The Blog
Join me as I share my experiences from across cyber space and talk about my passion of web design
July 28th, 2008 - 4 Comments
It looks like last week’s predictions were proven right with the “mini heat-wave” currently hitting the UK. Temperatures hit a rather toasty 30 degrees today, and with more planned for next week I can safely say that summer has finally arrived. No doubt it’ll only last a couple of weeks, but grab a nice cold one and let’s enjoy it while it lasts!
In other events this week; I’ve become an official developer for the iPhone. I was pleasantly surprised with the entire process taking less than 48 hours – although I’m not sure where all these reports of “huge queues” are coming from, but I certainly never had any major issues! In fact, a 2 minute call to Apple (including waiting) sorted out my only problem. Kudos to you Apple for proving you care about your customers.
Related to my decision of developing for the iPhone and OS X is the need to expand my programming skills into Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ve always wanted to do this, but only this week have I really put these plans into action and grabbing a few books on the subject. I haven’t had much time to read them yet, but hopefully I’ll have an application in the wild by Christmas. Watch this space!
One of the coolest things things I saw recently was while I was at Fabric in London. I’d heard about their “sonic dance-floor” from friends in the past and I must say I was rather excited about checking it out for myself. The whole concept is that they’ve built-in some fairly serious sub-woofers under the floor which give you a “kinetic dance experience”. To cut a long story short, it was absolutely amazing. You really know you’re a geek when the technology under the floor excites you.
So let’s wrap up the week with the latest happenings on the interweb. Enjoy!
This week’s news
We started the week with the outage of Amazon’s S3 distributed file system, crippling a whole variety of web services that have come to rely on it. The outage completely disabled two web services that I’ve come to use often: SpanningSync for synchronising Goolgle Calendars with iCal, and the Twinkle localised twitter application. I remember this occurred earlier this year and I think it shows that you should never let your business rely 100% on another company’s service; you never know when it could go down!
Everyone’s favourite social network Facebook released their long awaited redesign to mixed opinion. The design has gone down fairly quietly, which is definitely better than an uproar. However, I feel that the more hardcore users (the addicts) of Facebook are a little frustrated over the redesign because so much has changed. Personally I think it’s a great design and Facebook are really heading in good directions with the clean, utilitarian look. I’ve spotted the odd table element being used for layout, but at least they aren’t basing their entire system on tables like some of the other networks… *cough* … MySpace! … *cough* … Excuse me, I seem to have caught a cold!
MySpace isn’t all bad, though. They announced that they’re going to be supporting OpenID, which is a great move on their part. Let’s just hope they can pull it off.
Clearleft’s user testing application Silverback was released on Thursday. I have to admit I haven’t had time to try it out yet, but I’m really impressed with the development and the video walkthroughs that are doing the rounds on Vimeo. With guys like Clearleft behind the wheel you can be fairly sure this app is going to be polished and really useful for web designers, I’m looking forward to being able to use it in my projects.
Google has announced that it’s now indexing around 1 trillion pages. These are some totally mind-blowing statistics, though. It makes Rawkes a massive 0.0000000017% of Google’s index!
Links of the week
Site of the week
Silverback
An awesome guerrilla holding a clipboard. What more do you want?
Onehub
Such a clean layout, with excellent attention to detail.
Design Disease
The illustrations and texture on this design really make it stand out for me.
Lesson of the week
Not everything can be thought through logically.
Track of the week
“Gobbledigook” by Sigur Ros. The new album by Sigur Ros is an absolute spanker, but I really like this one in particular, it’s surreal when you listen with headphones on!
Predictions for next week
I’m going to melt in the heat and start praying for the colder weather to come back!
July 20th, 2008 - 7 Comments
Things are starting to calm down in my full-time job and here at Rawkes – in a good way. Work is still piling in but I’m slowly but surely taking control. You can definitely look forward to some awesome projects being added to the portfolio soon, and I have some developments planned for this website that I’m sure will go down well!
The week has most definitely been revolving around the iPhone and the super-cool app store. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much intimate time with a piece of technology before, it feels kinda nice! My plans are still firmly in place for iPhone development so I’d love to hear any ideas for web or native apps you’d like to see developed – stick them in the comments below.
So grab your favourite mug, fill it with your beverage of choice and come join me for a round-up of the last 7 days.
This week’s news
Apple announced that they sold over 1 million iPhones and topped 10 million app store downloads in the 3 days following the launch – Quite astronomical numbers when you think about it!
It wasn’t all peachy for Apple this week as we saw with the botched release of MobileMe. After days of intermittent access and accusations about the push functionality Apple eventually apologised for the MobileMe mess by giving members a month of free access. They also apologised for a lesser known issue involving new members being overcharged for their subscriptions, myself included. This resulted in another apology from Apple and another month of free access. Well done Apple on doing the right thing!
In web design news; Steven Frank, one of the guys behind OS X development house Panic reckons it’s about time that we dropped FTP, in favour for the newer and more secure “SFTP” (Via 43folders). Personally I think this is a great idea; FTP is old and I feel slightly dirty knowing I’ve been sending personal information and FTP passwords unencrypted for so long!
On Tuesday WordPress 2.6 was released almost a month ahead of schedule. There are a bunch of improvements, most notably the ability to track changes to every post and page, and the new bookmarklet that lets you blog from wherever you are on the web. I mentioned this update in the past and I’m really glad WordPress are pushing forward with fresh ideas for blogging.
Mid-week Firefox 3.0.1 was released, introducing a bunch of stability and security fixes.
Nearing the end of the week Last.fm opened the doors to their new website, bringing with it some strong criticism. Yes, it’s plain, but I actually find it well made and it allows me to really concentrate on doing things with my music rather than fighting with a layout. Along with their native iPhone app I can see Last.fm making some serious ground in the coming months.
Links of the week
Site of the week
Function
Clean and crisp; I love it! You should check out their free icons as well, they are really well made.
Tapulous
This set up produce stunning iPhone apps; their website is just as good!
Lesson(s) of the week
Brainstorming over a few drinks with some creative minds results in awesome projects.
Track of the week
“Join The Dots” by Sub Focus. Drum and bass doesn’t have to be dark and chaotic to sound good. Sub Focus just get better and better!
Predictions for next week
We’re finally going to see summer here in England! A man can dream…
July 13th, 2008 - 10 Comments
This week started with some absolutely torrential rain in Surrey, someone must’ve pulled the plug on the clouds over here! I was up at 7:30 on Monday morning, to be greeted by an email from O2 at which caused me to spend the next hour stressfully trying to pre-order my iPhone 3G. It turns out their website doesn’t like Safari very much so I had to switch to FireFox, finally becoming one of the lucky few to receive an iPhone 3G on launch day. I must say, it certainly lives up to the hype!
You can probably guess that this is going to be an iPhone themed Rawkes Weekly, so if you’ve had enough of that this week then feel free to skip past the news.
This week’s news
At 8am on Monday O2 started accepting iPhone 3G pre-orders. The site went down fairly quickly after O2 estimated they were sometimes receiving over 13,000 orders a second. The entire process was a mess and it resulted in hundreds of complaints on the o2 forums. Paul Boag (of Boagworld) summed up most of O2’s failures on his blog.
Tuesday saw the BBC announce an updated version of the BBC iPlayer, with radio and TV all in one place. I have to admit I really like the new layout and feel that it’s looking like a great resource for people in the UK – It certainly trumps the options for the other terrestrial channels!
Further into the week Apple released iTunes 7.7 and opened up the App Store. There are some great apps on there; it’s definitely going to play a major part in the future of mobile technology. I’ve actually been inspired by the app store to get into application development for the iPhone. Watch this space!
Following the launch of the app store came a flurry of announcements from iPhone developers. My favourite was Cultured Code with the release of their GTD app Things for the iPhone. I absolutely love this application on the Mac and having it on the iPhone is going to be a lifesaver. You can’t sync anything yet, but it will be coming soon apparently.
Another one to look out for is the official iPhone app for WordPress – a very promising application that has got me really exciting about mobile blogging.
With big hopes and a lot of drama, the release of the iPhone 3G brought this week to a climatic end. Needless to say I pre-ordered mine earlier in the week so wasn’t caught up in the whole activation debacle. Personally I haven’t had any major mishaps with my journey to the iPhone, and I must say it’s an absolutely stunning piece of kit which is going to seriously shake up the mobile industry. I’d recommend everyone to head down to their local Apple, O2 or Carphone Warehouse store (or AT&T in the US) and give it a try. Even if you don’t buy one it’s a good idea to get hands on with the future of mobile technology, or at least for usability and accessibility reasons!
Links of the week
Site of the week
DivVoted
Lovely illustrations on this website. I like how it looks like the island at the bottom is going to be expanded in the future.
Lesson(s) of the week
If you attack a fear head-on you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about
iPhones are all they’re cracked up to be!
Track of the week
“White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes. This little beauty has been keeping me soothed all week!
Predictions for next week
More iPhone madness, including loads of new applications and plenty of bugs being found in the 2.0 software.
