Better Together is Back

Better Together has returned for 2011, and is now bigger, deep fried and more chocolatey.

Better Together is a nationwide campaign which aims to build support for hundreds of charities, clubs and associations across the country by encouraging the public to support these good causes and make a difference in their communities.

There's a lot to do in Better Together.

3 competitions, voting, facebook, videos, heroes, donations and more.

Porting Widgets to Nokia S40

Another platform, another list of quirks.  With Nokia's Create for Millions competition, there was finally a compelling reason to look at the Series 40 platform. These somewhat ubiquitous phones are not smartphones. They are not even kinda-smart, or smart-ish. They are feature-phones. That means that they do more than make calls, but if you come from the position of building tools for smart phones, these babies appear woefully underpowered.

Nokia is pushing their ability to run "web apps", which on the face of it looks like something similar to the WRT for Symbian, but once you delve in under the hood, the architecture of it all is very different, and once again, you're very limited in what you can do. To do anything funky, like use the camera or the GPS, you need to use Java. Fair enough, but I want to leverage the investment I've made so far into widgets based upon web standards.

Why PNG is a force for evil

PNG images are a thing of beauty. Alpha transparency and properly antialiased curves mean that designers can mix and match beautiful images, overlaying them and creating splendid collages, striking break-outs and visual treats a-plenty. We can now also use images with transparent backgrounds with impunity, safe in the knowledge that we will not be left with a nasty bounding box of background colour and we do not have to worry.

Latest Project: Governance Code

www.governancecode.ie was unveiled on Monday 16 May to some very positive feedback. It is a site whose mission is to convey the complex and daunting detail of a code of good governance for community and voluntary organisations. Not very sexy, you might say, but such was the challenge!

The crux of the Governance Code lies in the concept of proportionality, i.e. that a small, low budget volunteer run organisation is markedly different from a big, complex multinational aid agency. Naturally, the requirements for each of those two types of organisations would be very different. Therefore, a big requirement of the site was to allow a user to view the code through a mask or lens, to let them see just enough to grasp at a time, and to hide from them anything which is irrelevant to their organisation.

The site uses tabs and carousels heavily to achieve this sort of "blinkered view" effect. A good smattering of JQuery and lots of variables to track location and state means a smooth ride for the user, and some dynamic loading of hidden tabs means that the site is always responsive. Speed was not an official requirement of the project, but rather a personal one. I've gotten bored far too often lately waiting for cumbersome sites to load.  In our tests the site was loading in around 0.6 seconds, which keeps me happy.

Bring back 1995 - all is forgiven

I've been doing a fair bit of mobile browsing on my shiny, ever so beautiful E7 lately. One thing that you really notice, despite the wonder that is surfing the net on the bus, is download speed. When a page loads, my browser displays a little gauge, showing the quantity of data that has been downloaded so far, and roughly how much is still to go before the page is loaded. And what really becomes apparent is that many, many sites have just become huge, bloated, sloths.

New mobile app - Cash Tracker

We're proud to announce the release of our fifth mobile widget title: Cash Tracker.

Cash Tracker lets you track your personal spending habits.  Cash Tracker makes it convenient to enter the details of a purchase at or after the point of sale, so that you never forget to account for any item.

Summaries, totals, spending categories and recent transaction history all combine to provide a complete view of your spending habits and patterns.  A handy monthly budget tracker also lets you keep tabs on how much you have left 'till pay day! Export your data from the app to get it emailed to you in a handy CSV list so you can import it into other applications.

Choosing a web developer

I recently had the privilege of helping a client choose a web development company.  It was quite a rewarding task because - even though it means by definition that I don't get the development job - it's great to look at the whole selection process from a new angle. Having hired and been hired, it was new to be objectively assessing other companies and translating the techno-babble into real English that my clients could understand. 

I was brought in, after brief consultation on the writing of the tender documents, to look at and compare the different tenders and then to lead interviews with the candidates. I saw my role chiefly as that of a facilitator and translator. There was little point in my choosing a company for the client: it was they who would need to be able to work with the chosen company. My job was to make that choice work.

Just Say NO, Kids!

This Dilbert cartoon really hit home.  I've posted it here to remind me to think before obeying my natural inclination to say "yes".  With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.  You have to ask yourself: is what you've just been asked to put on that web page really a good idea?  Web designers need to remember that they are the professionals, hired as much for advice and insight as their ability to push pixels.