So here is a task we have massively underestimated! Like Boris from GoldenEye I too thought “I was invincible!”.

“What? We can do anything, coding is easy I’ve been doing it for over 10 years now… A new programming language sure, add it to the list… I have made apps for windows before this will be a breeze.” - David McGeorge, BigRedCircle 2009

In retrospect Boris did die at the hands of Bond in a liquid nitrogen incident. For me, Bond was out of the picture but unfortunately we came to a similar end (almost).

Why couldn’t it be done?

OK, please point and laugh at me for being so naive. I really did expect to get on board with this quick project and bash out a fairly simple iPhone application.

Half expecting it to be a little more difficult than building a dashboard widget or a little flash application. Most of my preconceptions about the iPhone SDK were gone within the first few hours of working with it. An iPhone app has all the complexities and flexibility of a regular desktop app just with a smaller screen. Web developers take note!

As a company we could create a web app in 4 days if the idea was simple enough. This is because we already know the main things that are needed.

• We have lots of experience coding in php
• We are experts in JavaScript
• We can write CSS with our eyes closed
• Coda is the application we use to make websites. We know all the shortcut keys and menu items.

All of the above are needed before you can create a web app. With an iPhone app the requirements that you have to know are:

• How to programme in Objective-C (Apple’s programming language which is different to most)
• Xcode (Used to write and debug your code)
• Interface Builder (to create the interface and link it to the code written in Xcode)
• iPhone Simulator (to test your application)
• Not to mention the multiple performance tools needed to see how your app performs

Because we are all web developers none of these skills were instantly at our fingertips and all required learning.

Research the platform not the app

After doing a little more research about developing for the iPhone I found a few quotes, this one really struck home “Our team of 12 created this app in less than a month!” wow less than a month… Our team of 1.5 had 4 days.

If you are a web designer it’s a long way from Dreamweaver, trust me!

After looking at the competition I think the idea of a cinema show-times app is a good one, that’s why we will still pursue it. The competition, be it more complex and feature rich than what we proposed is simply not good enough from a user experience point of view. So unless someone else comes out with a Super Simple Cinema Times app we are still in iPhone production mode.

Was it worth it?

Totally… We love to learn new things and I will be constantly working on this app until it’s finished (but not in the usual work time).

As much as I feel bad for not reaching these, now looking back, slightly ridiculous targets, we gave it a good shot. It’s back to the class room, download a few more tutorials and hit the code again.

Jolicloud is a new OS optimised for netbooks and working in the cloud.

What’s a netbook?

Have you seen those little laptops which are too small to do any real work on? Well they are great and actually boost productivity. I have been a big fan of netbooks for a long time. They are often most useful when used with applications that are online and in the cloud. I will apologise now for the overuse of internet buzzwords in the following paragraphs.

And what’s cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a style of computing that is scalable and uses resources provided as a service on the internet. An application that uses cloud computing often requires an internet connection and is accessed though a browser. Google Docs is a good example of an app that uses cloud computing.

So Jolicloud is…

A happy mass of water vapour high in the sky? No, it’s a great new operating system that has been designed especially for netbooks. No stripped down version of XP for them. Jolicloud has been described as “A social Operating system” and “An OS in the cloud” but I think of it as an OS that is “properly” optimised for netbooks.

The Review

Jolicloud is in its alpha stage at the moment so there are one or two quirks. This is to be expected so I wont dwell on it too much. What I didn’t expect is that it would look as polished as it does. Small touches which I didn’t expect such as nice graphics on the volume control and brightness indicators. User interface/experience is always about the little things.

I installed it on a Samsung NC10 which has the default Windows XP that came with the netbook. In a matter of seconds, done! No issues at all. I am indeed quite Joli!

Jolicloud offers a way to test the OS without actually installing it on your machine. After the installation a click to “Get Started” and you are promptly thrown into the Jolicloud registration process. This is all very seamless.

The main feature of Jolicloud is the Jolicloud interface (this is not the entire operating system, more like an application within the OS). Inside it has all of the aspects of a social network and an app directory. All of the apps here are very much netbook orientated. VLC, Twitter, GMail, Google Docs, Facebook, etc. Mostly apps running in the cloud.

I had a little issue at first not being able to install any of the web style apps. This was fixed with a quick visit to the updates tab. All in the name of alpha!

The social aspect of the OS comes in the form of a follow-me-and-I’ll-follow-you style of interaction. Giving you a dashboard full of “This person is following that person” and “This person has installed Skype”. It’s a great way to discover new people and apps.

From a user experience point of view, managing your apps and social stream is very straight forward and intuitive. Once you have installed your apps and made your friend connections you then leave the nice Jolicloud interface. This is where the nice slick design seems to trail off.

At this stage, for me, you lose the nice intuitive interface when you are launching your apps. It seems a little disjointed especially if your have never used Ubuntu before.

I would like to see a boot straight into the Jolicloud interface and within this have app launching capabilities. After seeing some of the early screenshots I was expecting this interface to be the entire OS. A small gripe I know but the experience seems to change so much once you are out of the Jolicloud interface.

So is it any good, really?

Yes, it really is. The issues I have are very small, maybe even a little bit picky. Like the fact that the ‘Home’ icon and the ‘Jolicloud’ icons are the same colour and that the menu bar is very cluttered with icons of different shapes and colours. These can and will be fixed in later versions (I hope). I’m trying to be a little more objective and look at the great stuff Jolicloud is actually providing.

Overall it’s a success and I’m looking forward to seeing what will come of this project in the future. It’s free but it’s looks expensive. It’s slick and it’s fast. It WILL be my netbook OS of choice when its released. Come on, you didn’t expected me to stay with windows XP, did you?

Amazon.com is one of the biggest and probably the best known of all online e-commerce shops. It was launched way back in 1995. It sustained the first internet boom and survived its following bust. It played a big hand in promoting the benefits of online shopping and is still most peoples first online shopping experience. I know it was mine (Gleaming the Cube on VHS… what. Its awesome!)

I believe that, not all but the majority of Amazon’s success has been down to its user experience and usability. It was one of the first internet shops to take usability seriously, and to my knowledge, the first to do full usability testing on a website.

Lets see what they did right.

For a closer look check out the slideshow above. Click ‘Full Screen’ for a massive view.

1999 (party like its…)

This is the earliest screenshot I have and by this time things have moved along well for Amazon. No longer did they only sell books, now a whole manor of departments are listed. The first thing that stands out is that the logo is not in the standard top left corner. The left navigation is a waterfall of links and text. A little difficult to read I think.

2000 (Lets all meet up in the year…)

Now everything has gone haywire and they have departments coming out of their ears. This is a good example of how top horizontal navigation does not grow well with a website. I suppose its still usable in this form but it looks terrible.

2001 a space odyssey

The top navigation had to be tamed. A victim of their own expansion. Too many departments forced them to only show a few departments with a “see more stores” link. The left navigation has also been brought a little more inline. It doesn’t hurt the eyes anymore.

The colour change could have been a seasonal change but the more important usability change is that the left navigation is no longer in alphabetical order. When you have a lot of departments alphabetising the navigation is often a good way to help the user. On the other hand, if 80% of your visitors use only a handful of departments you are helping them enormously by ordering departments by popularity.

2002 (No song or film has 2002 in the title)

Why change a winning formula? More of the same apart from a slight tweak to the left navigation. It is now far more usable with just a touch of organisation and section heading. Users don’t read anything online (in most cases). If you can make content easy to skim users will love you for it.

2006.

A drastic redesign is required now that Amazon has 32 stores to fit in. Why the logo was put inside a tab, I will never know. Don’t mess with the convention of a logo as the home link situated at the top of the page.

With the department overload, a new ‘favourite department’ functionality has been shoehorned in. This will do nothing for usability and I would be surprised if any user would take the time to customise the navigation of an online shop. Would you?

Hurray the search is back. I have no idea why they would remove such an important usability and navigation aid from the framework of the website. Its not a win win situation because they also added an Amazon A9 search box. This searches the web but looks just like a regular internal site search. Even with the title ‘web search’ I still paused and had to think. (We all know that’s bad idea don’t we Steve Krug).

2007.

The year of the product. No massive changes to usability but a style change to the way products are displayed. Less text gives it a cleaner look whilst the carrousel product spinner gets a lot more items on the page but doesn’t clutter (much). Amazon now has a list of 43 product categories to view. Just imagine if they had continued with their original tab layout.

Not long after their previous radical change, along came another monumental realignment. The issues with hiding departments behind a “See all 43 Product Categories” tab must be apparent now. The traditional top navigation has been replaced by something that is very similar to the current version of the website. And finally… the logo is back in the most usable and conventional position.

2009.

The current day Amazon. The top navigation is slowly creeping back but now its only used for account related information. A very successful usability technique is to keep similar functioning pages in the same area. This is a good example. The left navigation has now been compacted to its main headings. New web technologies and the widespread adoption of rollover drop down menus have made it possible for this approach. This left navigation is no longer a daunting expanse of links. Its now a little cleaner and more usable.

What’s next?

Looking at the massive differences from the 1999 screenshots to 2009 version, you can see that things change a lot. I wonder if amazon ever thought they would sell so many products in as many departments? Nobody can predict what their e-commerse shop will turn into and how many products will be sold. All you can be sure of is that every addition you make could require some change in usability. Usability is not something that’s undertaken once and its done. It needs to change and adapt with your shop. A usability evolution over time.

I bring to you a non-offensive, non-denominational holiday object of joy. Unfortunately no music or lyrics by minimalist composer Philip Glass.

Enjoy

12 DAYS OF BIG RED CIRCLES

John Lewis giant red circle

An amusingly shaped plant pot

A home made card from a friend

The office rug

Mannequins and Big Red Circles

Habitat turns a Big Red Circle into a seat

A French Big Red Circle (Paris)

My cousin found a Big Red Circle on the climbing frame

Big Round Red Circular Bin

Red circles in the streets

A light bulb under a plastic bin

3 red faced christmas elves at a weird christmas disco?

…and a partridge in a pear tree

Up the ladder to the cold and dark loft. Blew the dust off the crusty old box which contained the Christmas tree and examined the decorations box for spiders.

And now!!!

The BigRedCircle website is ready for Santa. Although no mince pie or whiskey was left.

If you didn’t already know the header on the website changes at nigh time. As its winter and the nights are getting longer it now changes at 4 o’clock UK time. So you can see the snowy goodness in all of its nigh-time glory that little bit earlier. Thanks to Schillmania for the excellent random snow generator script.

Its December and its totally reasonable to wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas!

The BigRedCircle has been out expanding the size of its circle, filling it with information about the future. Attending The Future of Web Apps Conference in London hosted by those lovely people over at Carsonified.

When the internet is exploding with blogs, tweets and photos of the conference I was left thinking what could I possibly add to the plethora of FOWA web apps based knowledge.

So, racking my brain for that unique angle that nobody else will think of. I had a moment of clarity. For your blogging pleasure I will give you my top 3 speakers of the conference. This will be a totally biased David McGeorge certified opinion ©. (No cashback or refunds available)

As Pat Sharp once said “Lets hit the charts!”

Down 2 places to number #3 is Kevin Rose with his talk on the future of news

An interesting insight into the way that Digg works and some pretty in-depth explanations of Digg’s new recommendation engine. This guy actually knows what he is talking about, he isn’t just the geek chic Diggnation star that we all know.

Staying put at number #2 is Blaine Cook & Joe Stump with Languages Don’t Scale

Blaine is the ex chief architect at twitter and Joe is the lead architect at Digg. This was an uber geekfeast marathon, each sentence more geekey than the last. Not sure what this says about me but I loved it. These two knew their subject and gave great presentations.

Holding on to that top spot is Francisco Tomalsky with his talk about Building Desktop Caliber Web Apps with Objective-J and Cappuccino. #1

You know when you hear someone who is genuinely enthused by what they do it makes everything seem so much better. If I didn’t know better I would say Fransisco jumps out of bed every day with a massive smile on his face because he is off to work at 280 North. My favourite talk of the conference.

I would also like to give honourable mention to Ben Hun from i can haz cheeze burger for his excellent talk on How to take your community to the next level.

And… one final big massive thanks to the guy on the AbilityNet stand who withstood my uncomfortable and overly extended barrage of accessibility questions. Unfortunatly I never got his card.

FOWA London 2008 - survived it and was inspired by it.

You have read comic of never-ending proportions, you have listened to the monster of hype that surrounds it, but one thing that is never really mentioned…

Is it any good for web designers… really?

Chrome is a new web browser from that little startup a few years ago called Google (stupid name it will never last, its not even a word!). First and foremost I will rant about the fact that their is no version for the mac. I have been testing it mostly through VMware Fusion so not a massive downer but I would prefer it to be native.

Two days ago I quit Safari and Firefox then made Chrome my browser of choice. All main development and browsing was done though this browser. Before I delve into the depths of why it helps or hinders the web design process I think I need to run through some of its features.

Features that are useful for web design

I spend far too much time with my hands on the keyboard to worry about the mouse. Shortcuts keys are productivity gold. In a very OS friendly way Google Chrome keeps to the conventions and goes with what you would expect. Unlike other big name companies, yes Adobe Photoshop on the Mac I am talking to you.

Ctrl+L - Gives focus to the address bar.
Ctrl+T - New tab, my most used shortcut.
Ctrl+U - View the page source.
Ctrl+F - Find.
Ctrl+Click a link - Opens the link in a new tab.
Alt+Click a link - Allows you to download the contents of the link.

The view source has code highlighting and line numbering. The links inside the source are clickable, again a great time saver.

Google Chrome has no status bar running along the bottom of the browser to take up precious web design real estate. When you rollover a link it pops up a small bar in this area. Its only visible when its needed. A few more pixels available for that unnecessarily large footer.

Dragging links from the page to make a new tab is all very cool but you can also do this with images. Great for testing and just that little bit fast than having to open the inspector every time.

Well that was a good list of features… I seem to be missing the main one. Oh yeah, because the browser is based on the Webkit rendering engine you get the super inspector. Simply right click on any element and get a barrage of helpful info from it like css/html. Its no Firebug but for a built in feature its a great addition.

A feature not so well publicised is the advanced memory page. Type ‘about:memory’ into the location bar and you get a better breakdown of the memory consumption plus it also shows you the memory of other browser too. A nice comparison but not massively useful for a web designer.

Incognito tab or porn mode

Yeah! I can now surf anonymously without any digital trail being left behind for any unsuspecting third party to see what kind of a deviant double life I lead. Apart from the added perk of my partner not discovering my hula hoop fetish the incognito tab is actually a fantastic tool for testing.

At BigRedCircle we build a lot of web apps as well and web sites. One thing that is needed often is to test these apps from the perspective of a new user. With the incognito tab open I can log into a web app using completely different user details and nothing is stored so my session in the regular tab is safe. This is a massive time saver and annoyance saver. No need to delete all of my browser cookies just for a quick test.

Not another browser to test in!

Great, another browser to take into consideration! The bain of a web designers existence. Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine so if you have built a site and it works in Safari 3 then it will almost certainly look the same in Chrome. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it in Chrome but I don’t ever see a need to have some crazy css hack to target this browser.

Is Chrome my weapon of choice in this armoire of web weapons?

No! But it is good. The best kind of browser is a fast one and Chrome sure is fast. As far as the browsers go it ticks a lot of the boxes but will it replace Firefox as my own personal development browser of choice? If the Web Developer Tool Bar and Firebug were available for Chrome it would. Again Firefox has become better than the sum of its parts and takes the lead but only by a whisker.

Although Google keep telling us that this is just the first Beta, maybe “we ain’t seen nothing yet”.

What do you think of the sliding home page? I think it looks like it should make the noise of a well oiled pulley system. How about you?

Pentaplexity Promo Site

Oh, in the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God! I stood back as I laid my eyes on for the first time what seemed to be…

An awesome looking web app! Yes its true, the long awaited (long awaited to a short queue of people) ppppost.com is now live and free for anyone to have a go. Frankenstein references aside, it has been a difficult day or two. I did actually launch it yesterday, but was then forced to withdraw it within ten minutes later. That was not good for the nerves. All of those original problem have been fixed and now its ready for public consumption. Let hope we haven’t created a monster, and it won’t destroy us either.

I need you

Now its up and functional, but by no means completed. We want you to have a play with it and tell us what you think. Test it out see how you enjoy the experience. Do you like the colours? Would you change how it works? You can suggest networks for use to add. All ideas, comments and criticisms are welcome. Comment away.

Is that it then! are you done?

No we are not finished, we just had the idea of getting it in front of the public’s all seeing eye as fast as we could. We want to get peoples opinions because we are not the only people using it and we don’t want to force our ideas on everyone without them letting us know if its good or not.

We are looking into more API’s and different social networks to add to ppppost, seeing what are the most useful and used networks around. We are looking at Plurk so this could be popping up soon.

We are refining the backend almost everyday and making it that little bit more efficient. The user experience is very important too and we are tweeking that as we go, nobody want a super app that nobody can use or an app that nobody enjoys using.

What are you waiting for PPPPOST.COM

And now it has a name… doesn’t it make you feel better about it now that you know it has a name.

Previously we decided to create a web app in 5 days which was code-named ‘Project SmallGreenTriangle’. Now it has its own name, its called ppppost. The name possibly gives a little more away about what the app will do. The graphic above is a representation of the style of the site. What do you think?

After a fairly chaotic week of client requests, website emergencies and iChat silly face games we finally got some time to work on ppppost.

We will launch ppppost as soon as it is functional (which wont be long, I promise!). This way we can get you, yes you, the user to give us feedback. In turn we will change, update, alter and add things from your suggestions. Everyone’s a winner.

It has been named. It has a proper URL. All that is left for us to do is get the thing live.

…and hope that Carsonifed’s new matt project is not the same :)