Steelso V6.0

[TAG]Adobe[/TAG] launched [TAG]Flex 2[/TAG] today and we’re very excited about the potential for creating fantastic, intuitive [TAG]Internet experiences[/TAG]. Marc has been already working with the beta software and created a great little application that we’ll be using for a client shortly. The fruits of that will be displayed as soon as possible.

With Flex looking good and using various [TAG]ajax development[/TAG] tools the future looks bright. What does this fancy chat mean for you? An Internet experience that helps you get to your information faster. It’s all looking good.

steelso :: Jun.28.2006 :: Clients, Cool, Flash, Rich Internet Applications, Thoughts, biscuitmedia, biscuitmedia web design :: No Comments »

This Virtual Earth thing is interesting but is it useful? Another example of Ajax in action.

steelso :: Mar.01.2006 :: Rich Internet Applications, Thoughts :: 3 Comments »

Four websites in one week? No wonder we’re off to the pub tonight! Well it’s because of Jamie’s birthday but it doesn’t harm us to celebrate the four websites last week either. You can find out more about the websites, including the muse website, in our web news section.

We’re also in the final stages of going through the first revision of our own website. Since the launch three months ago we’ve had a fantastic amount of positive feedback. Even the crtical feedback has been constructive. As a company that likes to practice what we preach we’re taking those comments and making the website a wee bit more friendly and adding additional content in some current sections. It’s still a couple of days away and we’re still wondering if the phrase “View Our Past Hot Action” is acceptable. Find out first if we put it in by signing on to our mailing list that you can access via the news page.

Lots of cool stuff. Macromedia Labs was launched yesterday and I downloded the new framework for Flex, the technology that I discussed for creating rich internet applications. So far I’m impressed and we’re looking forward to getting right in about it to see just what we can do to make our client’s customer’s that wee bitty richer. That’ll give something for Stuart to get his teeth into when he starts tomorrow.

A shout out to those people who were on my residential course last weekend at a nice hotel with terrible, terrible service. It was a great weekend, hilarious even. It was good to meet 12 or so lovely people, each one made me laugh very, very hard. Top notch. I didn’t get to my bed until at least 4am which made learning the next day some what of a challenge. Still if it wasn’t for everyone’s good humour, insight and interest I wouldn’t have learned a thing. Thanks guys and see you all next week.

What else? Well I’m hoping to announce four new clients by the end of the month, stay tuned for that, and I have been invited to Dolph’s birthday celebrations in Glasgow. It’s the glamour, the only reason I do this job, the glamour. Networking event Friday morning, the Angel’s Ambulance on Friday night as well as Sean’s birthday, grandparent’s 60th Wedding Anniversary on Sunday, Mr Murray on Monday and all other sorts of stuff next week.

And I’m waning on Lost. Has Lost jumped the shark?

Take it easy,
S

steelso :: Oct.18.2005 :: Rich Internet Applications, Social, TV, Video, biscuitmedia web design, new clients :: 2 Comments »

Allan and Jamie have both mentioned the Flex application that we created for our client, Glasgow Film Office. It’s was our first delve into the world of Rich Internet Applications and Allan did an outstanding job getting to grips with it. It was a very interesting process for both designers and developers to get their heads around, mostly due to the amazing flexibility within the Flex framework.

But wait! What the hell is a Rich Internet thingie? Flex? You promised no jargon Steelso. Ok, ok…

Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) is a method of making complex things simple. The web was designed initially to retrieve documents so as time has run on the demands on what can be done within a basic webpage have been pushed. Complex interactions are not best suited to the web. Imagine that you needed to use Excel and you could only use it on the web. Imagine that every time that you entered a number or a calculation that the page had to refresh before you got the result of your query. Imagine doing that 10, 20, 100times. It would turn you to drink!

What RIA’s do is try to make complicated interaction with a webpage easier. Imagine, if you will that you’re booking your flight with Easyjet. Imagine now that rather than clicking from page to page that you could do it all on one page, no click to the next page, no waiting, it feels like software in your browser. That’s a RIA. Have a look at this shopping cart example.

The shopping cart example is cool, it lets you change the view of the page, choose your price bracket, drag and drop items into the checkout area. And not once does it appear to go to page to page to page.

So what?

Well the less you have to click and wait for the impact of your click to have effect the more likely that you are going to stay on the website and achieve a goal. The experience becomes better, richer.

There are a number of ways to produce RIA’s. This is the presentation layer of the RIA. We’ve decided to jump in with Flex but other RIA’s are created using other technologies. Each have their merits, each have their nippy bits. We like Flex.

The application that we created for the GFO was a locations database. It was a big old beast of an app when we originally built it, the HTML process was about 10-12 pages. However it worked but it was difficult and tricky to try and work out just what was going on when and where.

When the GFO website was being redesigned it was agreed that we wanted to make the locations open to the public but it couldn’t work the way it was now, it was just to complicated. So how did we start?

Tune in next time as I go into the challenge of shifting mindsets and explaining how things work to people who don’t know how things work.

Cheers,
Stewart

steelso :: Jul.25.2005 :: Flash, Rich Internet Applications, biscuitmedia :: 1 Comment »