Solid State Group Blog

What Apple, and the industry, need to do about mobile privacy

daves Roberts — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:58:37 +0000

Oh dear oh dear. The mobile application developers dirty little secret, the one that no one really likes to talk about, is going to be mainstream news this week.

For those that have missed it, iOS startup darling Path have been sending your entire phone address book to their servers when you start using their app.

Most of the time dealing with the privacy of users is considered a technical challenge. SSL certificates, salting hashed passwords, good processes for controller database access and all that fun stuff. It doesn't really get you anywhere with your product but, well, you have to do it. Just keep thinking ahead to the due diligence process when you are about to be acquired.

But let's face it, people worry more about their Homepage copy than that on their Terms and Conditions page. And that's understandable.

Where things get a little murky is when user privacy is less of a technical challenge and more of a moral one. When the guys at Path were developing their app, they had a decision to make. We could make the newly minted user pass through another page, asking their permission to scan their address book looking for friends already using the service. Or we could just do it without asking. On the face of it, the answer is blindingly obvious, but some people 'sweat the details' when it comes to UX. And when I say 'sweat the details' what I really mean is take a copy of your personal address book without asking you.

On the face of it, it's not a hard question to answer. Do you value the privacy of your users over the success of your startup?

But the thing is, Apple could remove the need for all this soul searching.

Make app developers define what private data stores/services their app needs access to, just like Android developers have to.
Include this information in the App Store approval process.
If Apple think something smells bad, ask the developer what they are doing with that data.
Let the user know when they are installing an app what information it will have access to.

That way the hundreds of people working at Apple approving iOS applications don't have to worry about SSL enabled packet sniffers and proxies. Their job is probably hard enough as it is without all that.

The irony here is that the closed platform is, once you've got through the approval process, 100% open to abuse. This is not so for Android applications. Sure, most people don't read the Android 'permissions' page when installing an app, but *that's their decision*.

Apple need to do the right thing here and remove the temptation from the product design process.

Building For Mobile - jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch Framework Comparison

Ross Matthews — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:11:08 +0000

The developers here at Solid State wanted to determine which of the latest touch-optimized web frameworks would be best suited for our mobile website offerings. In this article we compare jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch to see which is best for the mobile version of solidstategroup.com.

Here is our Solid State Group breakdown and analysis of the products.

jQuery mobile

jQuery Mobile is specifically used for building HTML5/CSS/JS mobile versions of websites and web applications.

The framework claims to offer a broad level of support across a wide range of platforms, and progressive enhancement for older devices and operating systems.

Advantages

It is really quick to develop with. You can just start with clean HTML markup and then apply "progressive enhancement techniques" or extra HTML element attributes to integrate mobile features into an existing semantic structure.
The framework includes a great AJAX-powered navigation system. (To enable animated page transitions while maintaining back button, bookmarking and and clean URLs.)
The simplicity of the implementation allows a great integration with our content management system, Cookie Jar.
The framework comes with a CSS theme styling system that enables a simple project to get off the ground very quickly. This can then be easily extended with your own custom styles.
Integrates with other jQuery plugins.
Some good examples of the framework can be seen here http://www.jqmgallery.com/

Disadvantages

The CSS theme styling system has limited options so sites built using this can look similar.
Page transitions and animations don't feel 'native' enough and can be sluggish. The framework has not been around that long so hopefully the speed and the feel will improve over time.

Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch allows you to develop mobile web apps that look and feel native on Iphone, Android, Blackberry touch devices

Advantages

Enhanced support for touch events such as double tap, swipe, hold, pinch and rotate.
It was quick to create useful and impressive user interface touch events such as swiping between carousels of content or creating a tabbed toolbar interface.
Some examples of Sencha Touch applications can be seen here: http://www.sencha.com/apps/.

Disadvantages

The Sencha Touch API uses a fairly large (120kb) JavaScript library, this is many times larger that the jQuery Mobile library.
The html mark-up of the page is created client side by the Sencha framework when the page loads. Some may find this a benefit but we found it tough to work with and integrate with our CMS templates.
The HTML generated was not as clean as hand-coded mark-up and features many nested divs and multiple class names.
Converting our site to work with the framework would have involved a full front end re-write.

Conclusion

We decided to go with jQuery Mobile for the build of our mobile site. It was more ‘front end developer friendly’ than Sencha Touch and integrated easily into an existing site running off our CMS.

Sencha Touch is a more radical framework with many great features. We look forward to exploring it further in a ground up build.

You can check out the results on your mobile device by visiting our site as usual or you can view the results on your desktop machine here, www.solidstategroup.com/mobile.

(For best results on the desktop use Chrome to see all the features, you obviously won't be able to use the swipe gestures though.)

We're building quite a few mobile sites at the moment, so if you have a project you would like us to build, or want to simply discuss, please do contact us.

Social media in your Xmas party?

David Hemmings — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:47:11 +0000

This year we are attempting to be a bit more innovative with our "Winter holiday season" party.

Last year, we went bowling and then had a nice meal in a pub up in Islington. It was a great night and we all enjoyed it, but it followed the standard model for all such celebrations so this year I got my thinking cap on and created something a little more engaging, both for us, and potentially our social graph.

To help with team building we've introduced elements of competition to the evening which comprises of:

- 2 hours of power league football

- 2 hours of treasure hunt

- 2 hours of pub quiz

We've split our company into teams of 4 and each team will be awarded points throughout each activity which when totalled up at the end of the evening, will tell us the overall winner.

The football is a round robin tournament with the winning team taking the maximum points, the runners up getting less points and the losers getting no points. The same mechanic will be applied to the pub quiz. It's the treasure hunt through the streets of Old Street that's the most interesting though.

The tweesure hunt will be controlled entirely through twitter (see what we did there), which means that it instantly opens it up to others that were unable to attend the event, and also input from the twitterverse.

Each team has a team leader who has access to a smart phone with maps and twitter access and a camera.

Each team will be given a clue and the coordinates of a cache (box of stuff) secreted around the streets of Old Street. They have 15 minutes to find the cache, open it and execute the task held within. Once the task has been executed, the team leader take photographic evidence of the task and tweets it with the hashtag #tweesurehunt

This is where it should get interesting as some of the tasks are say… questionable…

Especially on the streets of Old Street.

Each team has up to 6 caches to find which are automatically triggered through our @solidstategroup twitter account. However some caches are "race caches" and only the first team to the cache will be able to complete the tasks, tweet the pic and score the points.

On top of that, if the hunt starts to gain followers on twitter, there will be some cache tasks that will take suggestions from the outside world, for example "write SSG on all your foreheads in lipstick". So in order to claim the bonus points for those public tweets, a pic would need to be uploaded by the team having completed that task.

We don't want to give too much away at this stage, but I think it's ok to say that some caches are inventive, some are fun, some are tasty, some are dangerous and some are just plain evil.

If you're curious to see what happens, stay tuned to twitter from 4pm to 6:30pm on 8th December and follow @solidstategroup or #tweesurehunt

If it's successful we'll be doing it every year, and may even open it up to more of our tech city neighbours.

Merry "winter seasonal holiday" everyone. :)

Haystack wins a BIMA award!

Ross Matthews — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:10:27 +0000

Well, we did it! We won the BIMA award for best business to business website in 2011 for the Haystack Online project.

It was a pretty awesome party last night in Fabric.

David Roberts, the lead developer, picked up the BIMA award from a lovely assistant before being dragged upstairs into the VIP/winners circle.

Congrats to Danny Somekh and J.M. Dentand for the IA and design.

Onwards and upwards....

Response From The Department Of Education

Ross Matthews — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:48:22 +0000

Dear Mr Rometsch

Thank you for your email dated 9 October addressed to the Secretary of State about ICT in the Curriculum. I am sure you will appreciate that as the Secretary of State receives a great deal of correspondence he is unable to respond to each one personally. On this occasion I have been asked to reply on his behalf.

As you may know, the department is currently undertaking a review of the National Curriculum. We want to restore the National Curriculum to its original purpose - a core national entitlement organised around subject disciplines. We have set out a phased timetable for the National Curriculum review. In phase one, we will design new Programmes of Study for those subjects - English, mathematics, science and physical education - that we have already confirmed will continue to be a part of the National Curriculum in all stages of a child's education. The new Programmes of Study for these subjects will be made available to schools in autumn 2012 for first teaching in September 2013.

Meanwhile, we will also consider which of the other subjects that currently form the National Curriculum, including ICT, should be part of the National Curriculum in the future and, if so, at which stages they should feature. The second phase of the review, starting in early 2012, will produce Programmes of Study for those other subjects remaining within the National Curriculum. These new Programmes of Study will be made available to schools in autumn 2013 for first teaching in 2014.

The Review has included a Call for Evidence to which interested stakeholders, both individuals and organisations, were invited to submit their views. We are aware that there is a highly vocal group within the computing community, including representatives from Microsoft, BCS (the Chartered Institute for Computing) and Computing at Schools that has been advocating that a more rigorous, programming-based subject should be included within the new National Curriculum. This group has made extensive submissions to the Call for Evidence about the importance of programming-based computing, and their contributions are being analysed at the moment.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write with your views.

Yours sincerely

Cathy Horrocks

Public Communications Unit

www.education.gov.uk

Letter To Secretary of State For Education Michael Gove

Ross Matthews — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:49:15 +0000

Recently I wrote to Secretary of State for Education MP Michael Gove regarding the teaching of ICT in British schools, and the lack of software programming in the national curriculum.

Dear Mr Gove

I am writing to you to discuss the teaching of ICT in British schools. Having recently spoken with some teenage relatives, as well as researching the current national curriculum, I would like to recommend, in the strongest terms, that software programming be reinstated and made the central tenet of the national curriculum across *all* age groups.

Programming a computer is creative, thought provoking and inspiring. You are not going to capture a child's imagination teaching them how to use Word or Powerpoint. You do it by giving them the tools and the freedom to be creative. Failing to teach programming in ICT is like taking an art class to a gallery to look at paintings instead of teaching them to paint.

When I was 8, ICT meant one Link 480Z computer that was shared around the entire school. When you turned it on, you *had* to program it to do something; that was all it was capable of. This simplicity and perfect creative starting point inspired me and thousands of people like me to learn how to program. Tools and languages like Logo, Basic and Prolog were accessible and inspiring to people even at the age of 8. My computer programming generation are now a significant part of the UK economy.

I understand that the world of computing has changed immeasurably since then, and I agree that it is important to teach general computer skills, but a syllabus that is devoid of programming is setting todays pupils up for a career using a computer, but not for a career *in* computing.

I commend the "Behind the Screen" initiative that David Willetts launched recently but feel that it is not broad enough in its approach; 15 is far too late to start to teach programming.

I am the director of a web development agency based in Shoreditch. We are software engineers. We are a net trade exporter, employing 17 people within Tech City. We are debt free and growing organically. We are exactly the sort of company that is going to help drag this country out of the financial hole that it has found itself. We employ software engineers, who all learnt to program computers before they were teenagers. I hope that I am able to employ UK engineers for the next 30 years, but I worry that soon this may not be possible.

I am writing this letter for two reasons. Firstly, I think that as part of the review of the national curriculum you should make the (possibly radical) changes necessary to the ICT curriculum to ensure that this country is still able to produce world class engineers. Secondly, I would like to offer my time to your department to help make this happen.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Ben Rometsch

Haystack Online is nominated for a BIMA award

Ross Matthews — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:20:26 +0000

Last Thursday I headed down to the offices of LBi for a spot of networking and to find out the nominees for this years BIMA awards.

I'm excited to announce that Haystack Online has been nominated under the business to business category. If you don't know what Haystack Online is, I posted about building Haystack online last month. We really are proud of this site, and I'm hoping it will win a lot more awards in the upcoming "awards season".

Building the Haystack

Ross Matthews — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:10:47 +0000

Update: We've now been nominated for a BIMA award in the business to business category

A few months ago we finished the build of the Haystack Online website. The best example of what we can achieve so far.

Working with Alan Thompson from Haystack Online and alongside JM Dentend and Huddle Creative, we carved out the leading directory for agencies in the UK.

It's fantastically easy to find the content you are interested in through tag based searching and exploring. Each agency has a virtual storefront to display their work in a standardised and yet customisable format.

It's all running on Cookie Jar and uses a custom built interface to allow agencies to load up their content in the fastest and most intuitive way possible.

Uploaded images are automatically resized, with crop options. Videos are automatically sent off to Zencoder and piped up to Amazon Cloud in 4 different formats to support all browsers and current mobile devices.

An integrated ranking system puts new and relevant content onto the homepage on every refresh.

Don't take my word for it, check out the video below to see how easy it is to navigate the content and load up new stories.

Or visit the site to check it out for yourself.

http://www.haystackonline.com

Look out for this site winning some awards this year ;-)

It's not about the Android

Ross Matthews — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:59:41 +0000

About a year ago I switched to Android. I'd owned an iPhone since the original was released and had often commented to people that it was the best computer I'd ever owned, by quite a wide margin. I've owned a lot of computers.

For 3 years I truly loved the iPhone. It was a water-shed device. But some of the closed aspects of the iPhone were really frustrating to me. I hated the fact that there was no way to run applications in the background. I hated how I had to open 4 different applications (Count 'em! RSS, Twitter, To Do List and Instapaper) individually to allow them to sync before I could leave the office and get on the tube where, god have mercy, there is no internet connectivity. I hated the way I had to use iTunes to get music onto the phone and then, if I was at someone else's computer, I had no way of getting my own music off my own phone. I hated the way I had to wait for Apple to vet that an application was OK by them before I could install it.

Anyway, I thought it was time for a change, and when the HTC Desire arrived, along with rave reviews and a nice shiny new build of Android, I made the switch. BSD to Linux. Who'd have thought.

Some aspects of Android I totally loved. Background app syncing, USB disk mode, install whatever the hell you like, an open API that gives you apps like Tasker (which is just complete genius), custom ROMs, a back button, all that stuff. Some aspects of iOS I really missed. The strong, consistent UI toolkit, the attention to detail, the vast selection of very high quality Apps, the iTunes eco-system, the battery life.

Fast forward to July 2011 and you still can't get your music off your iPhone. You still can't have proper background app syncing and Apple still control what apps you can install. When my contract was up and the Samsung Galaxy S2 was released I decided to stick with Android. The S2 is a seriously impressive piece of hardware tied to an ever improving OS. Google's services are first rate. I really, really like it.

The funny thing is that a lot of people, people who have no interest in technology for technology's sake, have taken one look at my phone and said "God damn, I want that phone". Initially I couldn't figure out why. When I look at it I see it as a technological achievement. A symbol of what you can build in 2011 both in terms of hardware, software and services.

Then I realised that all these people were watching a video I'd shot on the phone when they made the comment. The S2 shoots 1080p HD video at 30 frames per second, and plays them back on a large, drop dead beautiful screen. I'd taken some video of my brother surf-boat rowing on an estuary in Germany as well as some shots of my daughter's first fairground ride. It was literally point and shoot, default camera settings, but the video looks incredible.

It was then that I realised that most people just don't care what OS their phone is running. They don't care about App Store politics or whether they can compile their own phone kernel. They don't care about music syncing or background processes.

They want to shoot a video of their daughter going on a fairground ride for the first time and have it look completely brilliant when they play it back. Then they want to show their parents. After about 2 weeks they'll probably want to install Facebook and set up their email. And they can.

People who live their lives in a digital industry obsess on the detail of the fast-changing world that provides for them. Everything is scrutinised and commented on in the echochamber that is Twitter or Tech Crunch. We often don't see the wood for the trees, because the trees are so damn interesting sometimes.

For me, it's about "git clone git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/frameworks/base.git". If you know what that means, that's probably what it's about for you too.

For my Dad? For most people? It's about their granddaughter.

Barometa Case Study

Ross Matthews — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:50:13 +0000

Background

Rupert Sellers, a successful recruitment consultant with over 20 years experience in the high end hospitality market came to us with a requirement for a new recruitment website to be integrated with an applicant tracking system. This site should have all the functionality available on the current job sites, but be ultra usable and beautifully designed to allow his new company Barometa to instantly engage with the high end hospitality market.

Website

www.barometa.com

Solution

We discussed the brief and produced a multitude of ideas from data harvesting on social networks, to automated CV creation, to live video interviews. All the ideas were sifted, prioritised, costed and matched against the strategic goals of the company. Eventually the blueprints from the new barometa.com were born.
Barometa.com was released in June 2011 and is the first fully automated job board with human screening and assessment services which uses a video interview service taken straight from the users webcam.
When candidates sign up to use Barometa, they are asked for a set of career preferences, then asked to record generic interviews based on those choices. Each video interview (eg interview for Sales Manager), can be used to apply for multiple sales manager roles on the site.

Clients can post jobs quickly and easily and are notified when candidates have applied and have been approved and rated by the Barometa team. They can then view all of the interviews for the candidates, score each candidate and if required, create new bespoke interviews for each individual position.

Clients can expect to save hundreds of hours in face to face interviews by using this simple and intuitive video interview screening service. The ROI is obvious.

Results

It's early days, but Barometa has a number of top end clients ready to use the service including the Dorchester Collection, Mandarin Oriental, Soho House Group and Jumeirah.
We will update this case study with further metrics in the coming months but Barometa is off to a flying start.

Making the move from PC to Mac

Ross Matthews — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:49:13 +0000

I've been a PC user all my life, never once setting foot in the Mac arena. In the last few years, my career has taken on a decidedly more sales oriented slant and although powerpoint 2010 is much better than it's predecessor, it's still a little clunky compared to what you can produce with keynote on a mac.

So when I recently wrote off my car, crushing my PC in the process, I decided to take the opportunity to purchase a Macbook Pro 13 instead, just to see what the fuss is all about. These are my findings so far...

Where is the goddam print screen button? I've found it now, it's cmd-shft-3 I think. The lack of being able to take a screenshot easily bugs me. Although there are plenty of screen grabbing tools around to add this functionality. It also took me a while to figure out that function backspace is delete. Something I use a lot on a PC.

It's not as fast as my Dell XPS laptop was. Admittedly, I haven't installed the SSD drive I had in my PC yet, so this isn't a true comparison, but I had accepted all the hype about Macs being lightning fast and so was a little disappointed with the performance.

Window switching is far more complex. Macs are supposed to be easier to use, but quite often I'll be clicking the icon for a program in the dock bar expecting it to pop in front but nothing happens. After a while I figured out there is no active window for that program, it's just the top bar that becomes active, but coming from a PC where the program closes when you close the window, that's not at all obvious. In fact coming from anywhere thats not obvious.

The window management leaves a lot to be desired. On Windows 7 you can snap programs to the top, left, right etc. simply by dragging the pointer to the sides of the screen. I had to install some third party software (Better Touch Tool) to get this functionality. Although I'm told Lion will have this in it.

I had to buy a number of adapters to get this thing to connect to a standard HDMI, DVI or VGA. Essential for a salesman. I also had to buy a second power adapter so I didn't have to be crawling under my desk twice a day. These are NOT CHEAP!
I have yet to find a decent way to share Visio and MS Project files with people. There are various bits of software that claim to read and write to MS project, but they all tend to mess up the project file.

Finally, the graphics card in this Mac isn't good for gaming. I bought this for working and sales so I'm not too bothered about this, but my Dell XPS had a GeForce card in it and totally rocked at Call of Duty networked in the office. This Mac doesn't. Still, it gives me more excuses when I come bottom again.

Now the good bits.

The touchpad is awesome. Two finger scroll, zoom and rotate is fantastic. Three finger back and forward whilst browsing is brilliant too. Sadly my 5 button mouse doesn't automatically work when I plug it in, but I'm sure there are drivers for that.

The screen is bright. Really bright, and there are controls to make it EVEN BRIGHTER. You get some reflection in the sun, but it's usable outside. The networking seems flawless, not connection drops so far, so again working outside is a breeze.

The battery is amazing. 7 hours I think they quote, and it seems to be true. Real mobile freedom which is a massive bonus.

The keyboard illuminates which is new for me and makes working outside (in the dark) really easy. Not that I do that a lot. The keyboard is also really nice. Tactile, not too noisy, clickable but not clicky. Really nice.

Putting the machine in standby is fast, and resuming is equally fast. Better than my Dell I think, but it's close.

So in summary, after a week of using it, I like it. I'm not blown away by it, but I'm not disappointed. I'm still getting used to the software and tweaks in the OS, so I may follow up this post with more thoughts, but I did notice something quite telling as soon as I took delivery. I keep trying to open the Macbook from the wrong side.

This is because on my Dell, the logo was oriented so I could read it on the top before opening it to use the machine. On the Macbook, it's upside down, so when you open it, other people can see the illuminated apple icon the right way up.

That for me sums up the difference quite neatly, Apple is quite often about showing others what you have, and PC's might be, as it suggests, a more "personal computer".

Accepting flames to matt@solidstategroup.com ;-)

Cookie Jar emails are now powered by SendGrid

Ross Matthews — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:13:55 +0000

From time to time we get asked what we do about email deliverability.

Previously we tried to monitor blacklists, configure email servers and DNS records for maximum delivery and even look into content and structure of the emails. This takes a long time and we never really got a grasp on how effective these techniques were being.

Now we have decided to outsource all of that pain to SendGrid. We are pleased to annouce that we are now official resellers of the SendGrid email delivery system and it's already integrated into the Cookie Jar web content management system (version 7.1)

Sending all our newsletters and automated system emails through SendGrid increases the delivery rate which is extremely important for sites with high value emails such as email registration confirmations, or shopping cart invoices.

SendGrid boasts improved deliverability, integrated email analytics and scalability based on their cloud platform.

Just another reason to dip into the Cookie Jar.

Barometa builds pressure with Solid State Group

Matthew Evans — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:39:31 +0000

I can't keep this under wraps any longer. One of our latest and greatest projects is Barometa, a recruitment startup in the hospitality sector. But wait, it's not just another recruitment firm, no. Barometa is taking the whole recruitment model by the scruff of the neck and dragging it kicking and screaming into 2011.

Take the standard job board model, throw in some high end search and selection skills, top it off with video interviews and sourcing through social networks, then deliver it with meaningful metrics against each candidate with hand picked recommendations.

Imagine you're the employer and as a Barometa client you are being sent through the very best, pre-moderated candidates to your inbox. On your dashboard, you have the shortlisted candidates and you only need to watch 30 second videos and note the Barometa scores to make a decision. Hiring heaven, that's what it is.

It's in build stage, so go to www.barometa.com to register for more info when it goes live.

Axure V6 released

Matthew Evans — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:49:26 +0000

I've been trying out version 6 Axure which was recently released on the Axure blog. I've only recently converted to Axure from pencil but as an ex techie I'm totally loving it. Not only does it allow me to develop concepts right in front of the client in the meetings, but when I am done, I can simply annotate the wireframes and generate a spec for the front end developers.

Developing the concepts for websites and web applications has always been the exciting part for me, the part that makes me want to stay in this work. Staying ahead of the game, developing bleeding edge apps that integrate with the latest websites and technologies, having just one person saying "cool", that's the bit I love.

Writing the specification for those ideas for our tech team to understand and code, thats the bit that sucks. It takes ages, it's boring and you need a freakish attention to detail in order to get it to a point of completion. That's why I'm a complete Axure convert. I mean I hardly ever actually BUY software these days. There are so many awesome alternatives to commercial software, I honestly never buy anything. We are Linux based, run Google apps, use online project management tools, freeware for loads of other stuff, but every now and then there simply isn't a decent alternative and after a painful few months battling with pencil I tried the demo of Axure.

It's basically a god send for me. Most of the sites we produce run to some basic formats. Two column, three column, modules for different areas appearing on various pages. The masters section of Axure where you can define a page module and re-use it across various pages literally saves me days of time.

On top of that I can create clickable prototypes for my clients so they can totally understand the functionality of the site or app. Then we annotate the wireframes in the meetings and hit generate and bam! Most of the spec is written. It's put the fun back into the job, and that is worth every damn penny!

The irony is I haven't paid Axure anything yet as I was using v5.6 on a months trial, then upgraded to the V6 beta and can use it until the end of Feb, but if you're reading this Axure team, call me in March, you money is here and waiting.

I would love to put some examples of my wireframes and prototypes up here, but so far the only projects I have used it on haven't launched yet, so I can't release them, but I will stick some up here in time.

So thanks Axure, for making my job that much easier and enjoyable.

Ending the year on a positive

Ben Rometsch — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:51:59 +0000

Nice to end the year with one of the best customer service experiences I can remember for a long, long time. In fact, I don't see how you could better this. Let me explain.

We get an office delivery of a fruit box and some milk once a week. Abel and Cole provide this service. 10 minutes ago I got a call from them checking to see if we wanted to cancel our box for next week, between Xmas and New Year, and the following (the delivery would have arrived on a bank holiday). Quick aside - nice of the government to give us a bank holiday to deal with our New Year hangovers, although ironically this year the bankers are the one group of people that don't deserve one.

So I cancelled both boxes as there won't be anyone around to eat the fruit or drink the milk, and then I realised what was happening. Abel and Cole just paid someone to call me with the express goal of cancelling two of my orders. I mentioned this to the guy on the phone and he said "well, we don't want any of our fruit rotting in a doorway, and if you're not going to make use of it we'd rather not charge you for it".

Abel and Cole are a growing business, but they are heavily capitalised. Last year, the company made a loss of almost £3.5M. This year, they lost about £0.25M, so they're going in the right direction. Hopefully they will be making a big fat profit in 2011.

With customer service like that, they deserve to.

Rural Broadband Hell with some options

Matthew Evans — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:50:53 +0000

I recently moved into bough beech, Kent, from our 2 bed flat in central London.
I do a fair amount of work from home. In the flat this wasn't a problem as my broadband connection was 50mbps through virgin cable (nice and fast).

Having moved out to bough beech I started researching the connectivity options available to me and to my frustration found very few decent ones.

Broadband comes in many shapes and forms but the most common ones are:
- ADSL - this works through your BT phone line and is the most common.
- Cable - if you have cable tv in your street, you can get the internet through that.
- Mobile - all the mobile networks have dongles for laptops and some allow you to connect through your phone

There are other options for internet access, but for brevity these are the most common.

Having researched all three of these options, the only method of connection for my house was ADSL. This comes in many forms but the faster speeds require a technology called local loop unbundled (LLU). LLU is basically where BT have allowed competitors to install their own equipment in the local exchange allowing for greater speeds.

The problem is that the competitors only want to install their equipment in exchanges that have thousands of subscribers, to get the best return on investment.

Four elms, it seems, does not qualify as such a cash cow.
The result being the best speed I can get is about 0.3mbps less than 100 times the speed I had in London.

As a technologist this is not acceptable. I can't stream videos or music, I can't download films, presentations and images fast enough, I can't even access my desktop at work.

So I decided to do some research into some cutting edge tech to see what I could get if price is no object. Here's what I found.

Leased lines. These are dedicated lines run from the exchange to your house. They can promise up to 10Mbps. Setup cost of a few grand and £300 to £500 a month.

Satelite internet. 3.6Mbps with prices from 500 setup and £30 a month. Check out http://www.tariam.co.uk/products/tooway/ I'm going to be subscribing to this, so if anyone wants to try it out, feel free to drop in.

Mobile seems to be upping it's game, with new technology gain gain directional antennas. Apparently you can get 7.2Mbps through a mobile mast with one of these gizmos. Not available until next year though. http://www.deltenna.com/products/wibe.aspx

And finally BT are rolling out their Fiber to the Cabinet (FTTC) product which can deliver up to 40Mbps to enabled exchanges. My nearest exchange (Four Elms) obviously isn't enabled, but you can vote now to get the ball rolling at: http://www.racetoinfinity.bt.com/html-version

The more of us vote, the faster we can have blisteringly fast broadband into our homes. So go and vote now,even if you're not interested, you'll get serious browny points from your kids.

NHS Brand Guidelines Case Study

Ross Matthews — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:50:33 +0000

In 1999 a single corporate brand was introduced for the NHS. Previous to this rebrand there were over 600 brand marks being utilised used by different departments within the NHS broadcasting a blurred brand and identity. This muddled identity made it difficult for members of the public to easily distinguish NHS services and communications from those of a commercial or charitable nature. The single NHS identify was formed to address this problem, improving recognition and accountability of the NHS and its services.

Following on from the branding project the NHS needed a central resource containing brand assets along with guidelines on how the NHS brand should be used by different user groups. These groups range from dental practices and GPs through to strategic health authorities. In total, 20 groups with varying requirements were identified.

Several NHS communication principles were defined in the branding:

Clear and professional: Demonstrating pride and authority.
Cost-effective: Showing that budgets have been used wisely.
Straightforward: Avoiding gimmicks and over complicated design or wording.
Modern: Portraying the NHS in way that is up to date.
Accessible: Understood by the target audience and easily obtainable and available in other languages, symbols or formats.
Honest: Avoiding misleading information or false promises.
Respectful: Showing respect for the audience, avoiding unfair stereotypes, acknowledging the different needs of individuals and populations.

Website

http://www.nhsidentity.nhs.uk/

Solution

The NHS engaged with Bostock & Pollitt for branding project who in turns recommended Solid State Group to develop a publically accessible internet site run on the Sugar Cube digital asset management system. The solution contains all brand assets and collateral as well as a series of guidelines tailored by user type, downloadable in PDF format. The solution identifies the type of user (be it GP, dentist, nurse etc.) through a simple drop-down menu, then based on the selection, retrieves only assets pertinent to that user. Sugar Cube also dynamically generates a complete brand guidelines document in PDF format, which is personalised to that specific user.

How it works

The individual brand guidelines document are dynamically created and personalised for each individual type of user from shared content, which simplifies updating elements that span the entire set of guidelines. For example, if the user wanted to update the paragraph 'trademark' across all of the guidelines they can do this by editing that section of content in one place. So when there are 20 guideline documents all with the same paragraph about trademarks, its very quick and easy to change the content across the entire set.

In addition, even though all the guidelines share the same content elements it is possible to customise each guideline document specifically; so if the user wanted to change the NHS logo on a particular set of guidelines (e.g. dentistry) to differ from all the others they could do so.

Similarly, if the user wishes to delete elements from only one set of guidelines there are options to do so. The PDF documents on the NHS Brand Guidelines site range from a few pages up to around 180 pages in size which contain hi-res versions of all images and artwork. Technically, for performance reasons although the PDFs are created dynamically, it is not done at download request as the user would experience a delay. Instead there is a PDF generator which monitors when changes have been made to the content in the guidelines, automatically starting the process of rebuilding the PDFs, making sure they are always up to date and available instantly for users.

Results

The NHS brand value and clarity has increased through a more clearly defined message to the public. NHS departments and services are now able to produce communication and promotional material quickly and confidently with automated guidance from a central service, which is very cost effective and efficient to run. Out of date brand collateral has nearly been eliminated through the use of the NHS Brand Guidelines site, making old methods such as distribution of assets on CD's or by email redundant.

Wave goodbye to Google Wave

Matthew Evans — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:03:17 +0000

By sheer chance I was one of the first developers to get a Wave account. I seem to remember Google asking you to write a haiku along with your personal details. I was in a mischievous mood when I filled the form in; I can't remember what I wrote but I seem to be remember it being quite funny if you had the mental age of a 9 year old on a sugar rush. Anyway, I got an invite to the product when it was red hot. Remember that, when everyone thought it was a game changer?

So I had a play around with it, put together my thoughts in a post and left it at that. That post got onto the front page of Slashdot, was modded up to the top of Hacker News and for a while was on the front page of Google for the phrase "Google Wave". No doubt we got a boatload of traffic to our site from loads of developers who had no intention of spending money on a Content Management System. So basically worthless. But hey, I had journalists getting in touch about what I thought which was fun for about 10 seconds. Then it got really annoying.

Well, no-one likes a wise guy who says "I told you so" but, well, I told you so. Back in October last year I wrote a follow up which basically trashed it as a product. I think I might have been in a bad mood when I wrote that, but again we got a load of traffic from that post too. I suppose that Wave's been pretty good to us...The gift that keeps on giving.

"my gut feel is that it will, at best, become a niche forgotten about Google product"

But now Google have decided to can it as a product. They're going to pick over the code for useful bits and pieces and let the product as a whole die. Nice work if you can get it.

Funny how bleeding edge technology products can fail, yet pictures of poorly translated Asian menus become global phenomena.

Move your business online for easy integrations

Matthew Evans — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:15:21 +0000

We have noticed a definite change in trend recently in our new business. More of our potential clients are now looking for bespoke integrations into their legacy systems in order to expose more of their business online.

Some of our proposals are now purely to move entire businesses online into the cloud.

This is a slight change to our traditional work as we are mostly involved with content management projects along with social networks. However, when the users in the network require information from your business systems like product data we need to interface with legacy systems to get hold of it.

One of our more recent pitches is to completely relocate the client's entire business systems from traditional PC based software like ACT and SAGE to a cloud based model replacing that software with online applications like pipelinedeals.com and xero.com.

Most companies are recognising that the website is becoming the main interface into their customers and so shifting the business online makes sense for integration and availability purposes.

For us it makes perfect sense as Cookie Jar our content management system is often used as the base platform for all the customer registration, authentication and functionality. Then we integrate with CRM systems, accounting systems, fulfillment systems and other software to ensure efficient business operations.

This trend has been increasing over the last few years and digital agencies need to be in a position to be able to offer these kinds of consultancy, product cloud product knowledge and bespoke integrations if they want to stay ahead of the curve.

Everything Online

Ben Rometsch — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:02:40 +0000

Last month we moved into our new office. It's larger, brighter, funkier and altogether better than our old building, but as a result it's quite a bit more expensive. One of the goals of moving was to try and reduce our operating costs in areas other than rent which, we discovered, is a fairly immutable concept to our landlord.

One of the larger monthly outgoings from our old building was the phone system. When we moved in (this was back in 2005) we shunned the expensive proprietary phone systems in favour of an Asterisk box. This saved us a boatload of cash in capital expenditure, but still left us with a question of how we connect our internal phone system to the outside world.

Back in 2005, the quality of ADSL connectivity was good, but not perfect. As a result, we took a decision to use ISDN instead of an alternative VOIP product to manage this connectivity. This was not cheap. BT installations were high, the monthly service costs for the ISDN was high and the ISDN card to power the Asterisk box cost around £1k. On top of this, we only had 10 concurrent lines for an office of more than 30 people. If 11 people wanted to be on the phone at the same time, 1 person was going to be out of luck.

Fast forward to 2010. We've been with BeThere broadband for 5 years, and their service has been very, very good. Virtually no downtime and excellent bandwidth throughput. I spoke with a couple of other companies who had bitten the VOIP bullet and they explained that, done right, it would suit us better in the long run. So I put together a test Asterisk install before we moved office, selected a VOIP provider in Gradwell, and had a play around.

Generally the service was excellent. My only issue was one of upstream network bandwidth. If someone in the office was uploading a large file and consuming most or all the upstream bandwidth, the call quality would drop below an acceptable level.

When we moved office, it was a simple decision. Get 2 ADSL lines. One for VOIP traffic, one for everything else.

This has a number of positive effects. Setup costs were a lot lower. Monthly cost are FAR lower. We also now have more concurrent lines than we have people in the office, so we don't have to worry about all the lines being busy. On top of all of this, we are no longer tied down to our physical building as we were with the old setup. If we want to move, I just grab our Asterisk server, plug it into the net somewhere else and update 1 IP address in the Gradwell control panel. No more waiting for BT to do whatever it is they do.

The only concern was one of quality. Would anyone notice a drop in call quality? Well, four weeks in and I'm happy to say that I've not had a single complaint. In fact, the quality of service is so good that after a few days I completely forgot about the new setup.

And with that, the only really old communications technology left in the office is a fax. I hate fax machines. It's sat in the corner, yet to be installed. Someone asked if they could fax me something the other day, and I laughed and said we don't have a fax machine.

Death to faxes. Unless they run over TCP.