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Pinski Zoo consists of Steve Harris on Drums, Steve Iliffe on Keyboards, Karl Bingham and Stefan Kopinski on bass and Jan Kopinski on Saxophones. The band is more or less Jan Kopinski's brainchild, born of Polish and Irish origins his career spans from teaching to film score writing. The band as a whole has been performing on and off for 20 years gaining awards, critical acclaim and international recognition along the way.

To me Java is one of the most exciting and promising technologies of the past few years, but it's potential hasn't been reached in a lot of circles yet, especially in the consumer field. ThinkFree Office is an exceptional implementation of Java, being a multi platform MS Office compatible office suite. It runs on Windows Mac OS 9/X and varying flavours of UNIX, thus parts of the interface may seem a little un-Mac like but when you?re developing cross platform certain compromises must be taken. ThinkFree Office runs on a Java Virtual machine so is on occasions slower and more sluggish than other applications. The Microsoft Office compatibility is extremely well implemented, with the application not only reading / writing office files but even the layout and look & feel is similar, right down to dialogue boxes with similar appearances. There are of course some features missing and documents don't render exactly the same way as in Office, but for a reduction of £300 you can't really complain. For example the ThinkFree Show templates are different from PowerPoint templates, probably for legal reasons (!), meaning that some of you files will have to reedited to suit, complex tables look a little different, which may present problems for some users. On the plus side ThinkFree Writes web publishing tools are in my opinion better than MS Offices, it produces cleaner code and has the ability to insert more advanced objects such as image maps. The Excel beater, ThinkFree Calc has all that you would expect, a complex array of calculations and formulae, the ability to create a multitude of graphs (Though losing Excel v.X's support for transparency). The PowerPoint type module, ThinkFree Show is again more of what you would expect, Slide templates, animations, but no QuickTime support unfortunately.

Drawwell is a stripped down version of Workswell, so lets take a quick look at it's feature first and then focus on the extras in Workswell. Drawwell is a vector based illustration and DTP application, providing a vast array of easy to create objects from squares to shape bursts and doughnuts. All are easily modifiable through an inspector panel where you can set position, size, colours and textual content. Drawwell is Cocoa based, so you get all the features associated with OS X native applications such as font and colour picker panels. Layers are available in Drawwell, as supposedly is transparency but I couldn't seem to find any in implementation of this. Workswell is fairly similar, but adds some extra merge features and drawing objects. The merging features are extensive to say the least, mainly offering integration with iApps such as iTunes and iPhoto (May be more support to come?). Within several clicks detailed documents can be created based on photo or music libraries including all information from EXIF and ID3 data such as contact sheets and CD inlays. Along with the support for iApp libraries logical comparisons, incremental values and sorting (among other things) can also be used in merge features. Support for iApps aside, there are other potential uses for Workswells feature set such as numbered tickets and graphs, all based around clear vector graphics.

There was excitement and enthusiasm in the air of MacExpo 2001, and there was a reason. Perhaps because Apple was exhibiting at a UK show for the first time in five years, or perhaps because Mac users currently have a lot to celebrate, there was one of the largest turnouts of visitors and exhibitors in the history of the show. In a time of economic downturn (especially in the computing market), Apple is one of the very few IT companies currently running at a profit. A major upgrade to an amazing new OS has been released, developers are flocking back to the Mac in droves, machines are increasing in power but decreasing in price, and now Apple has once again starting manufacturing non-Mac products. To top all that you can't move without seeing Macs featured in adverts, TV programs, or films, so there really is a lot to celebrate.

European Apple fans have been eagerly awaiting this year's Apple Expo. As last year's event was cancelled, and most could not really warrant the cost of travelling to America, this year's Expo was the first major Apple-related date for Europeans in two years. There were of course a lot of product releases and newsworthy events at the Expo this year but attempting to document them all would be nigh on impossible, so I will now try to present my own personal highlights.

Not so long ago, many of us were satisfied handling deployment of our projects by uploading files via FTP to a web server. I was doing it myself until relatively recently and still do on occasion (don't tell anyone!). At some point in the past few years, demand for the services and features offered by web applications rose, team sizes grew and rapid iteration became the norm. The old methods for deploying became unstable, unreliable and (generally) untrusted. Read more

A few months ago I had a client requirement for PDF generation, in this case to generate certificates that could be viewed online or printed. I spent some time looking into the best Drupal options available and picked up some advice along the way on how best to accomplish these aims. After mentioning my results to several people, it seemed that PDF generation was a common requirement and now I have the same need again on a personal project, so it seemed a good case study to walk you through what I found.

API stands for 'Application Programming Interface' and as the name implies, creating one is a technical process. This article will talk very little about how to create an API as there are a myriad of methods to undertake that. This article aims to focus on the business side of APIs and supply advice for non-technical folk.