Gidley's Gossipings

Proof SeeSaw is better than iPlayer, Blinkbox, ITV Player, MSN Player, 4OD

2010-02-18T21:40:00.001Z

I have now got scientific objective proof that SeeSaw is better than iPlayer, Hulu, Blinkbox, ITV Player, MSN, 4OD!

How? you may well ask - the 'proof' is in the screen shots below - look at the volume controls!

iPlayer

iPlayer takes an early lead with the volume going up to 11..

Blinkbox

Blinkbox enter the race with a dull volume control - that doesn't event get over 10! It does have some cute animation effects though!
ITV Player

ITV appear to be a different race - they don't have any numbers! But they do have bars that expand around the volume icon and I count 4!

MSN

MSN have stuck to the slider with 3 bars that appear as the user moves it. It is interesting to notice they are using Flash which is a bit odd for the company behind Silverlight....

SeeSaw

What else is there to say about SeeSaw the volume goes all the way up to 12.
4OD

4OD have joined ITV in not showing a number putting them at an immediate disadvantage. Counting the bars on the icon I get 2 - putting them in last place - sorry guys - but this is an objective review and 4OD deserves better than coming last. A lot of people have forgotten how it BEAT the iPlayer to be the first major VOD service in the UK!

So lets recap

iPlayer - 11
Blinkbox - 10
ITV Player - 4
MSN - 3
SeeSaw - 12
4OD - 2

So there we have it the best Video On Demand service in the UK is SeeSaw as 'the volume goes all the way up to 12 - one more than iPlayer'....

SeeSaw is open

2010-02-17T10:00:00.005Z

SeeSaw.com is now live and open to the public!

As of 6.00am Tuesday 16th February 2010 (yes we waited a bit before announcing it) SeeSaw.com is live and open to the public - no more beta logins! Now it is up to the public to see if they like it!

I have been working on this since July 2007 when I joined ioko and started working on Project Kangaroo. Over the last two and half year we have had a lot of ups and downs and it is good to finally see this site open to the public. For those who are interested a rough timeline is

Jan 2007 Project Kangaroo idea conceived and early discussions begin
July 2007 Project team assembled
Sep 2007 Development team assembled - target completion date Q1 - 2008
May 2008 - Change of technology - moved away from Kontiki to Flash streaming
Q1 2008 - Venture voluntarily referred themselves to the OFT. Unable to launch until a decision is made so more is developed.
June 2008 - OFT decide to refer venture to competition commission. Development continues refining UI, upgrading from Struts to Tapestry 5.
December 2008 - Closed Alpha begins - project team planning on being ready to start beta the day after Competition Commission judgement.
February 2009 - Competition commission declare venture anti-competitve and it all shuts down
February - July 2009 - Project Kangaroo's technology was sold to Arqiva
September - December 2009 - A UI revamp occurs to the Kangaroo design to make it simpler and remove some 'design by committee' elements
December 2009 - SeeSaw.com Alpha begins
January 2010 - First public beta invites issued
16 February 2010 - Open beta begins

What's next - well thats for people from the business side of SeeSaw to reveal but I think we are going to be busy delivering at least a some of the ideas that people have suggested!

Apple iPad and Content

2010-01-28T18:10:00.000Z

The new Apple iPad has certainly got people attention - whether it will be a success or not is still to be seen. Unfortunately what is undeniable is Apple are not going to let 3rd parties deliver quality content onto it - further locking users into iTunes.

The iTunes story is one where Apple managed to wrest music from the pirates and turn it into a legitimate revenue stream for the music companies. They have managed to make legal downloads easier than piracy and for this they deserve a lot of credit. Their brave move to remove DRM have allowed users to once again 'own' their music - though I doubt they would have done it if other MP3 stores hadn't opened!

With video content however the story is very different. In video the content owners are still (rightly or otherwise) wedded to DRM to protect their content and this current boils down to 3 systems - Microsoft's Playready, Adobe's Flash RTMPE and Apple's Fairplay. There are some smaller players (and subtleties over versions) but these are the ones that are widely accepted by content owners. As it stands on PC and Mac all 3 work on all 3 platforms. However on devices the story is very different. The iPhone and iPad will only support Apple's Fairplay. Other devices will vary but often support limited versions of Microsoft's and Adobe's DRM.

This matters a lot as a consumer as it makes it very hard for me to get (legally) content on to a device. It matters even more as someone who works in the business of delivering VOD solutions. It is right now not possible for us to deliver content to iPod or iPhone and protect it with DRM. It can be argued that we should do it without DRM (like music) but that isn't going to happen quickly (if at all) so for now to get good content we need DRM.

Apple's position as a major video store and controlling the iPod device gives them immense power. They will not license fairplay to anyone else so nobody can deliver DRM content to devices that make a huge proportion of the market.

The iPad makes this position even worse - up til now we have at least had the option of Flash or Playready (via Silverlight) to deliver to every 'PC' type device. Now we have a 'big screen' device no-one but Apple can operate a quality content video store for. This isn't going to be good for the market. It may even be an abuse of a monopoly - they are abusing their strong position in the music and portable device market to lock others out of the video market.

What I actually think will happen is (over time) apple will actually struggle to keep up with the rest of the industry. There are plenty of more open devices (e.g Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and many more) in the pipeline that will be cheaper than Apple's offerings and begin to get better (and cheaper) content. In the long run the video market will be driven by content, onto cheap commodity technology, but in the short run Apple will make it hard for the rest of us to compete!

As an aside I often hear - but iPlayer does it. They do deliver to PS3, Wii, iPhone and dozens of other devices. The way they do this is by cheating and not using DRM. Due to 'the unique way it is funded' the BBC can force rights holders to release content without requiring DRM. This means there are tonnes (just google it) of methods of downloading iPlayer content without DRM. This is good for the consumer in the short run - but it is bad in the long run as it is a huge disincentive for anyone to invest money to compete with this stream of free, DRM free content!

SeeSaw and Technology

2010-01-27T18:00:00.002Z

The SeeSaw beta is now open so I thought it would be interesting to mention what powers it.

There are a few things I would single out

Tapestry 5

The web application is written in the Tapestry 5 framework - this is a relatively rare choice as it is quite new - it was in beta when we started developing (we actually migrated from Struts mid way).

I think this is one of the choices that has paid off for us substantially. That's not to say there hasn't been pain along the way (as I sure some of the team who had to learn it will agree) but I think overall it has paid off.

The key win features in my mind are

Components - it is hard to underestimate how powerful component based pages are - we can actually re-use large chunks of code with ease across the site
HTML templates - having templates that are basically HTML makes it so much easier to bridge the gap between the code world and the web development world
Javascript - now this would be the most debatable one - as I know some of our team don't like the way T5 handles Javascript - but the effortless way we handle AJAX via zones I think is a real killer feature

I won't say much more about this - as I'm saving it for 'In the brain of Ben Gidley - Tapestry In Action for real' a talk I'm doing on the subject of Tapestry 5 on March 23rd 2010 at Skillsmatter.

Jetty

The SeeSaw application runs entirely on Jetty. We don't need (or want) one of the more fully featured application servers. Jetty is stable, easy to run, manageable, lightweight, cheap and most of all just works. We develop on it, test on it and run on it. Lots of shops develop on lightweight servers like Jetty/Tomcat and then deploy on something heavier like Websphere or Weblogic. We just don't need it.

We also get top class production support for our production Jetty's from Webtide. When we have an issue (which is rare) we know we will get immediate support. They are the only company I know that operates support on a de-escalation basis - you get the senior people first who then hand off to junior people if it doesn't need their expertise!

Hibernate

Hibernate is like an old friend. I remember back when Hibernate was just reaching version 2 debating with people if this new fangled Object Relational stuff would ever take off. Now it seems to be the obvious choice for accessing a database from Java.
Hibernate has made it easy for our developers to focus on writing business code (e.g pages/components) and not worry too much about the database. It also performs well, is very easy to configure to cache our content and generally 'just works'.

Zeus ZXTM
Caching is a BIG issue when building a site that was designed to scale like SeeSaw is - when it was Project Kangaroo it was aiming to be the no. 2 destination in the UK - the new owners are also quite ambitious!
The site therefore relies on a range of caching to perform under load. The most valuable of these is the Zeus ZXTM cache. The best thing to say about it is - we can't break it. Seriously we max out our network links before it breaks. It doesn't degrade, it just keeps going.
The ZXTM doesn't just cache - it also handles SSL, GZIP and load balancing across our application servers. I think without it (or something similar) we would need a lot more application servers that we have.

SeeSaw beta is open

2010-01-26T21:20:00.000Z

So the beta invites are finally out for SeeSaw.com (well the first batch anyhow) - so people can now see what I have spent the last 2.5 years doing!

The SeeSaw (then Project Kangaroo) journey began in July 2007 when I left Macrovision and joined ioko to work on this new joint venture between BBC, ITV and C4. It has been a long road with the lowlight being last February when the competition commission banned the venture from proceeding. We had been ready to start a beta the day it was announced - as the whole team were expecting to be allowed to proceed!

Several months later the code was picked up by Arqiva to be remade into the SeeSaw that opens today. This involved quite a few changes including a complete UI redesign (I must say I like this one better!).

So finally nearly 3 years later we are inviting people in to see the 'future of TV' - now we just have to see how popular it will be. I hope all the team who have help make SeeSaw a reality (not forgetting all the Kangaroo people) enjoy the site and take some credit!

IE 7 and dom:loaded

2009-11-11T21:25:00.002Z

We recently hit a very annoying bug/feature that we could only see in IE7. The page works fine normally but in IE 7 we got javascript errors saying objects were not defined.

The page looks something like



<head>

<script src="ourcorescripts.js/>

</head>

<body>

// Some stuff

<script>

 document.observe("dom:loaded") = function(){

   // do stuff

}

</script>

</body>

What happens is in IE7 (sometimes) the event handler fires and objects defined in 'ourframework.js' are not ready yet. A similar problem was noted by Atlassian - their solution was to use window:load. This didn't really work for us as it is a bit too late as we want some of our logic to load sooner.

What seems to be happening is in IE 7 it is firing dom:loaded before it has finished parsing all of the JavaScript files. This seems odd as it doesn't happen in any other browser. Looking into this further it comes to light dom:loaded is not actually an IE 7 feature but is simulated by prototype. Prototype uses
code that registered a 'deferred' script to fire the event. For some reason in IE 7 this doesn't seem to always work.

Our solution was more low tech. We simply fired another event my:dom:loaded from the footer and listened to that instead. This solved the problem and seems to fire nearly as soon as dom:loaded.

Social Network network....

2009-11-05T18:00:00.000Z

I have been slowly linking together all the social sites that I use and then surprised myself by how linked up they are. So i drew myself a diagram

So far it seems the best place to post new stuff is either Brizzly or my Blog. That way it gets everywhere!

I think I will see how many more services I can get linked in!

SeeSaw

2009-11-04T20:43:00.001Z

Finally the project brand name for the Video On Demand project I have been working on since 2007 has been released! It is http://www.seesaw.com/. It is amazing to think back over all that time - when we started we were Project Kangaroo (a join venture between ITV, Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide) and were aiming to build a combined video on demand site. That project was killed by the competition commission and then resurrected by Arqiva.

The next step is (obviously) to launch the thing. Now I am not going to say when, but if you watch http://twitter.com/seesawtv they are promising to announce when you can be involved with the beta.

From a more techy point of view I hope to be able to say more about how it works as I think it is a really nice architecture (well I would say that as I designed a lot of it). In the meantime we (the dev team) all have a lot of work to do to get it polished for launch!

IntelliJ Community Edition

2009-10-19T19:00:00.001+01:00

Jetbrains have announced IntelliJ community edition and open source version of their excellent IDE. I have long been an IntelliJ fan, but have had trouble justifying the cost when compared to Eclipse.

The open source version of IntelliJ appears to have all the key features I use day to day (a few of the toys are missing, but I can live without them). It has the excellent code, xml and HTML editors (though some of the smart feature in XML/HTML are not available). It runs fast and works well with Maven projects. The only major gaps are lack of Javascript and CSS editors - I suppose they had to leave something out in order to persuade us to buy the pro version!

A number of people have been writing about if this release is a good/bad thing for both Jetbrains and everybody else. At the moment this is a really good thing for IntelliJ fans however these is a risk open sourcing it will result it becoming the plugin driven mess that is Eclipse. Eclipse has now got so bloated it is getting harder and harder to use. However I suspect IntelliJ will stay focussed and will remain (probably) the best IDE out there.

JSON and Flash and Tapestry 5

2009-09-22T20:48:00.000+01:00

I was asked recently how we get Tapestry to play nicely flash so I have written a tutorial on this as part of ioko-tapestry-commons.

The tutorial speaks for itself but I think there a couple of interesting things to learn about Tapestry

Tapestry easily support a component or page returning from an event either JSON, a HTML block or some other protocol you decide to make up
It is easy to call tapestry events from javascript or flash

Combining these two things makes it very easy for us to build up a component that include AJAX behaviours that interact with either Flash or Javascript (that isn't tapestry aware).

Tomtom traffic subscriptions - a warning

2009-09-20T19:16:00.000+01:00

A few months ago I activated the traffic subscription on our TomTom with the intention of cancelling it after a month. The reason being is I wanted it for a holiday but day to day it isn't worth it.

I have been trying to cancel it since June 23rd and today (September 20th) still don't appear to have suceeded in doing so.

Firstly when I cancelled it they have in their T&C's the right to charge one more subscription. So cancelling on June 23rd would mean I would pay the July 17th payment and be done. However they proceeded to charge me on the 17th August. So I asked them to sort this and they replied that their T&C's allow them to do this quoting the following

a) Subscriptions will be entered into for an indefinite period of time, unless TomTom and you have agreed on a fixed period of time. b) If your Subscription is for an indefinite period of time, either you or TomTom may terminate your Subscription by taking a notice period into account of 30 days (your notice to be sent: by e-mail via http://www.tomtom.com/support). This notice period starts on the first collection date after receipt of your notice of termination by TomTom. If your Subscription is for a fixed period of time, it will automatically end upon expiration of such period of time. c) TomTom reserves the right to change the prices for or the terms and conditions applicable to your Subscription, subject to giving you reasonable prior notice thereof (either via email, the TomTom website or otherwise). If such change will result in higher prices or otherwise works towards your disadvantage (but not in case the higher prices result from higher government levies or taxes), you may terminate your Subscription prior to and against the date such change comes into effect by sending an e-mail via http://www.tomtom.com/support. d) TomTom may terminate your Subscription or a separate service within bundled Services by providing at least 30 days prior notice if TomTom decides to discontinue offering such Subscription or such separate service respectively. e) TomTom may terminate your Subscription with immediate effect without notice of default being required if (i) you fail to comply with any material term of these Terms and Conditions which shall be understood to include clauses 6 and 9 or (ii) collection through the Payment Service for Subscriptions should fail after a second attempt. f) Upon termination of your Subscription, your License as detailed in clause 6 will terminate simultaneously.

I have read this several times and I fail to see anywhere in here that lets them charge for 2 full months on cancelling so several emails later I was getting nowhere so ended up disputing the transaction via my card company. However they did assure me the August payment would be the last.

Then (surprise surprise) I see they have charged me on the 17th September. This is getting ridiculous. This time I am pleased to see their support have acknowledge it is a problem (they have raised it to 2nd line!!!) rather than attempting to pretend their T&C's let them do it.

I am still awaiting a response - but in the meantime I thought moan about it on the web and warn people not to pay for Tom Tom traffic subscriptions. My parents have a garmin with free traffic and find it just as useful (I know the data isn't as detailed but it seems to work). I have been a fan of tom tom for years but following this I think I will buy a Garmin when the tom tom breaks.

Celle vs Aeron Chairs

2009-09-09T19:00:00.001+01:00

I am lucky enough to have a Herman Miller Celle chair at home. I bought it earlier this year as I wanted a comfortable office chair for working at home. I bought this as it was a lot cheaper than the more expensive Herman Miller chairs such as the Aeron.
ioko don't tend to go in for expensive chairs, but we have recently moved into a clients office and everybody has Aeron's so I thought a comparative review is in order.

My celle is a fully plastic chair but is exceedingly comfortable. I have pretty much all the adjustable options and find it quite easy to get comfortable. The one I use most is the tilt limiter and forward tilt. I have a (bad habit) of leaning of the computer and forward tilt supports my back while doing so. The plastic cover is very comfortable and I find the whole chair very good.

The office Aeron is also very good, but not quite as good. The office ones haven't got forward tilt or lumbar support (which I have on the celle but barely use). They have cloth covers which I don't think are as comfortable as the plastic 'celle' cover. The back is also slightly lower (or feels so - I haven't measured it).

Overall I think the Celle may even be the better chair (and it costs a lot less).

Oracle and Sun

2009-09-08T20:46:00.003+01:00

Oracle has aquired Sun and it suddenly seems to have changed it tune....

Last week on the back on the economist they were advertising the 'HP Oracle Database Machine' as the fastest database machine...

Whereas this week we discover that we should now be buying Sun hardware....

CITP

2009-09-08T20:44:00.001+01:00

I just got accepted as a 'Chartered IT Professional' with the BCS. I have been working in IT for several years and joined the BCS when Anite joined most the company up! I noticed at the time if I waited a few years I could get Chartered status and decided I may as well. Helen (my wife, who is a Chartered Accountant) is jealous as she had to sit a load of exams to get to be 'Chartered'!!!

Snow Leopard Upgrade and Juniper Network Connect

2009-09-05T09:00:00.002+01:00

I (along with a bazillion other people) have been upgrading my Mac to snow leopard. As I used my Mac day to day I was quite nervous that some critical items wouldn't work. Fortunately I found an easy way to test.
I simply took an external hard disk and installed Snow Leopard onto there. I then booted off it (you hold the alt/option key) and tried my applications out.

I was lucky only one application - Juniper Network Connect had issues. I use this SSL VPN for work all the time so really needed it. Some googling later I discovered a number of people had a solution. However this solution relies on you having network connect already installed which my clean image didn't.

The though the browser install of network connect doesn't seem to work with Snow Leopard so I asked our sys admins (thanks) to let me have a copy of the installer (NetworkConnect.dmg) and then I installed that and then the fix above worked. I did hit one more glitch we use SSL certificates to authenticate the VPN snow leopard refuses to use the right certificate in Safari - however simply using Firefox got round that!

HTML entities (aka Character references) in Tapestry 5

2009-09-04T17:30:00.001+01:00

We recently hit (again) the issue of HTML entities in Tapestry 5. Tapestry treats its templates as valid XML so you can't put in them things that aren't allowed in XML. This unfortunately can include things like ©. The XML parser by default doesn't know what to do with this.

The easy solution is to add a HTML doctype to the file e.g.

This doctype includes definitions for all the usual HTML entities. Then it all works fine.

This led me to think how with Tapestry handle HTML 5 doc types. These unlike HTML 4 are not 'valid XML' they have introduced a new doctype of

This works fine in browsers, but in an XML parser as there is no DTD won't resolve things like ©. After digging around a bit I raised a JIRA about it for Tapestry. It looks like it will need to implement entity resolution itself for its xml templates (or not support them).

Royal York Hotel

2009-08-27T08:00:00.003+01:00

I don't usually blog about hotels but I feel the Royal York Hotel deserves a special mention. I stay in York quite often for work so have got to know a few of the Hotels. The Royal York is surprisingly bad for an allegedly good hotel. It is hard to say specifically why it is so bad, but a few things

The reception is slow and disorganised
They are so cheap they charge a 2.50 credit card surcharge
The hotel needs a coat of paint
The rooms vary wildly - you can get large rooms that need a paint, very small rooms that are miles from the main bit of the hotel (in an annex) and rooms that are so close to York Station you can hear all the announcements
The food is random - I have had an incredibly salty pizza, a quite nice fish and chips but the cost of the food is quite high for what you get.

So as you may guess I don't like it and interestingly neither do quite a lot of people. A quick look on trip advisor shows a number of negative reviews. What I found quite funny was the fact the management respond to each comment - if they only put half the effort they put into responding into running the hotel it could be quite a nice hotel! I do however like 'The Grange' and the Marriot which offer much better accommodation and atmosphere. With a bit of luck the Royal York will ban me and then when The Grange/Marriot are full I won't have to stay there!

Windows 7 RTM

2009-08-09T09:00:00.000+01:00

I installed yesterday Windows 7 RTM (64bit) on my home PC and switched over from Vista.

The installation was very smooth and quick. I simply dropped the DVD in and answered a few questions. I decided to go for a clean install as I keep all my documents on another drive and it was easy to do. The only glitch in the install is I wanted to change my drive partitions during the install sequence (something you have been able to do in Windows since NT) but Microsoft have remove the ability to delete/create partitions. It let me format my old OS but not delete the partition.

Once installed Windows 7 is (as reviewed) very good. It seems to be fast to boot (and shutdown). I was a bit concerned about compatibility of some of the key programmes I use (as they don't say they are Window 7 compatible). So far it seems

Kaspersky Internet Security 2010
Carbonite
Evernote

All work without issues on Windows 7.

I have unfortunately seen a couple of crashes since installing - once when using user switching, it totally locked up the PC and I had to turn the power off. It couldn't even bring up task manager to let me stop things.

The other thing I have noticed is Media Player seems better. I have a TV that supports DLNA and it never worked properly with Vista. However with Windows 7 it automatically 'just worked'. If I have my PC on I can view and use by photo's, videos and music from my TV.

In general it seems to be a marked improvement from Vista. The UI is more responsive and it seems a lot smoother.

Project Kangaroo (resurrected)

2009-07-23T18:14:00.000+01:00

The news is now out - Arqiva have bought Project Kangaroo. The offical press release has all the details so I haven't really got any more to add other than to say my post before now looks a bit premature...

XHTML vs HTML in HTML v5

2009-07-13T19:00:00.001+01:00

I was recently thinking of adding a XHTML mode library to ioko-tapestry-commons, but before I did I decided to check out the latest position on XHTML vs HTML with HTML 5. I was glad I did - as it appears the attempt to move to XML compliant markup on the web is being de-emphasised!
When XHTML was first introduced is seemed (maybe just to me) that is was aiming to replace HTML (which is quite hard to parse) with a more structured version (XHTML) but it has been an uphill struggle to produce valid XHTML.
It seems the W3C have recognised this and now recommend in most usages using plain HTML 5. I found an interesting write up of the notes that led to this decision. It does nicely clarify the situation, so now we can all stop worrying and just write plain HTML 5. Those people who love XML can still write XML versions of their pages - but as before they still won't render in IE properly (when the mime types are correctly set).

Nokia (finally) did something right

2009-07-10T19:00:00.000+01:00

A while back I reviewed my Nokia 5800 and wasn't entirely happy. However I just found the new Nokia email client and have discovered something actually good about the phone!

The Nokia Messaging client works like a high quality push email client (I am pretty sure it isn't push but it behaves well). It fetches emails straight from my Google Applications account (all it asked was my email and password) and seems to synchronise perfectly.

This is the kind of thing Nokia need if they are going to complete with Apple and Android in the smart phone market. People won't put up with things not working easily.

Eclipse, Maven and Subversion

2009-07-10T16:43:00.004+01:00

<rant>

I want to open projects from subversion, in Eclipse using Maven. Why is it so hard?

This used to work - once upon a time I could type

mvn eclipse:eclipse

and it all worked.

However in the new exciting world of Eclipse 3.5 I have to download Eclipse, Install one of TWO subversion plugins. One of TWO maven plugins OR use the command line method.

Why do I have to choose between two eclipse.org projects the do basically the same thing. Why does neither work on my projects that IntelliJ's maven integration has no problem with. Why doesn't mvn eclipse:eclipse work properly with web applications? Why does one of the eclipse.org maven plugins insist on the non eclipse.org subversion plugin?

I think I will go back to IntelliJ now.

I know the answer to all of the above questions - but it is extremely annoying. No wonder people call Java complex.

</rant>

Chrome for Mac

2009-06-09T16:28:00.000+01:00

Google Chrome was released as a developer preview for the Mac. Despite the warning not to download it and try and use it I did anyhow!
It turns out it is very usable. I have been using it as my day to day browser since I installed it and it is mostly sufficient. The biggest gap right now is the lack of flash support which a surprising number of sites now require.
The interesting thing is to compare it to Safari 4 - they are based on very similar technology. I must say I prefer the UI of Chrome. The single search/address bar is a killer concept. I suspect as Chrome stabilises I will use Safari less and less.

Bing vs Google

2009-06-03T16:57:00.001+01:00

I don't really want to spend too much time working out if Bing or Google is better. But doing a simple search 'Bill Gates is'

and in Bing

Now that does bring a new meaning to 'don't be evil'. Google suggest Bill Gates is sharing his fortune, whereas Microsoft think Bill Gates is evil!

Lake District

2009-05-27T16:59:00.002+01:00

Last week I went on Holiday to the lake district and we stayed at Knipefold Barn near Hawkshead.

We had an good week and I stronly recommend the cottage. The cottage site itself is quite good, but there are a couple of good points it doesn't quite explain....

Firstly there is the view

This view is shown on the site - but it isn't clear it is the view from the living area.

Second the location - it is brilliant!

View Lake District in a larger map

It is right in the middle of the lake district on the 'quiet' side of Windermere. You can walk (in a couple of hours) to Coniston via Tarn How's from the cottage. It is also in walking distance (20 mins) of 2 pubs. The more normal - Outgate Inn and the foodie Drunken Duck. It is easy to get to the mountains - we had mixed weather so didn't do many but I do have a lovely picture of the view from the top of the Crinkle Crags

Overall I recommend it - if you are looking for a nice cottage in the lake district.