Alex Hardy

To eat one’s own dog food is a colourful way of saying that you use your product. After all, if you don’t want to use your own stuff, who will?

So far, I haven’t been using simpleContact for my contact form. Pretty ironic huh… I was using a little script that I wrote a few months ago just for this website. At the time, simpleContact wasn’t even something I’d thought to build.

Now that it’s out there though and I’ve had a bit of a breather, it was time to fix things. I’ve installed it and will be using it from now on. Visitors to this site won’t notice much of a change, but this should better equip me to identify areas where it is lacking.

If you’ve got your own ideas about how it can be improved, you know what to do!

It isn’t often these days that I’m impressed by a Flash site, but I found Universcale fascinating. It places items on a line of scale, from the sub-atomic to the far reaches of the universe. It’s enough to make you feel very small indeed.

Freehand is dead, which isn’t a great surprise. Adobe weren’t likely to maintain both Illustrator and Freehand as two applications for the same job. It’s a shame for the enthusiastic and vocal Freehand user community, but life goes on…

… Which brings me to another of Adobe’s unwanted stepchildren: Director. Still alive, but buried behind the “see all products” link on Adobe.com.

I vividly remember one of my first multimedia design lectures at university in 1996. The tutor told us to ready ourselves, and launched Director. The stage, score, cast and scripts panels appeared, as did a sinking feeling in everyone’s stomach. At this point I’d never owned a computer and only dabbled slightly with Photoshop at college. This new app looked like my worst nightmare.

I went back to halls, stopping at the uni bookshop to buy Director 4.0 Academic. I called my folks, and told them that waiting until the second year to buy a mac was out of the question. I needed one right away.

A project or two later, and I was comfortable with it. A complex tool, but it gave up its secrets easily. From simple slideshows to shockwave games, complex applications and CD-ROMs, I used Director for several years.

The only grievance I ever had with Director was its quirky scripting language “Lingo” where common concepts had unfamiliar names (eg: Director calls an array a list) and its unhelpful help. It was quite tricky to migrate to Flash. I found it easier to liken Flash to Adobe After Effects than to Director.

These days, I don’t use Director at all. Flash has assumed its place in my toolbox. That isn’t the case for everyone though – there is still a busy community there too.

Many apps have a storied life of development, acquisition and reincarnation. Flash’s history can be traced to a small company called FutureWave and a little app called SmartSketch (later FutureSplash Animator, Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash).

If Adobe doesn’t want to own Director and take it forward, they should sell it to someone who does.

It’s been a couple of days since I released simpleContact and I’m pleased to say that the response so far has been very positive. I’ve tidied up its blog subcategory.

There’s now an RSS newsfeed dedicated to simpleContact. You can subscribe to it to keep informed of developments without having to read my other rambles.

O’ course, you may want to read them. I like to think I can be mildly interesting

Myself, Steph, and some of my colleagues from the Foundry completed the Bupa Great Manchester Run yesterday morning. It felt harder than last time (mostly because it was much warmer this year), but we still managed to beat last year’s time. Steph was my drill instructor, forcing me to keep running when I really wanted to walk for a moment at 7k…

I clocked in at 1 hour, 41 seconds. Next year I want to break that hour barrier…

I’d like to thank everyone who sponsored me this year. I’ve raised £311.17 (including Gift Aid) so far for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. It’s not too late to make a contribution: my Justgiving page is still live.

We had a lot of fun, I’d recommend it to anyone.

After many evenings in front of the computer, I can release version 1.0 of my contact form system. Though I make websites all the time in my job at The Foundry, this is the first time I’ve ever made an application for public release. I’m excited about this project, and looking forward to tackling the (rather long) list of additions I already have in mind. Here are the key features in brief:

Designed

It’s made to be easy to install, without any programming. You’ll find the forms are straightforward to incorporate into your website.

All the layout is CSS based, so you can tweak the design or re-brand it entirely.

Developed

Built in PHP and MySQL and deployed on your web site (no dependence on external services), this functionality and more is ready to use:

• Contact and mailing list subscribe forms with server side validation
• Web-based admin system with login to keep your messages private
• Convenient messages inbox
• List of email addresses on your mailing list
• Choose contact form fields just by ticking checkboxes
• Compose a personalised response email
• Set which email addresses messages are sent to

Documented

It’s frustrating when tools aren’t documented well enough to use. I’ve written a setup guide in plain English, which contains what you need to know to get motoring…

Please head on over to my newly added downloads page. You’ll find more information, screengrabs and you can download simpleContact right now.

I’ve given in to peer pressure and joined Facebook. It strikes me as a bit of a cross between Friends Reunited and MySpace. I guess that means I’ll have to stick my photies on there as well from now on

Steph tells me that she’s going to “poke” me. Not sure I like the sound of that…

This morning we braved a chilly Altrincham to have a group shot taken for a pitch.

Glad we didn’t use the “waving” one.

Clickey for a biggun.

On another note, it’s only a week until the Manchester Run! Yipe! You know what to do!

I mentioned in a previous post about Mint 2 and Google Analytics (GA) that I had signed up to the beta programme for Reinvigorate. My golden ticket arrived a few days ago so here are my first impressions as promised.

Reinvigorate is a browser-based analytics system. It appears to occupy a middle ground between Mint and GA. It has the following characteristics:

• Like both Mint and GA, it tracks visitor activity via a JavaScript include.
• It is externally hosted (like GA).
• It is free (like GA), as opposed to Mint, which is $30.
• As its Wikipedia page states, Reinvigorate is a one-man project (like Mint).
• Reinvigorate appears to track statistics in real time (like Mint) or at least fairly close. This is unlike GA where there is a significant delay of hours from visitor data being recorded to becoming available. As demand on their systems increases one should expect this to be affected.
• Reinvigorate aims to be visually pleasing, in a similar manner to Mint.

Pros

Reinvigorate is undeniably better looking than the current version of GA. A significantly redesigned Google Analytics is in the process of being rolled out to users, so that lead is being narrowed. Mint remains the slickest of the three.

I like the colour scheme and the summary dashboard is a handy touch, if a bit sparse. The new version of GA pulls more valuable information to the surface.

The 3D pie charts are nice. Mmmm pie

Cons

The interface isn’t without its rough edges, and suffers from information overload in places. Some of the visualisation tools are too complicated and worse still, inadequately explained. A polynomial chart? Wossat?

There are no stats for Flash versions. This is important information that any web designer is going to want. I’m sure this will be added before long, but at the moment is a bit of a howler. The lack of a plugin architecture akin to Mint’s “peppers” isn’t a bad thing per se but it places the burden solely with its developer to stay on top of the needs of the userbase.

Amusingly, it uses Google Maps to display geolocation data.

The most troubling aspect for me is that Reinvigorate existed years ago and closed down, reappearing this year. Since it’s free and its developer surely doesn’t have Google’s financial resources, I wonder how (read: IF) it is going to sustain itself. Should I trust my valuable data to a service that may be here today, gone tomorrow?

I’m going to try all three systems in parallel for the next couple of months. I’ll then make a final decision on which one I’m going to stick with.

[UPDATE] I just logged into Google Analytics and the new interface is live for me. Time to have a look around…

One of the best things about small developers is that they can be more responsive to their customers. The year-long waits for progress from the likes of Adobe, Apple and Microsoft do not apply. Coda has been available for a little over a week, and already we have an update.

Delivered by a slick little auto-update mechanism, we get the expected round of bug fixes and some welcome new features. Minor interface niceties and a useful keyboard shortcut to publish your changes (I’d been wishing for this myself). There are also new language modes for ActionScript, JSP-HTML and Smarty templates.

ActionScript support is a pleasant surprise; a feature I have found useful in Dreamweaver when working on Symphony. I figured that Panic would consider this to be outside Coda’s scope as a web code editor, but it seems not

Two more reasons for me to stick with DW bite the dust. This is a program to watch.