Kyan Blog

A plug-in free browsing future?

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:21:00 GMT

There is a vision of the future where browsing the web will no longer require third party plugins for videos and audio playback, that it will be native to the browser. All made possible through the adoption of HTML 5.

Google strongly supports this view and at its’ recent I/O conference it showcased numerous demos of html 5 and the capabilities it will bring to modern browsers – Web Monkey has a good write-up.

One example showed how you could browse YouTube without the requirement for Adobe Flash Player.

However, this vision will only become a reality if all of the various browser vendors adopt a common audio & video codec and this is where the problem lies.

It had been thought that the open source Ogg Theora codec would be the answer and would be part of the HTML 5 specification.

In fact Firefox 3.5 ships with full native support for media playback using the Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs. Google Chrome supports Ogg and the H.254 codec.

Other browsers vendors (Such as Apple) prefer the H.264 codec. Yet it requires costly patent licenses that both Mozilla and Opera do not want to pay.

Without getting into the details of the ins and outs of why the various browser vendors prefer specific codecs the bottom line is that no consensus on which codec should be implemented across all browsers has been agreed.

As a result the W3C have updated the draft HTML 5 spec to no longer recommend web browsers support audio and video playback using a specific codec.

Going forward the W3C have said that should a single codec emerge as the common codec they will consider updating the specification.

So a plug-in free browsing future hangs in the balance. For now.

UX London

jon@kyanmedia.com (Jon Lamb) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:51:00 GMT

We ventured into town recently to attend the ‘UX London’ user experience event organised by Clearleft.

Proceedings started with presentations by some heavyweights of web usability. Notable speakers were Jared Spool on creating an ‘intuitive’ website and Don Norman in favour of complexity.

On the second day, I went to a workshop on brainstorming techniques. In response to a fictional brief, our group scribbled ideas onto tons of post-it notes which we stuck to the walls. We then discussed ways to evaluate and organise our concepts using design principles.

Another interesting workshop was held by Jared Spool based around observations from his usability studies. He showed how to direct website visitors to relevant content by ensuring that links contain an information ‘scent’. He was a passionate speaker with strong views that provoked plenty of discussion amongst ourselves afterwards.

One of the best aspects of the event was meeting interesting people who’d come from far and wide. The meet-ups were informal and good for chatting and exchanging ideas over a drink.

Back in the studio, I’m looking forward to using some techniques I picked up at the event on forthcoming projects.

We love Ruby on Rails

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Fri, 29 May 2009 10:43:00 GMT

We’ve been using Ruby on Rails to build websites and web applications for a few years now. We might even consider ourselves one of the leading UK Ruby on Rails specialists.

We thought it was about time we wrote about reasons we use it and why it’s great for our clients.

Read all about our approach to Ruby on Rails development.

Random Typography Spot:
No. 03

gavin@kyanmedia.com (Gavin Shinfield) — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:46:00 GMT

Oh err… My local Post Office (Guildford High Street) has come over all touchy-feely. You no longer have to queue up, you take a delicatessan style ticket and relax on the red faux-leather banquette sofas. The good Burghers of Guildford however still prefer to form an orderly line unencumbered by bollards — Gawd bless ‘em.

To go alongside this new customer experience the PO designers have left their traditional typographic shackles behind and opted to use Chevin Bold, a cracking little font from Nick Cooke’s G-Type collection, available from purveyors of fine typefaces Font Shop

Not sure about the updated queuing system and furniture, but the typography’s great.

Lego vs Frank Lloyd Wright

gavin@kyanmedia.com (Gavin Shinfield) — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:24:00 GMT

This has got to be the most inspired lego franchise yet, it just makes so much sense.

How come no-one had thought of this before? Build the world’s most architecturally significant structures — in Lego!

Apparently there will be 6 models in the range, starting with the iconic Falling Water and the Guggenheim Museum. Here’s a vote for the Enis Brown House AKA Deckard’s appartment in Bladerunner.

Of course none of this sort of thing is new to afficianados of the original construction toy, Meccano — who come up with awesome concepts like a scale model of The Forth Railway Bridge

Now all we need is a Plasticine model of Mies Van Der Rohe’s Olympic Pavilion

So, just in case you were all wondering what to get me for Christmas…

[via PrarieMod]

Daily brand timeline portrait

piers@kyanmedia.com (Piers H Palmer) — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:34:00 GMT

I stumbled across a really interesting idea at Dear Jane Sample, for anyone interested in marketing and the power of brand; documenting your daily interaction with brands via a timeline.

I was so intrigued I decided to give it a go. You can see the results below. I stuck with the brands that were bubbling at the fore-front of my consciousness so it’s not a completely inclusive list and my online life has been kept stripped down. However an interesting exercise!

SEO success

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:36:00 GMT

Our article about optimising websites for search engines has now achieved number one status in Google for the term “Number one in Google” (View screenshot).

Read all about our SEO approach.

The Flip Mino

paul@kyanmedia.com (Paul Sturgess) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:46:00 GMT

Time for another random gadget review, the flip mino, it’s a tiny video camera and that’s it and that’s the beauty of it.

It fires up in seconds, you press the big red button to start recording and press it again to stop. So simple, so good. It’s light and will easily fit in your pocket.

You can’t replace the storage, it’s built in. You can’t adjust any recording settings like white-balance, contrast etc. You can only connect & charge via usb – but that means no external cables are required.

There are plenty of reviews out there from people who point to their digital cameras and mobile phones that already have video recording functionality. But they’re missing the point, try giving your phone or point & shoot to your tech illiterate friend and see if they can record video with it…

Kyan has recently invested in the brand new HD version so expect a Vimeo (or another video site) channel to spark into life in the near future featuring our shenanigans.

This is the epitome of a feature-less product that does one thing and it does it really well.

Very late to the party

steven@kyanmedia.com (Steven Wake) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:20:00 GMT

Of late I’ve been missing lots of comms from all over.

Eighteen months ago I signed up to Twitter to see what all the fuss was about – I very quickly decided I hated it. ‘I am doing this’, ‘I have just done that’ – why do I need to know this? Another form of communication that I had to keep tabs on. I already have IM, email and a mobile phone why would I choose to run another application to monitor something that I’m not interested in? BAH!

Whether I like it or not Twitter is becoming more and more important. All manner of individuals and organizations are now lending us a small window into their lives via Twitter. I am now seeing it everywhere. Acquisition rumors are rampant, the consensus is it is only a matter of time before one of the big boys sweeps in.

So when I received a free Mac app ‘EventBox’ courtesy of those kind guys at MacHeist, I decided to fight against my refusenik nature and have embarked on a little experiment.

I will try to keep an open mind, but I would like to know if my first assessment of Twitter were right or not. I will try and tweet regularly for about a week and find out.

I did a little research about available clients, updated my profile a little inspired @ormeski and @mrmatthamm and immersed myself in the Twitterverse.

I have installed Tweetie on my iPhone and will continue using EventBox for now, unless someone can suggest a better Mac client (the free-er, the better)?

Professor Wake will report back with his findings in another post.

I still refuse to use Facebook though.

Currency conversion in JS

robin@kyanmedia.com (Robin Whittleton) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:34:00 GMT

I recently had to make a couple of JavaScript currency conversion functions for a current project, so I thought I’d put them up here.

The project had a requirement for all currency values to be formatted as £xx,xxx.xx (commas to separate thousand blocks, and two digits of precision). The functions we came up with are:

function currency2number(currency) {
	return parseFloat(currency.slice(1).replace(/,/,''),10);
}
function number2currency(number) {
	number = Number(number).toFixed(2).split('.');
	number[0] = number[0].split("").reverse().join("");
	number[0] = number[0].match(/\d{1,3}/g).join(",");
	number[0] = number[0].split("").reverse().join("");
	return '£'+number[0] + '.' + number[1];
}

currency2number is simple enough – it removes the ‘£’ symbol and commas, and converts it from a string to a float. The only gotcha is passing in 10 as the radix; this prevents leading zeros causing the number to be parsed as octal, an old but recurrent JavaScript problem.

number2currency caused me a few more problems, the main one being that adding the comma separators has to start from the decimal point and work backwards. Let’s work through our solution:

First, take the number, wrap with with a Number object and use the toFixed method to get the correct number of decimal places
Next, split that number on the decimal place so we can work on the left hand side
Add the commas. Because we need to start from the right and work backwards it’s easier just to reverse the string and work from the left. Unfortunately Javascript lacks a String.reverse function. Best we can do is Array.reverse, so: split the string into an array, reverse it, rejoin it, find blocks of three numbers and join them with commas, split into an array again, reverse back to normal and rejoin. Phew!
Finally, simply tack on a £ symbol and join everything together

So there you go, hope this helps someone. If anyone’s got any better ways of doing this then definitely let us know.