Street
London
W1D 4AR

Feel free to pop in if you're passing.

UPDATE - Touching the VOIP

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2008-01-03T11:36:29+00:00

They've done it! Clever buggers.
You can now, with a little bit of work, hack the iPod Touch to work on VOIP.

Touching the VOIP

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-12-10T22:58:33+00:00

There are few things we at RMStudio towers like less than dealing with the un-organised bumbling goliath that is BT (British Telecom or Bloody Terrible, your choice).
You ring, you get a recorded thing, 10 hours later someone with less knowledge in technical matters than the average Polar Bear answers and tells you that you've called the wrong "section" of BT and that you "need to call 1. BTClick, BTConnect, BTBroadband or Oh'BT from Some mothers do ave em!
So.... when the chance comes along to stop giving them who rule the copper money we snap at it. Hence this story from the TUAW more than caught our eye.
The uber geeks are hard at work trying to get the iPod Touch to work as a phone using VOIP technology and it seems they are winning.

iPhone Launch in the UK

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-11-08T23:35:58+00:00

Bloody............... Finally! Today sees the launch of the iPhone in the UK (and some other places in Europe that don't matter as much).
How excited are we? Excited enough to still be awake blogging about it!
No one from RMStudio was brave/mad enough to sit through a cold evening in Regent Street, we're tucked up safe from the freak pigeons and the rogue ITV news crew. We do have some "Friends of RMStudio" right at the front though! Nik Fletcher (thanks for the photo), who writes for TUAW and our web guru Graham Gilbert are sitting there as we speak. Right at the front of the queue it's quite possible they'll be the first (Legitimate) UK iPhone owners.
Why does everyone want one? Because Steve Jobs said so that's why!

We're searching for a new Geek

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-11-06T15:09:01+00:00

We're searching for a full time junior geek. If you like the sound of getting paid to fix apple kit, have a genuine interest in everything apple and you've got good communication skills fill in the form on the jobs section of this site to apply.

Pixelmator released. Mmmmmmm Core Image!

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-09-26T14:55:13+01:00

If you're doing any sort of photo manipulation it's generally accepted that Photoshop is the program of choice. It's become an industry standard and as such is priced at a level that takes full advantage of it's monopoly. This is reasonably acceptable for businesses, but for the individual it's rather a lot of money to pay just to remove the wrinkles from Aunt Edna's picture. So Photoshop released Photoshop Elements, great! but when using it it always feels like a stripped down version of Photoshop, which is essentially what it is.
Along comes PixelMator. "Image editing for the rest of us" A universal Binary program for Mac OS X.
The first thing you notice is how good it looks, its got a sort of Aperture look with the main colour being black, all the panels float on the screen and they all have that slight transparency that gives the application a professional feel. The second thing you notice is how quick it runs, especially if you've got a meaty graphics card in your mac. PixelMator takes full advantage of Core Image meaning that most of the image processing is done on the image card leaving the main CPU to do other things (like render coverflow smoothly!).
Pixelmator supports over 100 file formats including PSDs with layers and has loads of the same functions as the full version of photoshop all for $59!
Check out the demo, it's well worth it.

iPod touch and Coverbuddy = cheap Sonos alternative

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-09-20T15:01:15+01:00

I was helping a client set up his home network today. He has a mac mini which he wants to control iTunes on from his laptop. I pointed him towards coverbuddy a brilliant little piece of software that allows you to control your iTunes from anywhere using a web interface. With this in mind I decided to see if it worked on the new iPod Touch - It did!
The interface is a little small on the screen at first but that's easily sorted by zooming in.
It basically means that you can plug your mac into your stereo and control your music from the iPod. I've done it before with the PSP but got a little bored of using the little mouse pointer on the psp, but with the touch interface I can see this being quite a nice cheap alternative to Sonos.

iPod touch like the iPhone without the nagging!

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-09-20T00:35:51+01:00

We've had a little play with the iPod touch, (video below) and we think it's rather good. Still no Flash and Flex though, someone please hack it.

iPhone launch in the UK but no Flex support!

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-09-18T16:52:49+01:00

We were really excited to hear news today that the iPhone would be released in the UK on the 9th November, a long time away for anyone as excited as we are to get one, but a firm date none the less. Also, it'll definitely be on O2 which'll mean we won't even have to change operators to get our grubby mitts on them.
So we'll get the iPhones as soon as they come out, we'll be able to receive email, SMS people, call our friend, listen to Phil Collins watch funny YouTube clips and surf the web all on an apple product, great!........
Not so great, the Safari browser on the iPhone doesn't support Flash! More importantly to us, it doesn't support Flex programs meaning that, yes you can surf the web and look at static web pages but you can't take advantage of the interactive side of the web as far as Flash and Flex is concerned...... That's Rubbish!

SING gaiji problem on Adobe InDesign CS2 and CS3

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-09-12T21:02:58+01:00

So you've deleted the preferences five times, repaired disc permissions twice, fsck'ed the disc and even called Adobe support to find out why your copy of InDesign CS2 or CS3 freezes every time it starts up.
That's the problem I had the other day at a clients place and we couldn't find the solution anywhere, so I've decided to put it here.

Toshiba HD DVD player givaway

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-09-04T01:50:55+01:00

Warner Bros are launching The Matrix on HD DVD at HMV Oxford street london on Sep 10th, not in itself a wholely impressive fete but according to HMV the first 150 customers who buy The Matrix Trilogy on HD DVD get a Toshiba HD-E1 DVD player free! Doors open at 8am, worth dragging yourself out of bed for though.

The power of Flex and AIR

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-09-04T01:38:39+01:00

This video shows the power of Flex when deployed using AIR. A great video even if the guy does sound a little bit like Daffy Duck.

iSCSI or Fibre?

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-08-23T17:08:29+01:00

We're thinking of utilising iSCSI at a clients place to improve IO times from the server to the user.
The psd files they open and save can be up to 20GB in size and take up to half an hour to open, this is obviously not very cost effective.
While researching iSCSI I found this video, its a bit cheesy but it explains the technology quite well.

Diggnation comes to London

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-08-23T16:01:46+01:00

According to the last episode of diggnation Kevin and Alex will be shooting an episode at the Future of Web Apps conference on 3-5 October. Kevin is one of the speakers at the conference which is being held over at the ExCel Centre in the east end. We shall be there sporting our diggnation Ts in true geek fashion!

The iPod iBook and now the iRack!

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-08-22T15:15:10+01:00

We'd never heard of Mad TV but this snippet made us laugh.

RMStudio gets Honda Zoomers for techies

info@rmstudio.co.uk — 2007-08-21T17:33:36+01:00

Each RMStudio techie is now equipped with his/her very own Honda Zoomer moped allowing us to get in to fix your problems faster than ever.