For instance, I’ve got a friend who used to work as a DJ, and he is incapable of going into a club or bar without immediately checking out the equipment used there and seeing how it’s set up. Equally, it’s impossible for me not to get advice from anyone who’s ever worked behind a bar whenever I make a complete hash of trying to pour a drink into a glass without creating enough head to have my own foam party.

The environment that I’ve mainly worked in (digital agencies) means that it’s also against the law of nature for me to have a website open in front of me without some designer or even project manager make some comment about how good or hideous the design or layout is. At which I can only shrug my shoulders and say I don’t really care how it looks as I’m a back-end developer (insert your own joke here) and as long as it works I’m happy.

Now, when I come across sites that don’t work properly, a variety of thoughts go through my head, foremost among them is deciding how annoyed to be at the incompetence of the developers/testers of the site to bring a halt to my journey so abruptly. Two factors govern how many times I scream at the monitor that I could code better than that; one, deciding whether the site belongs to a small shop and probably maintained by novice self taught coders using a variety of help manuals or a large corporation with enough resources to keep a whole army of programmers on. If I decide on the former then most of the time I would chuckle to myself, make an ‘ah bless’ comment and then move on. However, if it’s the latter then I would tut loudly and start making a mental list of what coding error could have possibly caused the problem.

The length of this list would be determined by my second factor, whether the error is actually an error or whether the site just doesn’t do what you or a 1 year old would expect it to. If it’s an error, then I would move on fairly quickly, as even programmers are human and will make mistakes. However, if it’s more of a case of extreme bad planning and thought then I get really annoyed. The prime example of which is the Transport for London site (TFL), (for those of you aren’t in London and really couldn’t care less about what happens inside it, tough) earlier this summer a cycle hire scheme was launched and you can now buy access on their site in order to use it. All well and good, you pay either £1, £5 or £45 for a day, week or year’s access respectively, great. There is an option when you sign up to decide whether you want to automatically renew your access subscription as it expires, useful, but I decided not to at the time. However, being human and therefore also certainly likely to change my mind I later decided that I would like to enable this option. So I logged into my account, full of hope and confidence and found out that the system wouldn’t let me do this one simple thing! Investigating further, it appears that once my subscription is expired the system will no longer let me alter settings in my account, and that I would have to ring up TFL and get someone there to do it!

To me, this is just mind boggling, firstly, what sort of lazy programming (and testing) let this bug get released into the world? My head is full of images of lines of code gone wrong that would lead to this. Secondly, seeing as it’s possible for their customer service team to do this at their end, it would suggest that the core functionality of the site allows this function, and it’s just the customer facing website that is defective. In which case, it’s been over 6 months since the scheme was launched and this problem reported, so why is it not fixed!? We are talking about TFL, a large corporation with a pretty hefty budget at its disposal for this sort of thing and not a corner shop with a shoestring budget. Plus, in my head, unless it’s such a monumentally badly coded site, it really shouldn’t be that difficult to fix.

When IE6 was first released in late 2001 it was received with great enthusiasm and relief by a development community that was bloodied and battered by the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. It was the golden child; the browser that finally killed the beast that was Netscape 4.

That was then, this is now. When compared to modern browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, IE6 is old, buggy, insecure, and doesn’t fully support all the fancy stuff we do today with CSS and Javascript.

Why, when IE9 is just around the corner, do we need to continue to support it? Is it because clients are insisting that their sites need to work in IE6 in the same way they do in modern browsers? Is it because the target audience are likely to be using IE6? If that’s the case then we need to educate our clients and their target audience about the limitations of IE6. We need to get them to upgrade or switch to a more modern browser if they want to experience what the web is capable of today. They won’t get that with graceful degradation.

With the arrival of HTML5 and CSS3 it’s time to look forwards, not backwards. It’s time to say goodbye to IE6.

Client: So how’s the reverse ratchet flux capacitor engagement system actually going to work?
Me: Magic
Client: Great, let’s build it.

I could substitute the word Magic with a details of how the flux capacitor engagement system will use a quantum tri-state to maintain a parallax field while pushing phased particles through a cloud substrate but the client really doesn’t care.  That’s the wonderful thing about technology and perception of technology these days.  People’s expectations are higher, yes, but people generally have much more trust in technology’s ability to perform.

One of my first commercial web applications was on online jobs site for a national newspaper that allowed recruiters to upload job postings and users to search and view them.  Back in 2001 this required what seemed like endless meetings to discuss and document the technical platform.  Everything from network redundancy and fault tolerance to the architecture of the COM components that would be written was documented and had to be reviewed and signed-off by the client. We probably spent as much time writing technical documentation as we did writing code – and the client was happy to pay for it to get the reassurance they required and the belief that should something go wrong, they had their arse covered!

Fast forward to 2010 and although now longer involved with the same national newspaper, similar scale projects for similar clients no longer require anything like that level of technical documentation.  That’s not to say that similar planning exercises do not happen behind the scenes, they do, it’s just that clients tend not to want to spend their money on reams of documentation that will never get read, and, more importantly, have much more confidence in technology’s ability to deliver.  They no longer have the need to understand (or even try to understand) the ‘how’, and are happy to concentrate on the ‘why’ and the ‘when’.  Any reassurance or due-diligence required is (and should be) focused on usability and design rather than technical ability.

Very few people try and understand how iPlayer works, or how Facebook uses memcached to achieve such a high level of performance, they are happy to accept that they ‘just work’, or are, as I like to put it, ‘Magic’!

It goes without saying, there are important phenomenological issues that media are trying to address: to start with, we can think of perception and how perception works. With time, I will address all specific aspects of it in detail.

For thousands of years, meaningful interaction was only and necessarily “real time” and its boundaries were immediately “spatial”. When written language came, mankind had the chance to delay the fruition of content virtually forever, but at the same time some spatial boundaries remained. Think of how text was ritually read, being it religious (the Koran, the Bible are public readings), entertaining (minstrels and all the “sharing” and “likes” they did will deserve a dedicated post), scientific (remember the Peripatetics? Yep, that was “social” learning).

Then, with better education and media, content fruition turned a-spatial: with the internet, this is actually true in the real sense (where is your tweet?). But we went from interaction (the Peripatetics again, and Socrates before them, with Plato going as far as to write as if people were discussing, quite in line with his personal issues with representation) to information.

As we know, making good use of information implies discussion and dialogue –turning information into knowledge- and that is potentially achievable with Twitter, Facebook and the like.

There are some things missing, which go back to phenomenology: interaction is inherently multi sensorial. Ok, we created “multimedia”. Obviously there are some senses we haven’t approached yet and I let you think of which ones are missing, although I guess you wouldn’t talk to an unbearably stinking person.

Now with the creation of spatial boundaries to pluri-directional real-time information we are a bit closer to the Peripatetics (I won’t mention them again, I promise) but in some way no one is sure whether the right direction is to create digital surrogates of real life rituals or creating new functional equivalents (I will give a Luhmann-style reading of digital media soon, I promise).

Question: What do you think about the geographic extensions of social media (Foursquare, Facebook places, etc.)? Are they here to make our interactions more meaningful (1) or are they another piece of information (2)?

During some of our researches at Global Beach, we analyse perception schemata to enhance conversion; and it is more and more clear that some of our results are universal, and that a universal digital grammar could actually exist. The true relationship between the digital and non-digital grammar is yet to be discovered, and this is an effort common to all digital media players. When we design a website we aren’t doing anything different (both theoretically and practically) from what social media are doing.

Going to the roots of interaction.

Peter bought this earlier in the year but didn’t get on with it because it was just too slow to do anything useful on.  He’s now upgraded to a macbook air (it’s a hard at the top isn’t it!) so I thought I’d have a play around with this.

The initial idea was to stick Ubuntu on it as a few others have done and after some messing about with USB keys (this thing’s got no optical drive) we configured a PXE boot server and got it to boot from the network and install Ubuntu – result!

Well, more of a no score draw really…  Initially the display doesn’t run at the almost impossible to see 1600 x 768 so you have to do some play\ing around as detailed by Richard Walker on his blog.  Once that’s all up and running it’s ok but the display is painfully slow and video’s are just unwatchable.  Not so much of a problem in itself but combined with the fact  that suspend/resume and the HSPDA/GPRS modem don’t play ball meant that Ubuntu was for the bin.

I was tempted to try OS X but apart from the fact it’s not legal, I suspect lots of pain and a result which is no better than Ubuntu (and probably worse).

So, back to Windows it was.  A word of warning here:  Do not suspend the machine halfway through the ‘recovery’ process!  Obvious really, but after waiting 2 hours for it to complete I wanted to go home!  The result was a machine that booted into Vista, displayed a message that system configuration couldn’t complete and then restarted.  Booting to safe mode didn’t solve the problem either.

Anyway, to cut a long story shorter, some more playing around with PXE and the WAIK resulted in a network boot server that wouldn’t quite install Windows and a 4GB USB key that wouldn’t format anymore (sorry Peter).  Trying to make a bootable USB key with the Win 7 ISO should be easy but for some reason it just wasn’t.

Then on Wednesday there appeared on my desk something that looked like it had been made in a shed 10 years ago from components bought in Maplin.  In actual fact it was an external USB optical drive, dusted off from the ‘archive’ of our CTO.  2 minutes later and I’m installing Windows 7 and we’re cooking with gas.

Well almost.  You have to do a fair amount of hacking around to get everything to work as detailed in this great windows 7 install guide and I had to download a different WAN card driver from option but so far so good.  I’ve got a vodafone SIM in the slot and it all ‘just works’.

It’s not rocket fast but it’s still a pretty impressive device, I’m now on the tube and literally put it in my pocket for the walk between the mainline and the underground, it’s that small. If only Apple would make something similar my life would be complete!

Next stop, install some real software, configure my Macbook for VNC so I can leave it in the office and remote into it from this, oh and swap the hard drive for an SSD – that should speed things up a bit.

Open Source Social Media Browser
If you are a social media hound you probably have Flock, a web browser full of extensions and other tools for interacting on the web. Flock is an open source web browser built on the same Mozilla architecture that Firefox is built on so many of Flock’s features should be familiar, like tab-based browsing and the ability to add extensions. However, there are a number of cool new features that appeal to the social networking crowd.

http://www.flock.com

It’s not because it’s sexy and shiny and plays music and lets you watch YouTube and play great games and read blogs and twitter.

It’s not because the touch screen keyboard is pretty good and the accelerometers mean it automatically rotates the screen when you turn it over.

It’s not because the location services and built-in GPS mean it knows where you are and can do cool things with maps and friend/restaurant locators.

It’s definitely not because of the quality of the camera or the life of the battery or the slightly flaky exchange server push mail integration.

Nope, it’s more fundamental than that.

Using the iPhone is relaxing.  Seriously.  The gestures, the screen transitions, the responsiveness all combine to make a calming user experience.  No other mobile device manages to achieve this: The Blackberry is a tense fiddle of scroll wheels or mini track-ball followed by cramped two-thumb typing, all Windows Mobile devices I’ve used are sluggish and require almost pin-point accuracy with a small stick and every Nokia, Motorola or Sony Ericcson I’ve ever used has had a counter-intuitive interface a predictive text system that has made me want to smash it against the nearest solid object.

Just about the only thing that’s frustrated me about the iPhone in the last week has been level 64 on Blocked.

Creative Director, Matt Conn, came up with the overall creative and decided the best way to proceed was to work closely with specialists Incentivated who provided the underlying technology and speed to market.

To quote the MMA:

“This seriously heavy-weight mobile advertising campaign directed traffic to a purpose built mobile Internet site from where Jaguar enthusiasts could find out details of the new car, download video clips, wallpapers and the TV ad, as well as find their nearest dealer and order an email brochure to be sent to their PC (directing traffic to the even richer website).

The campaign hot all the right notes with the tech-savvy target audience, being fully optimized for all handsets, including Smartphones and iPhones, and was in keeping with the luxury identity of the Jaguar brand. With 55 million impressions booked (and some still to run) across a range of sites including MSN mobile, Yahoo! mobile and Cars.mobi, this is believed to be one of the world’s biggest mobile advertising campaigns to date.”

Praise indeed! See for yourself at www.jaguarxf.mobi

Last week Mozilla Labs announced Geode, a geolocation add-on to Firefox 3.

Geode gives the ability for websites to gain access to your location without the use of GPS. Instead it uses Skyhook’s Loki technology, which uses WiFi to determine your location within a second and with an accuracy of about 10-20 meters. Whist this won’t work in remote areas, it does however have a big advantage over GPS. It works inside buildings! No longer do you have to be outside to get location based services.

The example at azarask.in/local/ found 522 Fulham road straight away without me doing anything, so clearly it works.

Whilst finding restaurants does have its uses, I’m sure we’ll start to see some better applications of the technology soon.

Let me know if you find any.