Scott Mallinson | Web Designer
Yesterday on the BBC Internet Blog Anthony Rose announced that the BBC iPlayer has gone high definition (HD) and has added higher quality streams in his article entitled BBC iPlayer goes HD, adds higher quality streams, releases iPlayer Desktop out of Labs.
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I’ve never been a big fan of Flash, largely because I can remember the era of tacky, full-Flash websites that merely existed to boost the egos of their designers. However I am gradually coming round to seeing the advantages of the platform.
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A short while ago I migrated my RSS feeds from FeedBurner’s servers to Google’s. As I use MyBrand to distribute my feeds from feeds.scottmallinson.com the transition wasn’t as smooth as I liked.
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The new Giddy Kippers website is now live. Though it looks almost identical to it’s previous version, it is now powered by WordPress which allows the client to maintain the website with relative ease.
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I am pleased and proud to announce that the new Firmstep website has now gone live. You can read more about the project here.
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Regular visitors to the website will have noticed that The National Skills Academy for Food and Drink Manufacturing no longer adorns the homepage. Instead it has been replaced by ImJustCreative; the website for professional logo designer and creative freelancer, Graham Smith.
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You may recall me asking you what was in your pocket a couple of days ago so when developing a mobile friendly version of this website I would know which are the most popular mobile devices, and what to test the website on.
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A few weeks ago I signed up to try out Olive, a web application from You Know Who. I had jumped on the hype bandwagon after following Sarah Parmenter’s tweets, and decided to take the new web application for a bit of a test drive. Whilst I had no immediate use for the web application as any client contact through my employer is done via Basecamp, and current freelance work is done face-to-face, I knew a couple of people who would be interested in such a thing.
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Over the past four days I have been monitoring the development of Matt, Multi Account Twitter Tweeter application which has been built by the guys and girls over at Carsonified. Now whilst I could talk about the actual development of the application, it has already been done here and I would rather concentrate on the marketing of the application and the company culture from where the idea originated.
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I have been spending some of my time lately working on a application that will be partly used on mobile devices. The intention is to capture a photo and upload it from a mobile device. We are using Flickr to upload and store the photos through their APIs and to also retrieve them for a different part of the application.
Early on in the development of the application, to test the functionality we simply used the web browsers on our desktop computers, and we then tested the application in mobile devices once we were confident it met the requirements. We assumed that the web browsers on mobile devices wouldn’t be too much different from those found on desktop computer. We were wrong.
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More and more I find myself using new domains to test my latest project out on. Although I use XAMPP to develop on locally, it isn’t a true replication of my web host and so once I have done what I can locally I move to the testing server, usually a sub-domain on my webhost.
There are problems however with using sub-domains; one being the wait. It is recommended that you allow up to 48 hours for any DNS updates to be made before you begin using the domain. This is often a frustration as I want to be able to create sub-domains at a moment’s notice (though I am getting better at creating them in advance).
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As Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned earlier this month on ReadWriteWeb, myOpenID now allow you to create OpenID accounts through your own domain.
I’ve already covered this briefly as an aside however as I regularly use OpenIDs for both work (Basecamp) and pleasure (ClaimID) I decided to give it a go. My current OpenID provided by ClaimID, who were at the forefront of implementing OpenIDs, is not very aesthetically pleasing, and the premise of myOpenIDs new feature is to allow me to have my own .scottmallinson.com OpenID.
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I guess this really continues on from my previous blog article about Grid-based layouts. A number of CSS frameworks have emerged over the last few months making it somewhat easier for front-end developers deliver consistent interfaces across web browsers.
A personal favourite of mine is to use the YUI Reset CSS along with the 960 Grid System I mentioned in the earlier post. This ensures that all elements; type, layout, input etc. are stripped back to their basics across all browsers through which you build on to. It means that any browser-specific padding applied to elements such as input buttons are removed and by declaring your own settings you know that you are getting a true value across web browsers.
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Yesterday, whilst working on a client’s Wordpress website I took the opportunity to implement a ‘quick search’ search feature. Using the OpenSearch standard, the ‘quick search’ is supported by Internet Explorer 7 and the latest versions of Firefox and the likes of Wikipedia, Google and Amazon already take advantage of the technology.
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A new feature that has been rolled out to all Flickr accounts is the ability to edit photos online. Through a service provided by picnik you are able to edit any of your photos using picnik’s Flash interface.
The interface allows you to perform quite advanced photo editing techniques on your photos such as, altering the exposure and contrast, sharpening your photos, changing colour temperature and saturation and curing red-eye. Basic photo editing features such as crop, resize and rotate are also available.
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