Solid State Group Blog

Agile scrum project management spreadsheet

Arnaud Valle — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:43:44 +0000

I few months ago we went through the usual "are we using the best tools" paranoia in order to maintain decent efficiency in our working environment.

Generally speaking we came out quite well this time, changing only a few bits here and there. We changed our internal task management (non development) to Asana, which is really nice, although desperately needs a native Android app. We moved back to Basecamp because the new features and interface is much better (esp the calendar, take note Google). We retained Trello as our tool of choice for sprint management during a scrum project, but we didn't really have a suitabe burndown chart generator.

We tried pivotaltracker for a bit, but it didn't stick. So after a quick search of the web produced nothing quick and easy for burndown charts (it might do now) I decided to create an extremely simple excel (now google docs) spreadsheet to manage scrum meetings on a daily basis and give insight into our scrum projects.

I talked to a friend today who was having the same issue and so I mailed him the sheet at which point it occurred to me that others might benefit from this very simple doc.

So here it is. Our take on the sprint management and burndown chart tool in excel. Enjoy and let me know if you make any improvements. I know it's got it's limitations.

Converting Fixed Width Layout To A Responsive Design

Arnaud Valle — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:20:55 +0000

Responsive Web Design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behaviour and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. Rather than building device specific versions of a desktop site, the content on a site should automatically respond to a user’s preferences.

In a recent project we worked on converting a fixed width layout to a responsive design that adapts to common device widths. In this article we will discuss and evaluate points of consideration when undertaking this process.

Adding Meta Tags

In order for mobile devices to understand media queries, it is necessary to insert a Meta Tag in the head of your responsive page, as this will tell the mobile device to render the page at the correct pixel resolution. The viewport meta tag will contain the following content parameters:

width=device-width means that the viewport width is rendered correctly according to the device in question. This renders the webpage on a 1:1 pixel ratio. This is the width of the screen in CSS pixels at a scale of 100%.
initial-scale=1 ensures that the page, when first displayed, is fully zoomed in, so that the viewport's width matches the device's screen width in portrait orientation — for example, 320 pixels on an iPhone and 768 pixels on an iPad. Setting initial scale=”1” renders the initial zoom level of the web page on loading.
maximum-scale=1 prevents the device from zooming in further than the 1:1 pixel ratio when rotating to landscape orientation. Basically, it forces the iPhone viewport's width to increase to 480 pixels in landscape mode. If we did not include the maximum-scale value then the viewport would be 320 pixels wide in both portrait and landscape orientation. Although this setting disables the users option to zoom into the page it is currently the best option for being able to optimise content for this orientation change.

Putting all this together our meta tag looks like this

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

The term 'viewport' refers to the device screen size, or the browser size on desktop monitors.

Break Points

When moving from a fixed width to a responsive layout it is necessary to establish break points to target key viewport sizes. These break points will form the basis for our CSS3 Media Queries that ‘trigger’ CSS style rules on the screen at a specific viewport width. We will cover Media Queries in the next section.

It may be useful to check your Google Analytics reports, to evaluate which are the most popular mobile devices that are being used to visit your site.

Set breakpoints for the most popular devices that are being used by your visitors. After analysing the Analytics for our project we defined the following breakpoint specifications;

320px for common smartphones including iPhone at portrait orientation
480px and below for iPhones at landscape orientation and many of the HTC handsets
768px – 980px for iPad and other tablets
980px and upwards for desktop monitors
1200px and upwards for larger desktop monitors

Media Queries

The key to building responsive layouts is CSS3 Media Queries. With media queries, you can create different CSS rule sets that only apply when the desktop browser's width or device width is a certain width or height, or within a given width/height range.

One common misconception with responsive design is that the layout should be fluid at all screen widths, however this is not always the case. Building on top of Twitter’s Bootstrap responsive framework in a recent project, we used a fixed width layout at screen widths above 768 pixels, changing container element dimensions at breakpoints above this. Screen widths below 768 pixels used a fluid layout which do not have a fixed width set on the container elements.

Using this method makes the transition from fixed layout to a responsive layout slightly less painful as the desktop version of your site should not need as many changes than if it were to be completely fluid.

Process

Targeting the various breakpoints with CSS3 Media Queries and changing the width of the fixed width container elements will undoubtedly throw up formatting issues.

This is where the largest amount of work will be required to complete the conversion and it will take time to dig through the CSS to find all the fixed width elements.

Keeping the existing fixed width layout at larger widths and then adapting these widths to automatically resize at smaller widths is a quicker technique.

Here are some tips on writing the CSS for this process.

Watch out for elements that are positioned absolutely. Will they overlap with other items at smaller screen widths?
Make sure your horizontal menus items wrap gracefully. Try centering them on smaller screens and using the CSS3 white-space: nowrap property.
Set a max-width for images and form elements of 100%
Watch out for elements with a fixed width. At smaller screen widths these will need to change to width: auto.
Can you hide some content that is not needed or required for smaller screen widths?
Separate your different media queries into different CSS files for better structure and organization.
Keep in mind that the order of your CSS files is important. CSS selectors will override identical selector rules if they are included after the original selector.

Responsive Frameworks

Using responsive frameworks such as Twitter’s new Bootstrap 2.0 can help with the process of converting your design to a responsive grid, as when using frameworks such as this there is an existing set of responsive media queries designed for predefined screen widths. This means it is relatively straightforward to divide your design into grid based columns which will resize and stack based on the screen width.

Conclusion

Converting a fixed width layout to a responsive design is more difficult than building a site from scratch with a responsive layout in mind. However it can be done with the right approach using CSS3 Media queries and can be less problematic when keeping fixed width layout for desktop screen widths and making devices with smaller widths implement a fluid layout.

Carefully consider the user requirements aswell as optimising the layout for the various screen sizes, the mobile user may need to see elements in a different order for them to complete your goals.

Before starting this conversion process it is worth planning out exactly what should and shouldn’t be shown at smaller screen widths and how this information should be displayed, doing this will speed up the conversion process and will result in a more focused mobile content strategy.

Talent acquisitions hurt everyone

Ross Matthews — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:56:14 +0000

If you are into reading between the lines of press releases, there's a really juicy one over at Posterous. They just got snapped up by Twitter, which is great. No doubt the equity owners are secure in their knowledge that they will be able to send their grandchildren to college, hopefully in a flying car.

The reason it's a juicy press release is what it doesn't come out and say, but what the startup community knows only too well. In fact, most startup veterans would be able to predict what is going to happen to Posterous just by reading the headline: "Posterous is Joining the Flock at Twitter". Even the phrasing is rich with connotation.

For those less cynical, the answer is this: Posterous will be closing their services down in the near future. Even the headline makes reference to the Twitter team, not Twitter or Posterous the product. "Joining the flock" is loaded with signalling.

The reason for mentioning this is related to how I use Posterous. I don't really use it much; I only host my personal blog there. What's more important is that Posterous is the service that my wife has been using to chronicle the daily goings on of our two year old daughter, Lotte. Every few days she uploads a photo of her doing her thing (eating, mainly) to her Posterous account. It's a private blog, so really only for our amusement, but the plan was to use the service as a diary that our daughter could look at when she is old enough to use the Internet by herself.

When I told my wife about Posterous, I had a suspicion in the back of my mind that it wouldn't be around by the time Lotte grew up. I chose the service as I knew that it had good traction, and so the whole "talent acquisition" was going to be the thing that killed it, and so it has come to pass.

Personal photos are really, really important. Especially if you have kids. The problem is that by using a web based service like Posterous you are taking on a small amount of what I call web-app doubt. That niggling worry in the back of your mind that you are going to wake up one day and the service, along with all your precious photos, are gone. I guess if you were using MegaUpload to do this, that feeling is probably still with you.

But the reason this is really damaging is how it affects the mindset of the casual user. As someone who is part of the tech/startup community I can understand and appreciate the reasons behind the acquisition. The problem is that my wife doesn't. All she appreciates is the fact that she now has to figure out how to backup all the content she uploaded to Posterous, find another service, and then upload it all again. Only now SHE is going to have web-app doubt along with me.

And that's the kicker. That's where it hurts the industry. Eventually most people are going to have a similar experience, and start to discover that doubt. It will become a pervasive, insidious worry, the way people currently worry about viruses.

I appreciate that there is no real solution to this, short of a Stalinist economic model, but it does seem a real shame that plays out every few weeks. Same story, different startup.

We all say how we are doing it for our users. That's easy to say in some chirpy homepage copy, but much, much harder to say when Twitter is waving a big bunch of green so close to your face that you can smell it.

BlackBerry is Bust

Ben Rometsch — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:53:48 +0000

About two years ago I sat down and learnt how to write simple Android applications. Coming from 10 years of web development experience, it was pretty insightful having to re-learn multi-threading, network blocking and all that fun stuff that is thick client UI development. Learning to use all these new tools like Eclipse and the ADT was also something of a learning curve, but the documentation was very good, and throughout the entire process I felt like I was making progress.

Fast forward a couple of years, and the mobile device landscape is radically different. Apple are the largest company on the planet, Google are trying really hard not to be Evil and BlackBerry are in deep, deep trouble. The PlayBook is a nice device, but seriously lacking in decent applications. And when I say seriously, that's an understatement; it doesn't even have an Email client!

So I get up one day and find an email in my inbox inviting me to submit my Android application to the PlayBook AppWorld. Why would I do this? Because they will send me a free PlayBook when it's accepted (AppWorld is a walled garden just like the iOS App Store). Not one to pass up the offer of free high-end gadgets, I decide to give it a crack.

The cynical readers of this blog probably know where this is going.

The BlackBerry PlayBook has about 129 different runtimes (possibly a slight exaggeration), but the one we care about is the Android runtime. This means that you can take an existing Android application and, with very minor modification, create a PlayBook application. The documentation provided by BlackBerry is poor, but not impossible to work through. You have to wait days for things like certificates to be generated, and I needed to send them a copy of my company's legal documentation, but after about a week I was ready to go.

All in it took about 4 hours to compile a PlayBook build of my application. Not bad. So I log into the App World developer area and go through the somewhat laborious submission process. After submission I receive an email thanking me and letting me know that they will be in touch soon.

Two weeks go by.

Then I get woken up to my daughter jumping on my head and an email in my inbox that reads (SIC)

Dear App World Vendor,

Unfortunately Release '1.0' from your product 'BenPaper Pro' has not passed testing and therefore cannot be approved for sale through BlackBerry App World.

The apps/games doesn't working properly

Thank you for your understanding in this matter,

Regards,

The BlackBerry App World™ Team

That's it. It really is the mother of all bug reports: "The apps/games doesn't working properly". So I reply to that email asking for more information (the application worked fine in the simulator before I submitted it). I know what's coming next but I send the email anyway. 1 minute later:

***ATTENTION***

This is a notification email only and replies to this email address are not monitored.

At this point I can see the next 3 months of my life experience with BlackBerry panning out in front of me. Here's what I just know is going to happen.

- I'm going to spend an hour on the AppWorld website trying, and failing, to find a more detailed bug report than "The apps/games doesn't working properly"
- Send a message via a really off-putting generic web form (does anyone actually receive these messages? I'm not going to put money on it)
- Wait about 3 weeks
- Hear nothing back
- Gnaw off my left hand
- Bitch some more on this blog about the level of service
- Have someone get back to me asking to resubmit the app
- Resubmit the app
- Hear nothing back for 2 weeks
- Gnaw off my right hand

How do I know this is going to happen? Because BlackBerry have busted out. You can tell from every interaction with them as a company. The whole process just reeks of too much middle management, poor engineering and bad decisions.

Here's the thing. BlackBerry have a pretty decent piece of hardware. They have ZERO apps on their platform. Here's what they need to do. It's quite simple.

1. Watch this video
2. Throw a chair out of the window
3. Put the developer at the very top of their list of priorities. I mean, THE VERY TOP. Give me an account manager that I can TALK TO ON THE PHONE
4. Get my app into the AppWorld as quickly as possible

Ballmer was right. When they are buying tablets, people don't say "ooh, it has a 5 megapixel camera instead of a 3 megapixel one". They say "can I use Facebook" and "can I Skype my mum". That's it. If it's 170 quid (and it is 170 quid, really!) and it has these applications, they will probably buy it. OK, fair enough, they probably don't say "I want BenPaper Pro goddammit!" but you see where I am coming from.

I don't think BlackBerry are going to do this, because I think BlackBerry as a company are broken beyond repair. The market thinks it too - they are trading way below book cost and have been for months.

We're building some iOS applications here at Solid State, so we'll see how the process compares. Oh, and if anyone at BlackBerry reads this, I'm waiting for your call.

Developing With jQuery Mobile Tweaks And Tips

Ross Matthews — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:25:02 +0000

We recently decided to use the jQuery Mobile Touch-Optimized web framework to build our brand new mobile site. We thought it would therefore be of some value to document some tweaks and tips we discovered when developing our brand new mobile site with the young and exciting framework.

Transitions

The transitions in jQueryMobile were one of the most appealing features we found when we were evaluating which framework to use, and certainly on iOS devices the transitions seemed on the whole smooth and slick. On Android devices the transitions were markedly different, for starters they were extremely sluggish and not quite as smooth as on iOS. A secondary problem was a very noticeable blinking on the target page once the transition had completed.

This is a known bug, and although there are some touted css fixes around that certainly reduce the flickering they seem to result in other problems. Certainly, the blinking problem was still clearly noticeable on Android 2.2 and 2.3.3 even with these CSS based fixes.

The blinking wasn't so bad in iOS, however was still evident in certain circumstances, therefore we decided to turn off the transitions across all platforms for the time being.

As this is a known bug we look forward to this being fixed in a future jQuery Mobile release so we can put transitions back into our mobile site.

Click / Touch Events

One problem with the jQuery mobile and touch events is the time it takes to action a click event, this delay was most prevalent in Android, where it seemed tapping on a link would take an age to trigger, in some cases up to 3 seconds.

The crux of the problem is that the click event does not fire until a delay has passed, as the browser is allowing the chance for a second touch to make it a double click or for it to become a swipe gesture and so on.

The solution to this was to execute a conditional statement to test for native touch event support and then execute a 'touchStart' event (the mobile equivalent of mousedown) when this event is natively available. The 'touchStart' event fires immediately, just like mousedown. This results in a more responsive device interaction. The change significantly reduced the delay on iOS but less so on android, however there was still a marked improvement.

Touch Overflow Enabled

Perhaps the most visibly distracting problem we stumbled across when developing jQuery Mobile was when utilizing the feature Touch Overflow Enabled, designed to vastly improve page transitions and allow for native momentum scrolling (think of quickly scrolling through your Twitter app whilst on your smartphone).

Turning this feature on resulted in a weird page ghosting effect when navigating between pages, and seems best avoided until it is deemed stable by the jQuery mobile team. The feature is turned off by default so is nothing to worry about unless you override the default settings. In which case the jQuery Development team recommend thorough testing as this is a new feature which is still being tested and debugged.

Content Modification On 3G

One of the most unique bugs with jQuery Mobile is an issue with accessing a jQuery Mobile site via 3G, whereby the internally hosted JavaScript libraries fail to load.

Basically, 3G providers such as O2 have content caching systems which modify the page content in a number of ways before delivering it back to the phone, this modification results in errors that arise from the minified jQuery library file.

The fix for this is to load the library from an external CDN so that content modification cannot take place on the minified JavaScript file.

Conclusion

Although some of the issues we faced here were problematic this should'nt put you off developing with the framework. One of the great factors we discovered whilst working with jQuery Mobile was the wide early adoption of the framework by mobile site and app developers and a large range of online support, threads and documentation.

As most of the bugs we encountered are known to the Development team we fully expect them to be fixed in future releases (jQuery Mobile intends to have a regular three month release cycle).

Many of the bugs tend to be exacerbated or unique to the older Android systems, therefore with the recent news that Google Chrome is to become the standard browser on Android 4.0 and above means that jQuery Mobile will be more consistent and should offer A Grade Performance across an even wider range of device platforms very soon.

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

David 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

Ben Kupper — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:34:27 +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?

Ben Kupper — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:47:22 +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.