A couple of weeks ago I saw a segment on our regional news programme, BBC Look North, about how the future new Children’s Hospital within Newcastle’s RVI was looking for a new name and wanted the people of the North East to vote for it. There were three choices: The Great North Children’s Hospital, The Greenhouse Children’s Hospital and Northern Lights Children’s Hospital. We were able to do this by logging on and voting here, aswell as view the logos and hear a pitch by three North East celebrities on why we should vote for the name they have stood by.

I didn’t need to listen to any of the pitches, the choice was easy: The Great North Children’s Hospital. Seeing the logo confirmed it for me…

That name and logo just says everything that a name and logo should say. It’s simple: Newcastle upon Tyne is the Great North, obviously, but most of all I think it will appeal to kids as it’s got a fun element to it with the rainbow of colours and the cute eyes over/within some of the lettering. The voting was pretty close all along with The Great North pretty much head to head with Northern Lights. The Greenhouse was only ever stuck on 2%, bless it, and although not a fan of the name at all I can see why that was put out there as the hospital is going to be green and round.

The winner was announced this evening at 6.30pm - The Great North Children’s Hospital Well done to my fellow Geordie’s for having good taste

I love seeing simple logos like this that don’t need any further explanation…unlike London 2012. If only the British public were given a chance to vote on that….

If you are a Twitter user then you’re probably frustrated with the service thesedays and fed up with seeing the Fail Whale page that tells you that there’s just “too many tweets”. The API requests has also been lowered from the standard 70 per hour to just 20 which means if you’re using a desktop Twitter client like Twitterrific then you are buggered unless you lower the auto refresh from every 3 minutes to every 15 minutes to avoid the dreaded yellow triangle.

The official Twitter Status page often seems a bit casual as if they are shrugging and saying “So the site is down again, so what?”. Nothing much seems to change - goes from running fine then oops, everything has gone pear shaped again. Personally I prefer the Fake Twitter Status. It’s given me a good laugh this afternoon, especially this more recent one at the time of writing…

You’re totally going to laugh about this one.  Somebody tripped over the power cable in our new offices and through some kind of “Butterfly Effect” kind of thing, the entire website went down.  Go figure.

I’m looking forward to the day when the official Twitter status page is as open and as frank as the fake one!

Following the announcement of MobileMe at WWDC a couple of weeks ago I have been looking forward to the early July release so I could sign up with a brand new username and be able to sync my Macs and iPod touch over ‘the cloud’. When I bought my Mac Mini three years ago I tried out the 60-day trial of .Mac but didn’t use any of the services as I wasn’t keen on renewing with a price-tag of £69.

I was going to wait until the Apple Store were shipping before ordering MobileMe, but my friend Chris mentioned that he bought a discounted .Mac Family Pack on Amazon.com which I thought was a great idea. I had a look around and saw an eBay listing for the .Mac user and Family Packs cheaper than elsewhere. I bought .Mac (user) for £48 - a saving of £11 on the soon-to-be MobileMe price. The activation code was e-mailed to me 5 days after purchase due to the increased demand. I headed to the .Mac site late last week and was pleased to grab the name I wanted.

Usually I wouldn’t be too bothered about a saving of around £10 or £11, but at least registering before the upgrade takes place means I have the option of having mail sent to either @mac.com or @me.com. If you want to grab a discounted .Mac so you’re ready and waiting for the switchover then search eBay for ‘dotmac’ and there should be a few listed. Once MobileMe is officially launched then I’ll most likely use it as my main personal address as I’ll be able to access my mail far easier, especially on my iPod touch which never did seem too happy about dealing with my POP3/IMAP mail accounts.

So, here’s the big question…

If you are buying (or moving from .Mac) what features are you particularly looking forward to? One of the features I’m newly excited about since my switch back to Safari yesterday is being able to sync my bookmarks across my Macs and iPod touch. I’ve noticed some intermittent outages on .Mac over the 5 days I’ve had it, mostly with Mail. Since I’m not relying on the service yet then it’s not a problem and I guess this can only be expected during the run up to the MobileMe launch, then hopefully it will be a lot more stable.

Remember, there’ll be a 60-day free trial of MobileMe when it launches so you don’t have to commit right away if you are unsure whether it will suit your needs. I was thinking of signing up for the trial, but then I couldn’t really see why I won’t immediately love and embrace all the features right away since the guided tour has me positively salivating

I’m guessing that there are a lot of Mac OS X Leopard users visiting Fruit Bytes and you may even have a WordPress blog of your own. How cool would it be to have a Leopard style WP Admin Panel to replace the default one which is, well, a little bit bland and boring shall we say? Enter Leopard Admin.

It’s the easiest thing to get up and running. Simply download the plugin, upload to your /wp-contents/plugins/ folder in your WordPress installation, activate and voila, a sexy new look to your Admin Panel that will make you want to spend more time blogging, which has got to be a good thing.

Thanks to @chris24 for tweeting this.

For around two years I have been a Camino user on my Mac. It didn’t start out this way when I got my first Mac three years ago - I was very much a Safari girl. However, I started running into annoying issues where I was being beachballed and had to Force Quit on a regular basis.

I then switched to Firefox for the Mac but it’s distinct Mac-look-lack was a turn off for me and then I heard about Camino which is Mozilla power with Mac Style. It wasn’t long before this became my browser of choice and I’ve used it pretty much exclusively since. There are occasions when websites won’t work correctly in Camino such as my online banking or the o2 website which throws an annoying pop-up at me which repeatedly tells me that my browser is out of date, so for these occasions I almost always use Firefox.

I downloaded Firefox 3 last week on release day to help break the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in 24 hours. I used it briefly but one thing I noticed was how fast it was. Blazingly so, even compared to Camino 1.6. I was also impressed with it’s slick Mac look. I’m glad it’s finally been updated to at least look like a Mac browser. But, I don’t think it’s one that I could switch over to completely. It’s useful for the sites that won’t play ball in my browser, however.

The problem now is the choice: Camino, Firefox, Safari. I *want* to go back to using Safari as it’s much more stable now and I do like the fact that it’s Apple’s own and has a gorgeous UI (fangirl alert!). Plus on testing it out again today I have found it is MUCH faster than Camino. Of course, the other great thing about switching back to Safari on the iMac and PowerBook will be the ability to sync bookmarks across machines with .Mac/MobileMe. So, looks like I’ll be letting Safari back into my affections…

So, what’s your favourite browser?