Posts Tagged ‘development’

The Olympic Games have started and it’s been a pretty good show so far.  There’s a lot of events, and I like to follow certain sports, but I can’t really stay glued in front of the TV on several channels throughout the entire day.  I don’t think clients would be very happy.  I do like to check out their websites to keep up with the latest standings and results.  For as long as I can remember using Olympic websites they’ve all been pretty good.

They offer the overall package: good design, good user interface, and best of all good functionality.  I’m able to find what I need in a pretty effective manner.  It’s nice to see that over the course of many years, even larger sites have transitioned into XHTML/CSS.  It’s been a long process, but I think many companies and organizations have seen the benefit.

NBC’s Olympic website does a good job as well.  I think people put more time into websites that will see a lot of traffic in bursts.  Of course these websites probably get the bulk of their traffic hit during times like this so it’s a good chance to shine in front of a large audience.

Well, that’s all I really have.  Do you like the Olympic sites or do you think some things could be improved?

There was a post on TechCrunch yesterday regarding MySpace and Facebook’s inability to penetrate into a market like Japan.  In the post it says it took a long time for translation (Internationalization) to happen, but more importantly the site that works here in the US market isn’t catered to that of another global market.

With my clients now, it has become important to build sites with global aspects in mind.  Previously, clients just wanted an English based site, which for most businesses based in the US, is probably just fine.  For more complex projects like social networking, developing the site with this in mind early makes for a much easier task than trying to do it later.  This was seen by how long it took Facebook to get up to speed.  Translations take a long time so knowing what you want to do in the beginning can be a great help.

As for Localization this is a little bit harder.  There’s a lot more research that needs to take place in order for your site to look and feel just right for your target audience.

So the terminology Localization (L10n) and Internationalization (I18n) gets mixed up at times and people believe them to be the same thing.  In general clients think Localization is your website translated into another language so that the target country can understand the content. This is actually part of Internationalization. Internationalization covers language, number formatting, dates, times, currency, etc. Localization deals with catering the site to the target market. An example of this may be a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge here in America, but using a graphic of the Great Wall in China.

Overall, I think it’s great that people are looking to expand their site to different markets.  It’s also good that clients see that they want to do this up front which makes it a lot easier.  Don’t get me wrong though, the way we design sites, we can always do the translation after the project is complete, it just always seems to be planned better knowing beforehand.

Apple released the iTunes App Store last week for the iPhone and iPod Touch and I’ve spent some of the weekend using a variety of applications.  For the most part all of the applications run better than their web application counterparts which is expected.  Some of the applications are lacking features, but I’m sure as time progresses those features will be added and they will become complete miniturized versions of their desktop web based applications.

For a few months now I’ve been contemplating jumping into iPhone applications.  I don’t have any Mac OS X desktop experience.  I do have experience in several programming languages both computer and web based.  I’m thinking that this platform would be something worth looking into.  With all the lines in front of the Apple Stores each product launch, I see this platform being just as popular as the iPod.

I did apply for the program and was initially rejected.  I recieved a letter from Apple recently stating I can now join the program.  I’m sure all the other developers that applied were notified as well.  I think it’s going to take a lot of research, development, and testing and hopefully I have the time to take on the challenge.

I see it much more fulfilling to create native applications over the web applications for this platform.  Sure you are limited to the specific platform of Mac OS X for the iPhone, but I think that platform will grow much larger than other manufacturers we see today.

If I start dedicating more time and the company moves more into this sort of development, I’ll be sure to post.  Until then back to web development.

I’ve really gotten into Twitter lately and I’ve been able to incorporate it into my daily life as well as integrated into many of my blogs and websites.  I think it’s a great idea and a great service, but in terms of reliability not so great.  I’m hoping that their new investments will really help out the service because I think it brings a great deal of value to my sites as well as sites of others.

Recently since Twitter has been down, it’s slowed a lot of my websites down.  The connection needs to timeout and this can make a website seem extremely slow.  I suppose I could cache results more often, but that defeats the whole idea of Twitter where you want to know what’s going on right now.

I’ve read articles saying that the platform wasn’t really developed with scalability in mind and that they are looking to develop the system using a different architecture.

I think a lot of people don’t take this into consideration.  When I develop websites for clients many people don’t take that into consideration.  Sure if you are a small business with little website traffic or you have a small blog with a few writers it probably doesn’t make a difference.  If you are trying to build the next best social network however you need to consider it now or pay the consequences later.  You could always neglect it now, but look to change that in the future.  You would need to make sure that you do take care of it before you get as big as something like Twitter.

Now it’s a huge task for them since they have a ton of users using it all the time and they are looking to build reliability into a system thats already developed and running.  I hope they have the time and money to fix those issues because it really is a great service.  It would be a shame if I had to remove it from my sites completely.

Noupe had another great post yesterday that collects some of the most common bugs, hacks, and fixes that us front-end CSS developers use on a daily basis.  Those fixes are broken down in the following categories:

1. IE Bug Fixes
2. Centering A Block Element
3. Column Issues
4. CSS Positioning
5. CSS Float Concept
6. Easier Rounded Corner Solutions
7. CSS Form Issues
8. Worth Checking Out CSS

If you are trying to learn CSS or just wanted to review some of the tips, it’s a good article to check out.

Jon Skypes wrote up a CSS performance test across browsers comparing CSS styling by no styling, by tag, by class, by descender, and by child.  While for most cases everything seems pretty close as far as Safari and Firefox goes and of course IE is a whole lot slower.  In real world applications you would never really have that many styles in your style sheet so in most cases I don’t think you would see a difference in speed.  It is interesting to note as these web applications become more and more complex this may be an issue.  As of right now I think we’re pretty far off before we need to worry about it.

WWDC starts today and I’m looking forward to the keynote.  It’s probably one of the biggest shows Apple participates in and it outlines the future of where they plan to go as far as development.  While I should probably be at the convention, the price just doesn’t justify the kind of knowledge I’m looking to obtain.  I suppose now things are moving toward iPhone development, but now it will probably be more centered around OS X development as opposed to web development.

I am interested to see what new products will be released today.  I guess I’ll know in a couple of hours.

Noupe had a recent post some websites you shouldn’t have missed in May 2008.  It’s a list of 54 things to review covering a range of design, coding, to just some good resources to bookmark and keep for future reference.  I’m going to go through and give my top 10 from the list.

1. Pastel color menu with dynamic submenu using CSS - While I haven’t necessarily made pastel color menus, I have used this technique many times to create menus and submenus using list elements.  It keeps the code pretty clean and of course you need to have the small piece of JavaScript to support browsers like IE6.  One thing to be aware of is if you have a large elaborate menu scheme, this creates a lot of HTML in the header of your page.  If you are supporting JavaScript it might be a good idea to AJAX the appropriate data when the user takes action.
2. Yahoo! Design Pattern Library - I’ve been posting a lot about Yahoo.  I’ve just been really happy with the work they’ve produced over the last year.  This is a very good reference piece if you are wondering how something should be implemented or if you have a client that insists on one thing, you can show them that it’s been tested and proven to be best this way.
3. Which CSS Grid Framework Should You Use for Web Design? - I’ve been using a few of the Grids frameworks listed in this article, mostly the YUI Grids CSS for my work.  For the most part it gets the majority of what I want to do done faster and I feel like I’m a step ahead when I’m creating a site.  Good clean CSS is what we strive to create and these libraries make it easier for us to do that.
4. Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs - While I don’t do too much design work personally, there are times when I do and I think that’s one area in my work that I can learn more and improve.  It’s always been pretty difficult for me to design things.  I guess I just don’t have enough creativity.  This article describes the rule of thirds when designing and this fits in well if you are using a Grids library.  You can work together with your front end developers and designers to create great looking layouts and save some time in the process.
5. Free 278 Page PDF eBook- The Photoshop Anthology - I haven’t read the entire book yet, but it looks like a good read.  There’s only a limited amount of time left if you want to sign up and download.
6. Find Similar Users on del.icio.us - I’ve really gotten into del.icio.us lately and I think it’s kind of cool to see who has similar interests as you.  I’m not one of those social network stalkers though.
7. 45+ Free Premium WordPress Themes with Magazine or Grid Layouts - There are some great looking designs in this collection.  Just glancing over them has given me some inspiration on some future projects.
8. 36 Cool Business Cards You Should’ve Seen - I’ve been looking for some new business cards since I formed the LLC.  I’ll have to take some more time to come up with something cool.
9. 30 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Development - I saw this posted in Digg the other day.  I saved it to my bookmarks.  It’s a great resource for web development.
10. SEO Guide for Designers - While I don’t like to take on too many SEO projects anymore, this is a good resource for best practices.  I don’t like taking the projects on because there are no guarantees in that market and if someone says they can guarantee something they probably aren’t doing it white hat style.

So that’s my top 10 from Noupe’s post.  If you have any questions for me or any comments about the resource, let me know.

I’ve been waiting for Versions to come out for about a year now.  I have been using Subversion for a couple years now and there really hasn’t been any clients for the Mac that I have given me the Mac experience I have been used to in quite a few of my other applications.  I had tried ZigVersion a while back and I don’t know if it’s changed much, but it didn’t work out so well for me.  It wasn’t a bad experience, it just wasn’t what I was looking for.  On the PC side, I use TortoiseSVN, but the Mac-like client didn’t seem to function as well as the PC.  Since then I’ve been using SmartSVN.  This has so far worked out the best for me, but I don’t really care for the interface and since it’s a Java app it doesn’t seem to play well with Spaces.

I was looking for something better and I saw a post on TUAW about a year ago and decided to sign up for the mailing list.  Today I saw another post that the beta had been released so I thought I would try it out.  I loaded all my current repositories into the client and everything seemed to work okay today.  The interface was new to me, but after a short while I was able to get used to where everything is located.
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The official Webby Awards were announced.  For those of those not familiar, it’s like the Oscars for web development.  There’s some big names and some small names in there as well.  Some of the companies I worked for this year have been honored by the organization.

If you want to see some excellent websites or are looking to build something new and are looking for inspiration, this is a good place to start.  Why not review the best of the best?

http://www.webbyawards.com/