May 17th, 2010
Browser plug-ins are a mixed blessing. They add useful functionality, but at the same time heighten your risk of viruses and other malicious code by increasing the browser attack surface. This is always a trade-off and sometimes the inconvenience of making sure the latest security updates are installed is worth the hassle. Google Analytics and Xero without Flash, for example, would loose their interactive graphs greatly reducing the functionality of both applications.
However, there’s a difference between a plug-in you’ve chosen to install, and one that just installs itself along with another piece of software. Worse still are those plug-ins that you just can’t uninstall. iTunes is particularly annoying in this regard, there’s no uninstall and deleting the plug-in files causes iTunes to reinstall itself (and the plug-in) on next run. Sure you can disable the plug-in in the browser, but I’d prefer it not to be there in the first place.
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Posted in Information Technology | 0 Comments
April 12th, 2010
The calendaring on the iPhone is great; unlike Outlook you don’t have to be at your desk to get reminders of appointments and meetings. However entering calendar items on the iPhone keyboard is a pain, and the UI doesn’t expose a full range of reminder options, e.g. ‘1 week before’.
Of course one can sync between the two using iTunes, but this is tedious to say the least and not exactly practical if you use your Calendar and To Dos a lot. The iPhone OS 3.0 introduced Exchange ActiveSync, allowing medium- to enterprise-sized businesses with an Exchange Server installation to do 2-way wireless sync. For smaller enterprises this may not be an option, even if they have Exchange, due to the increased security concerns of making their mail server internet facing.
It is possible to have 2-way sync without Exchange, by using a Google Calendar as intermediate store and synching both the iPhone and Outlook against that. Internally we use ‘Google Apps for Business’ for our e-mail, mainly due to the excellent spam filtering, and that also provides calendar accounts. However any Google calendar account will do.
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Posted in Information Technology | 4 Comments
February 22nd, 2010
Mobile is where the web is going. Trend statistics from Google show that by the middle of this year mobile search volume (searches done on mobile devices like the iPhone) will exceed that of desktop search. With the recent announcement of the iPad, and the new generation of Android devices, progress in this area is showing no signs of abating soon and Adobe’s pending release of the Flash CS5’s ‘Packager for iPhone’ is just going add fuel to this fire.
We were an early developer of mobile sites for WAP Phones, almost 10 years ago now, and it’s great to see how far the technology has come. There are still limitations, but the scope of what you can do with HTML5 capable mobile browsers is amazing in comparison. The flow on of web standards from desktop browsers has also been a great benefit. Gone are the days of supporting possibly up to 100 different handset configurations. The migration of mobile API’s (like geolocation and location services) to desktop browsers is easing the development burden even further.
Many of our sites, including this one, now incorporate a mobile style sheet and iPhone springboard icons to ensure good user experience on all devices. This an important consideration when developing a site, as the range of devices it’s likely to be viewed on has increased considerably. Visual design plays an important role here; will it work well in a single column format? is the text size big enough to read on a small screen? For a lot of sites these questions remain unanswered, because they were never considered. And if you’re not considering your mobile audience, now is the time to start.
Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments
January 12th, 2010
The start of the new year is always a good time for goal setting. I’ve got a list on the wall for my personal goals, however there is a list for the business too:
- No clunky implementations—easy to ensure if you’re the only person working on a project, less so when you’re on a team or working with developers from other companies. This year I’m really going to push overall code quality for every project I work on… my code or not.
- Focused project selection—one of the nice things to come out of revising one’s marketing plan is the new sense of focus it gives. This year we’re going to focus on building the portfolio of sport related sites, with a new social web app being the first in development.
- Build photography portfolio—an area I’ve been thinking about moving into for a while is the stock photo market. The higher end of the market is the aim, and I’ll be working towards building a strong portfolio to that end.
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December 9th, 2009
A common situation, at least for me, with web graphics is you’ll get an image that needs transparency but due to file size constaints or browser compatibility has to be an 8-bit png.
These images undoubtedly will contain far more than 256 colours, so some form of dithering would be required to make them more visually acceptable. The problem is images with mixed content. Text looks best with ‘no dither’, photographic images almost always with ‘diffusion’ and in many cases gradients with a ‘pattern dither’. Photoshop one allows you to choose one, so which area do you sacrifice?
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Posted in Web Development | 0 Comments
December 3rd, 2009
Google Analytics is great for assessing people’s interaction with your site, the fact that it’s a free tool is even better. Probably the most interesting/useful metric that it exposes is where people come from, both the physical sense with Google’s excellent geo-location and also on the web. In the case of the latter, it’s possible to break this down even further if you have a blog or send email newsletters by tagging your urls.
Analytics tagging is adding a couple of additional parameters to your urls that are picked up by the GA tracking code. These then show as additional sources/campaigns in Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics.
These are most useful for email newsletter tracking to help gauge how effective your marketing has been. Answering questions like did the copy in the newsletter engage people to click through, of those how many bought something or signed up for your service? Try putting different copy/design into some A/B testing to gain some insight into how well your layout or copywriting is working.
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Posted in Internet Marketing | 0 Comments
November 20th, 2009
Solid State Disks (or SSDs) using flash memory chips instead of a rotating plater/head assembly like traditional hard drives are great. All of my systems here have one as the primary disk. Especially in a laptop situation the extra reliability and a computer that is completely silent are very welcome, as is the speed. They are fast, really fast when reading data of the disk—Windows starts in few seconds and applications near instantly.
The problem is the write performance, and it gets worse with time. Writing data to a SSD* first involves first clearing a whole block and then writing data to it, and this block clearing is slow. To compound the issue, the filler/more used the disk the less likely there will be an already clear block. To the end user this clear/write cycle is worst with small random writes (e.g. a web browser writing to its cache, or version control software updating meta data—yes Subversion I’m looking at you!), and causes the whole machine lock-up for as much as 10 seconds at a time.
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Posted in Information Technology | 5 Comments
November 15th, 2009
Website testing or quality assurance seems to all too often get overlooked. At the very least basic cross browser testing should be done, and it’s surprising how often issues here can sneak through, and not always those you’d expect. The most common case is the ‘web designer’ with little front-end knowledge creating a site that only works in Internet Explorer, though a similar case is developers who work in Firefox or Safari making sites that work fine in those browsers but have weird glitches in IE. However, cross browser is just the start.
For sites with user accounts every page should be tested with logged in and logged out states, do parts of the UI change between the two? Does the layout look weird or broken with elements added or removed? Does an Internet Explorer rendering bug occur on interaction? Then let’s add Ajax into the mix. When you start to consider these cases, it’s easy to see why you need solid QA plan and that allowing 20% of the development budget isn’t unreasonable, especially on iterative designs.
So are you sure your site actually works in all cases? If not it might be time to reassess your QA strategy.
Posted in Web Development | 0 Comments
November 8th, 2009
I’ve done a lot of fine art, travel and portrait photography, but sports photography is a bit different. Moving subjects and often difficult lighting make it much more of a challenge, and the opportunities to practice are also limited.
Next weekend’s Karapiro Half Ironman will be a good opportunity to work on my technique and hopefully get a few good shots. A Half Ironman race takes about 5 hours on average to complete, so this is a good amount of time to move between locations and work with a range of compositions.
For shorter races you really need to have everything scoped first and there’s little latitude to experiment, and with the training schedule for my own triathlon, pre-scoping the course isn’t on the agenda for this one.
Looking forward to a good day out at the lake.
Posted in Photography, Triathlon | 0 Comments
November 2nd, 2009
Or somewhere to put all the techie posts from my personal blog, that my family and friends aren’t interested in. Well not entirely, the range of topics on this blog will probably cross over a bit, however it’s probably good to have a little more separation/organisation between the two lots of content.
Even on the personal side of things there’s been a shortage of posts from me, Facebook and Twitter updates seeming to take over from the long post. Just as I love slow travel, I think it’s time for slow writing again—more than an sms’ worth of text and a bit more thought.
Posted in Social Media | 0 Comments
