A new way to advertise
Ever wondered what might happen to the print industry?
A clever company called blippAR may have just got the answer. You download an app to your smartphone, find an advert which is participating in a new way of consumer technology. Then use the app to reveal what is hidden in a virtual world. Confused. I was until I saw it in action, check out the video here.
I am always impressed with the rate that our industry is progressing, but this is a little gem for clients wanting something different or special.
icloud
The icloud is brilliant working along side the new IOS 5 platform. Biased but true. You take a picture on your iphone and instantly its stored in the cloud. You cant find your iphone – it tells you where you left it. The icloud interface on the website is cool too. I hope that they will develop more web apps to feature here. I would like to see music on the icloud, a place where you can store your favourite songs and play them.
Previously I wrote about cloud storage and talked about zumo drive and dropbox. There is now countless of free gigabytes of free storage up there, you just need to know where to look. So there is now no excuse for lost photos, lost music or even lost documents.
Online storage is the way forward!
Steve jobs career
Just found this video of Steve jobs lifetime career all wrapped up in 2 mins
An interesting look into the fight against health and competition. He has done a lot for the apple and I hope that the public will have faith in his sucessor, so that apple can continue as a great brand.
Steve Jobs and the Apple Factory
Another great animation to share with you.
A great video by college humour about the control that apple is taking on the world. With apple now bigger than microsoft and intel combined I thought it was very app.
Taking full advantage of your web browsers
A lot of people ask me how do they do that?
Have you ever wondered how someone has created something on the web? If the answer is yes then this blog might be of some use to you. I use a couple of tools to help me work out how a piece of design was built. The first is in your web browser is to view source. This can be done by going to (in Firefox) view – page source or “apple u” for short. This may be different if you are using different browsers etc.
Another way to work it all out is by using add-ons. Firefox comes with plenty of add-ons such as firebug etc. I use firebug, it means that you can high light various parts of the site and view the actual code for that part. You can also find keywords as if you were doing a search in Word. Confusing – it is a bit but can be very handy for debugging etc. However I bit of advice this will not work on flash and you will need the fla’s (original files) to sort that out directly.
To add firebug go to http://getfirebug.com/ and install it for free
How do you stay in touch?
There are various people out there with great knowledge of the digital world and sometimes its hard to keep a track of such a fast moving industry. Im going to give you heads up and tell you who I use and why.
Lets start with smashing magazine. They are primarily a blog site with great resources for trends, tutorials and just pure web knowledge. You can visit there site here. I use them for inspiration as well.
Mashable on the other hand are great for keeping me up to date with social trends and gadgets, which is very handy in my line of work. They also have an iPhone app which keeps the user inundated with the latest news. If you want to have a great read on social gadget trends then visit there website here
Neither site is better than the other they both help me to keep in touch and up to date – enjoy!
User Experience
UX for short is what web designers commonly know it as. A users experience can be landing on a home page to using an iPhone app to even working there way through an operating system. All of which I have designed in some form or another.
It is for all intense purposes a guide from start to finish through a piece of design. It can be simple or very confusing. All are user experiences’ in some form or another. On a personal level the easiest and simplest will deliver the best results. Planning is key and I like to use a program called Mockflow which is intergrated with gmail.
A bit of a sidetrack but Mockflow is a wireframe application which lets the user guide through a simple outline of the product. I have used these for websites and operating systems. It sorts out the confusions and lets the clients know what to expect. All in all makes for a quick and easy signoff process.
User experience or UX – my recommendations are keep it clean, simple and try not to get them lost!
flash stickman
I had to share this very clever animation with you. Animator vs animation
I know this looks like some poor designer who is bored, but I believe it couldn’t be further from the truth. It looks like that there has been some integral planning involved to deliver a fun and inspiring animation.
cloud storage
Cloud computing has become an everyday occurrence for most of us. But did you know that the idea started back in 1960? Unbelievable I know!
I just wanted to share with you ways in which we can store data etc. online. Most of us are familiar with the likes of facebook, youtube and flickr. I wanted to draw your attention to some alternatives – zumo drive / zumo cast and dropbox.
Zumo drive / zumo cast are compatible with mac and windows. They have iPhone and Android apps available too. Essentially it is a hardrive in the clouds, you can put anything up there. Of course there is a limit, but there is a paid for option as well, see http://www.zumodrive.com/. I think that the clever side of zumo drive is its sister company zumo cast, giving the ability for a user to stream media directly to there iPhone from there computer. See for yourself at http://www.zumocast.com/ - just brilliant!
Dropbox on the other hand is a great bit of online syncing storage, compatible like zumo. http://www.dropbox.com/. It is free like Zumo but till a certain extent. They have a great sharing community for files and we often use it in the office as a quick go between the macs. Its easy to use and very user friendly.
I would recommend both, actually have both – I use them equally as a great way to share files and keep items safe out of the home and office.
FBML and being social
FBML is the code language set for facebook, it is similar to html but with a couple of extra little add-ons. It means that you can now have a mini web page within facebook.
Promoting your business on facebook is the future. If this is of some interest to you, then get in contact either on the home page or by filling out the message box below, and I will gladly help you in your designs and coding to get the best possible creative for you and your business. At the same time, why not incorporate rss feeds and twitter apps, making facebook the hub of all your social marketing. Not only can I help here but also across other platforms, with other social areas like linkedin.
So get in contact and start benefiting!