In the early hours of Friday, September 26th, 2008, years of ambition and months of hard work personified itself in an unorthodox manner… I’d like to introduce you to Mighty Ape:

Mighty Ape is our new online shopping site, built from the ground-up to a be complete replacement for Gameplanet Store, which launched five years ago in September, 2003.

The biggest surface upgrade that Mighty Ape introduces is the introduction of books and toys to our range. Our team is passionate about both and I believe that we have already become one of the best online options for New Zealand consumers in both categories.

Technically speaking, Mighty Ape has been a massive challenge. The addition of books has seen to this, as the sheer scale of the book range means that things need to be as optimized as possible instead of just “good enough”. (With GP Store we could get away with this somewhat, thanks to a relatively tiny product database.) The end product is something many times more complicated than GP Store, and the fact that you can’t really tell the difference is something I’m proud of. It can a little irritating that most people don’t seem to see Mighty Ape as complex project compared to GP Store, but hopefully the fact that we’ve lost no speed despite the additions is an indication that we’ve done it right.

It’s been a week and a half now since Mighty Ape launched, and so far it’s holding up well. We installed a fast new server last week to help with the extra load has been generated and although our web team is working flat out to fix things, it’s nothing that we can’t handle. Overall, I’m very very proud of what we have achieved.

For the science buffs and technical boffins curious as to how Mighty Ape came to be, the following diagram illustrates the evolution of the GP Stoiran (2003-2008) into the Mighty Ape creature:

Check it.

The beta version of Google Chrome became available this morning, and it’s definitely worth trying out. It’s not quite good enough to pull me entirely from Firefox yet, but it definitely has enormous potential. For now I’ll be using it for casual browsing whilst staying with Firefox for work.

Our new online shopping site currently in development seems to work flawlessy… that was expected, considering Chrome is based on WebKit, but given that we’re getting very close to launch (honest!) I’m pleased to say that IE6 remains the only browser that I hate.

Simon pointed out that Chrome gives very little weight to the web page’s title. Because Chrome has a minimalistic look about it, the classic “File / Edit / View” bar and application title are nowhere to be seen. Furthermore, the tabs cut off page titles after around 20 characters, so page titles like “Gameplanet Store NZ – Buy DVDs, DVD movies, PS2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii, and PC games online.” are suddenly extremely useless for all purposes other than search engines. Interesting decision.

It’s that time of year again, and the Cancer Society of New Zealand is actively collecting money to fund cancer research into cancer causes and treatments, providing support to people affected by cancer and other initiatives such as public awareness programmes.

More information is available at the Daffodil Day web site.

Chances are incredibly high that you know someone who has suffered or is suffering from cancer. If you haven’t already given to the cause, I urge you to make a donation.

Keeping on the Olympics theme, Usain Bolt absolutely set the standard in the 100m final early on Sunday morning NZ time.

It shouldn’t be possible to dominate an event that lasts approximately 10 seconds, but Bolt did just that. I think this picture sums it up nicely:

When running an Olympic 100m final, you are not supposed to have the time to realise that you’ve won and start to celebrate 20 metres before the line, whilst still setting a new World Record of 9.69 seconds. Incredible.