Check out Trism, an upcoming puzzle game by Steve of Demiforce. GameSetWatch have posted an interview with him. It looks like the accelerometer may do for the iPhone what the stylus did for the Nintendo DS.
If people like him can create gems like this with no tools, documentation or support from Apple then I can’t wait to see what appears once the SDK is released.
As I’m now working on simpleContact Pro I need to tackle licensing a commercial self-hosted application. I’ve been looking into how others do it and there seem to be a variety of options. Putting aside price for now, the dilemma is actually a collection of smaller issues:
On reflection, the licensing model I’d like to adopt is as follows:
So what do you think?
Toshiba’s abandonment of HD-DVD is the final nail in the format’s coffin. Like most so-called format wars it was brief, brutal, and a million people got burned.
This was always about two industry’s interests. The consumer electronics industry wants to sell huge HD televisions (which happen to make DVDs look shabby). The film industry wants movies to cost £20 again.
Who stands at the intersection of those industries? Sony does. They have a portfolio of blockbusters (e.g. Bond) that will appeal to the early adopter demographic. They have a worldbeating console platform to put the Blu Ray format in living rooms.
It was a foregone conclusion.
Meanwhile, the mass market will stick to DVD until films and players are cheap.
Today’s announcement that the BBC iPlayer will be available on iPhone / iPod Touch within the next few weeks is far more interesting. I expect 4oD to follow suit.
Let’s face it, this was all a bit of a red herring. What we all really want is content on demand. To push a button on your computer / TV remote / mobile device and start watching what you want / where you want / when you want. That’s a generation away though, so Sony get to make some money until the rules are changed.
I’ve added a support forum to this website. I refer to this as a “soft launch” because I haven’t integrated it with the rest of the site, graphically or in the navigation. The only exception is a link on the footer for the downloads page.
My reasons for this are simple:
You’ll find sections for FAQs, installation, troubleshooting, requests, miscellaneous and a section that I’ve called “Out and About”. This is where you can earn yourself some link-love by posting about your simpleContact powered website.
Let’s get a discussion going 
UPDATE: Added a link to the contact page.
The Foundry Communications is looking to hire three people to join our team.
The Foundry is a design agency based in Altrincham, Manchester UK. I’ve worked there happily for five years and would urge anyone to apply for these roles if you think you fit the bill. With several new account wins and an imminent move to a new office, these are exciting times for us. Here are the job descriptions:
Art Director? Designer? Don’t pigeon-hole yourself! Talented, innovative problem solver required to join our fantastic team. Your track record will speak for itself.
Devoted developer to join our expanding new media department. Wants to excel, working on many international brands. PHP/JSP, MySQL, XHTML and CSS essential. Flash, ActionScript and Dreamweaver experience are highly beneficial.
Enthusiastic, type lover, doesn’t want to be a designer, but a brilliant artworker.
Disclosure: There is a bonus for an employee that is instrumental in filling these positions. Please use my contact form to express your interest.
The Web Guidelines quality model, published by the Netherlands government:
For creating web sites, internationally recognized agreements exist in the form of Web standards. Application of these standards provide a significantly better website. The Netherlands government has brought these international standards together in a quality model called the Web Guidelines. They include 125 quality requirements in order to achieve better government websites.
This is well worth a read. Although the site is devised to help build government websites, just about everything here could be applied to any site.
Cabel Sasser has released the JavaScript image zoom used on his blog and Panic’s website as FancyZoom. It provides a nice smooth zoom effect, caption and drop shadow.
Free for non-commercial use or $39 per domain.
Some may find the price a little steep for what is no more than a slick alternative to Lightbox (which I use myself) or Thickbox, but I can see it being popular with people who want a web gallery to be über cool.
One of the best things about web development is that there is always something new to learn, no matter how much you know. If you want to really learn how to build a solid, portable application then I’m convinced that the best way is to release one.
Users will be swift to report bugs and incompatibilities for you. This isn’t negligent; it’s natural. A developer can’t anticipate all possible configurations and behaviour. Your response is what matters. You may be equally swift to issue a fix, but issues may sometimes go unaddressed because the effort outweighs the benefit.
Issues with simpleContact have been rare, but a self-started forum thread caught my attention last week. A member commented that they hadn’t been able to submit their name properly. I’ve researched the matter and in the interests of transparency I’m going to present what I found and what I plan to do.
Character encoding is a thorny issue that few bother to understand and implement in a considered way. There are articles on the web that cover the subject in detail, so rather than re-hash their points I’ll add some relevant links at the end.
simpleContact uses MySQL’s default collation, which is latin1_swedish_ci – fine for English and most Western European languages, but other languages (e.g. Greek, Japanese, Russian etc) will not be stored or represented properly. This is a matter I wish to address because I want as many people as possible to use my software.
The ideal course of action would be to process and store data in UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 is a multi-byte character encoding that supports the characters of just about every language in the world.
Advice abounds for how to reconfigure your server and scripts to use UTF-8, but matters are more complicated when users will host an application on their own site. As developers of apps like WordPress and Mint know, ideal configurations in shared hosting services and availability of non-default PHP extensions like mbstring can’t be guaranteed. Some of the servers I have access to lack the necessary functions.
The easiest thing would be to put up a wall and say “If you don’t have x, you need to get a better host”. Meanwhile back in the real world, users are far more likely to reject an app than swap hosts. A middle ground has to be reached.
UTF-8 support must be added, but not without respecting a user’s situation. I plan to keep Latin-1 encoding and collation as a baseline standard for compatibility. It is better to support a subset of commonly spoken languages than not to work at all. For users whose server supports mult-byte string functions, the database will be silently upgraded to UTF-8 and appropriate methods will be used in PHP.
Beyond that, there isn’t much else. If you want a truly international solution and your host won’t support mbstring then you really do need to choose another host.
I have fixed the feature-set for simpleContact 2.0 Pro and don’t intend to add UTF-8 support to it. When 2.0 is done, it will become a high priority feature in version 2.1, which will be a free upgrade. I will add it to simpleContact Lite in due course.
I thought I’d follow up my post about Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow (and conclude my recent spate of YouTube posts) by linking to this video. It touches upon many of the ideas covered in the book, and is well worth 19 minutes of your time.
I noted that Godin uses the more positive Western spin on the word “Otaku”, meaning expert or enthusiast. I have it on authority from a Japanese friend that it means nerd, but I agree with the principle that it is used to convey.
I started work on simpleContact 2.0 Pro tonight. That is, I started to sketch my ideas on paper. To decide what will make the cut for the first release. To start working on answers for the what ifs and formalise the database structure that’s 80% designed in my head. The key features will be:
I’ve gone back to good old fashioned paper because design comes first. I want to use my experience as a web designer to build an elegant solution to real needs. There will be no comparison tick list. I won’t add useless features for their own sake. I’ll be adding some over time however, that I’ve seen nowhere else…
I want to make something that’s remarkable because it makes a difficult thing easy. One user was kind enough to share that he’d tried seven other products without success before simpleContact 1.2. It is very rewarding to get feedback like that.
I’m not going to commit to a release date because of my schedule, but I’m going to aim for May/June. Version 2.0 Pro will cost $25, and the existing free version will remain, re-branded simpleContact Lite. Version 1.3 Lite will follow thereafter.
Recent Posts RSS
