An ace piece of advertising that has exploded as a viral video.

Usually fashion it’s not my forte but when I heard news that Prada were using the cast from Final Fantasy XIII-2 to advertise their new line of clothing I have to say it piqued my interest.

“I’ve always been interested by the power of video games and their place in society, and the amount of work that’s gone into this project blows my mind. We’re incredibly pleased with the result,” Max Pearmain, Editor of Arena Homme

Judging from the comments, fans of the series were not impressed with the news, believing this will give advertisers free reign over some of gaming’s most cherished characters. I believe this also raises the issue of self image. Why airbrush models for adverts when you can simply use a CG model? You can make them pixel perfect, precisely position them and you don’t need to book a time slot to get your shots. I expect we may end up hearing more about this in future.

The issue is due to go on sale in April 12th and features characters such as Lightning, Serah and Noel ditching their trademark flamboyant outfits for something more casual.

I mentioned in an earlier post how the EU cookie law was soon coming into effect and how there are different ways to remain compliant.

In an interesting move Econsultancy have not followed any of their own suggestions and have decided to flirt dangerously close to the line of compliance.

They’ve broken it down into 3 levels of broad compliance:

Level 1 = a more prominent link to the privacy policy and improved information within the policy itself
Examples: Econsultancy; John Lewis

Level 2 = user can selectively opt in/out of groups of cookies
Examples: BT (overlay bottom right that disappears, ‘slider’ for cookie opt out/in); Magiq (selective opt out/re-opt in); Reuter (this links to the frame/overlay provided by Evidon on the Reuters site)

Level 3 = active opt-in
Examples: ICO – still the only site we’ve found so far that has this.
My reading of the Directive would be that only Level 3 is strictly-speaking compliant.

Both they and John Lewis have decided to comply by merely raising awareness of their cookie and privacy policy. It’s certainly a confident move as this still does not strictly comply with the new law. Their belief is that providing information to the customer about all of the cookies the site uses and how they work will ultimately educate people to become more mindful of cookies and how they affect the browsing experience. It’s an intelligent stance to take but if the the law is enforced I believe they will have to provide a “Level 2″ solution at the bare minimum.

I favour this stance and so do some of the people I work with, its a small change that promotes awareness and understanding to those people who aren’t so tech savvy whilst maintaining the functionality of the site. It’s just such a shame that the sites who are honest and compliant are the ones who will suffer from an impeded user experience if this is enforced whilst the rogue sites who are responsible for the malicious cookies can continue to operate from outside the EU. It doesn’t really make sense.

Dubbed the “Freedom Edition” and “Join or Die Edition” they will be available at a fairly respectable £79.99 and £64.99 respectively for console owners such as myself.

• A 9-inch Connor figurine
• Steelbook case
• George Washington’s notebook
• Exclusive lithograph
• “Lost Mayan Ruins” single-player mission involving exploration of a Mayan pyramid and Captain Kidd’s cutlass
• “Ghost of War” single-player mission including Pontiac’s War Club weapon
• “Sharpshooter” multiplayer package including a new character, Sharpshooter weapon, one relic, one emblem, one special picture and “The Jester” title

The Join or Die edition appears to come with a silver Assassins emblem. There is also a regular special edition which comes with a exclusive single player mission.

It all looks pretty good and I’m certainly looking forward to the final installment in the series.

Here’s a breakdown of the updates:

• Favicon now live
• Twitter feed now live on the right sidebar
• Site web fonts have been updated
• Site ‘Gallery’ is now ‘Scrapbook’ – the gallery feature doesn’t really suit a portfolio style

Now onto the reponsive layouts. Whilst tinkering with the web fonts I began to think about the responsiveness of my website. Currently I post most of my content from my phone, once I’ve uploaded my post I’ll check it on my mobile browser. Once it’s loaded I’m confronted with a not-so user friendly rendering of my site.

I’ve already tried to remedy this by installing the wp-touch plugin and while it presents my content in a more “mobile friendly” way, I still find it a little frustrating to navigate at times. Besides it doesn’t visually fit in with my site’s current layout.

Media queries appear to be my saving grace, I’ve already used them at work and they seem to do the job, the difference here though is that my website doesn’t have a fluid layout. This makes the transitioning between different layouts quite jarring for users which is never my aim.

What I’m aiming for is a fluid layout but with a maximum width of around 960px. By converting the rigid widths to percentages and max-widths, combined with sparing use of some CSS3 media queries, my site will scale down nicely onto smaller browsers.

That’s the theory anyway…

Now before you ask, I waited until everyone left before snapping this picture since I didn’t want people to see me as some kind of cine-perv. Sadly no friendly URL was attached to the poster so after unsucessfully trawling their website I figured I would send them an email to get more info.

Hopefully I’ll hear back from them soon. Because I know what I want to do on my next birthday!

The people over at Econsultancy have been keeping an eye on the impending EU ‘cookie law’. Whilst a lot of companies won’t make a move until the last possible moment whilst they gauge their rivals, the big question that’s being asked is “How do you comply with these new regulations without impeding the end user?”.

This recent post has made a few suggestions and has weighed up some of the pros and cons. I think whichever way you look at it there is definately going to have to be a compromise in user experience for the sake of compliance.

Of the 3 options they present I believe a transparent status bar absolutely positioned at the bottom of the window is the best solution to me, but I tend to want to avoid putting barriers between users and content.

Some leaked promo art for AC3 has surfaced online via kotaku. I’m not sure whether it’s the real deal but I have to say that it does look pretty convincing.

The Continental flag in the background is a big indicator that the next instalment will take place during the American Revolution.

The protagonist looks like a Native American and is carrying a gun and tomahawk engraved with the assassin crest. I have to say that if this a fake, then it’s a pretty convincing one.

After a bit of research (see Google) I found this article which explains the concept from fujitsu as an all-in-one laptop, tablet, smartphone and camera.

Each device serves as a input device for the laptop (the tablet slots in to become a keyboard, etc). More importantly, this would allow you to synch all of your devices and carry them around together. Pretty cool eh?

I think data synchronization between devices will be better suited to cloud computing but there will always be those who look for an alternative and this concept certainly looks promising!

Watch the video to catch a glimpse of all the new classes, a few new guns and a lot more wub wub!