So, I have recently been developing the homepage for our new website, and after completing the front end, we decided to see how it would look and work on the iPad. After testing it to make sure it looked fantastic, the iPad was left on my desk so I decided to take a break from staring at my computer and take a look at the iPad and see what all the fuss is about.

After playing about for a couple of minutes with the games someone had put on there I found an app called sketch book pro and decided to see what it could do. The options available in the app are pretty cool, a variety of brushes, pens, pencils and all the colours of the rainbow.

 Anyways, 5 minutes later I arrived at this:

Last week was a long one, everyone waiting patiently for the bank holiday to arrive.

It seemed the world decided to enhance their 3 day holiday with an extra day, but luckily the team was still string within Creative Jar.

As the votes were gathered for Most Excellent Person, it was clear that two people had impressed the team this week.

But, there was only one winner and that was

Nathan Burn

Picnik, if you haven't googled it by now, lets you edit your photos. I, for one, love photography and I think maybe one of the best parts of the art, is being able to show your work off  but, that’s not all you can do with this site.

I was set a few hours to look through the site, so I could come up with something to write about and you know what...I was impressed. 

Think flickr and very a cut down version of Photoshop 7, mix them up and Picnik is what you get. It’s a really intuitive little site, enabling the user to edit photos (to a basic level) and then to post them online for the others to see. 

It doesn't stop there, thanks to its speedy server, you can upload photos, then edit and save them back on your desktop in minutes. Not happy with your photo's? Look for inspiration on the homepage by following the featured photographers. 

If you love your photo's, print them to canvas or that special office mug you been longing for, all with a few clicks of a button. 

There is only one draw back...unfortunately Picnik is powered by Flash and Flash being Flash it’s not supported on the iPhone, or iPad which is a bit of disappointment...but hey life goes on!

I am not gonna chat endlessly about Picnik and frankly I ran out of thing to say. But I will say this; if you are interested in photography or just wanna upload photos with your friends quick and easily, then Picnik is for you. 

Go on have a look (picnik.com) you know you want too!

Location-based social networking is experiencing a boom and now entering the lives of far more people than ever before… but what is it? The examples below are based on the current Foursquare model.

To put it simply the premise is that an individual 'checks-in' to a specific location, whether it be a business, restaurant, holiday destination etc. and collects points in doing so. Points are scored and badges unlocked dependant on the amount of times a location is visited. Users can post notes and advice based on each location. For example: 'Dave's Fish & Chips' would be your entry and your comment could be something along the lines of "Try the Steak and Potato pie, homemade and great tasting".

There are extra features including:

• • Location aware searches
• • Friend searches and connections

OK, so it's a game? Yes and No. It depends on what you wish to use it for. As a user I have absolutely no interest in the collecting of badges or playing a game. I want to use the application to give me real information that will assist me in a present situation. There are people who love the game aspect of the concept and spend a huge amount of time in becoming a 'mayor' of their local Tesco.

Examples of how a location-based social network can assist an individual rely on the quality of the data input. I have only ever posted twice within the Foursquare environment promoting a Chinese restaurant who serves Gluten-free food. To me this is an extremely useful piece of information that can be searched for within the application. There are currently too many people posting irrelevant entries for me to want to open up the application on a regular basis.

That said this form of social networking can be huge for businesses (but can be sabotaged). Starbuck's use Foursquare to generate custom by offering discounts based on check-ins to their outlets in the US. A number of other large companies have given away free products to the first 'X' amount of people to check-in  at specific locations. So for businesses it's a great marketing tool that generates leads for pretty much no outlay.

It will be interesting to see how the recently announced (and launched in the US) Facebook Places competes with Foursquare (currently you will be able to push check-ins from Foursquare to Facebook Places). One interesting addition is that by adding a business via Facebook Places a Facebook Page is automatically generated, allowing you to target people who like your business page.

I think for the time being, especially in the UK, location-based social networking is still a wait and see. It is extremely reliant on the quality of data and businesses jumping onboard. Possibly when Facebook Places hits the UK we will start to see a positive adoption of the technology, especially as businesses realise that amount of people they have at their Facebook doorstep.

I thought that hell would have frozen over long before I ever blog about a Microsoft product, let alone Internet Explorer, let alone looking forward to it, but here I am - blogging about Internet Explorer 9, the latest soon-to-be-released version of Internet Explorer.

Even though the much improved Internet Explorer 8 was only released over a year ago in March 2009, Microsoft are already hard at work (and not too far off releasing) version 9 of their controversial browser application. You can even download the latest preview of the browser from their test drive microsite.

It was also announced that the first official beta of Internet Explorer 9 will be launched on September 15th 2010, that's just 3 weeks away from today.

Having just switched to Google Chrome after years of being a Firefox fanboy, there is no worries of me jumping ship to Internet Explorer as my browser of choice anytime soon. However, the main reason for my excitement is the possibilities it opens up when developing websites.

Though we hate to admit it, Internet Explorer is probably one of the most influential browsers in terms of the technologies we decide to build our websites in. Due to the large market share, we have to make sure that what we build is compatible. This meant that using exciting new technologies such as CSS3, and HTML5 was not as possible as the more standards compliant and frequently updated browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.

As of the fourth preview release, Internet Explorer has surprisingly good support for CSS3 selectors (43 out of 43) and properties, scores 93/100 on the Acid3 test – a much higher score than the 20/100 IE8 receives, a faster JavaScript engine and supports new HTML5 tags such as <video> and <header>.

With the end of Internet Explorer 6 coming more of a reality day by day, we are likely to see a big surge in people upgrading and therefore allow us to use these new technologies which the latest browsers are now supporting.

As an industry we are steaming forward into a more standardised playing field, meaning our web designers and developers are happier and the web will become a much more competitive and exciting venture.

Reading mashable last night and being a new iPhone 4 owner I found one of their latest posts most useful!

Using your iPhone keypad while typing tap and hold the '.?123' button, then slide your finger to the required key and let go! Instant update without having to tap to switch screens!

I found this incredibly useful with punctuation, tapping away for my message then sliding my finger for a comma, job done!

* So much so this has all been typed from my iphone :)

mashable.com

As designers who code and developers, we like to shout about writing semantic HTML as a standard in our work, but a lot of the time we then get asked "What does Semantic HTML actually mean?"

In short, it means the HTML tags we use imply meaning to the content, rather than presentation. This in affect means our HTML is cleaner, easier to understand, more accessible for screen readers, and should no custom CSS be applied to the document – the content is still readable in the manner it was intended.

Some examples of these would be using: <p> tags for our paragraphs of text; <address> for, you guessed it, an address; <h1>, <h2>, <h3> for headings and sub-headings – increasing the number as the heading decreases in the page's hierarchy.

When writing semantic HTML, we also tend to use <em> and <strong> tags rather than <i> and <b>. Earlier we stated we want to use HTML tags which imply content, not presentation. In this case <em> and <strong> imply that the content should be emphasised and have strong meaning, whereas if we were to use <i> and <b>, they are a presentational instruction for the content to be italicised and bolded – which can just as easily be done through CSS, further separating visual style from content.

The above are just a small handful of the tags we can use, and with the continuing development of HTML5 we are seeing even more tags created to make our templates even more semantic, removing the need of copious amounts of <div> tags (a <div> being just a container, implying no meaning to its content).

Headings and SEO

On the topic of semantic HTML, the conversation about the use of headings and its impact on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of a page is often raised – and one tag which causes confusion and a plethora of opinions, is the <h1> tag.

The <h1> tag is intended for the most important heading on the page. Most of the time designers and developers wrap the site title and/or logo in the <h1> tag as they deem this piece of information as the most important. However some SEO specialists disagree, and would rather the current page's or blog post's title should be within the <h1> as this holds the most weight about the information that is on the page. So who is right and who is wrong?The answer is there is no right or wrong way, and there is a lot of grey area, just personal preference and different SEO strategies – hence the reason for difference in opinions and implementations.

Personally, I agree that the page title should be in the <h1>, and the site title should then be within a link to the site's homepage.

But what about the home page, that doesn't necessarily have a title? After a recent discussion with other developers we came up with a simple solution. This solution can also be found in the recently released Twenty-Ten default theme for WordPress 3.0.

On the home page, the most important heading on the page is the site title, correct? Well on this page, we wrap the site title and/or logo within a <h1> tag, giving it the highest priority on the page in terms of structure, and search engines will recognise this.

When moving onto a subsequent page, the <h1> tag will then be used for the page title as discussed earlier, and the site title will then be wrapped with a link.

This might require a bit more code from the server side point of view, but the result is a lot more efficient for your semantic HTML, and it will definitely make SEO consultants and specialists happy.

Friday is once again home to the Most Excellent Person!

This week it was a double whammy for one person. Not only did they support numerous projects and help the teams, he also invented the mini scrum and he is getting married next week!

The Winner is.... Nat Coxall!

Better late than never!

As always the Most Excellent Person deserves the acclamation, this winner had theinitiative to call old clients and bring in two newpieces of work, while taking on responsibility for Frankie’s (recently left, and much missed account manager) projects as well as attending events and getting leads.

Phew, a lot of extra work!

The winner is: Charlotte Murray

The founder of Wikipedia, Mr Wales, is calling the Times paywall “a foolish experiment"

As the founder Mr Wales has multiple business interests. He's not a journalist who has to rely on his news organisation surviving - newspapers have been in decline for some time.

The free paper model, funded by advertising, has been steadily devaluing news for some time.  Online, the mindset is that news content is free.

The Times is trying to restore its premium positioning.  The catalyst for this is the launch of the iPad. The Times are putting tablets such as the iPad at the centre of their publishing strategy and they've set expectation, right from the start that content on this platform is paid for.

Under these circumstances, a free website would be an anomaly and would undermine the strategy.   

There is value in high quality, accurate journalism and tablets will allow publishers to regain control of their product and generate revenue from the journalism at their core. 

Publishers will need to adapt though, because consumers will expect to see richer, more dynamic content than is on offer currently.

The Times will also need to provide in-depth features and analysisto set them apart from basic news products and justify their premium positioning.

Yes, it's disappointing that the Times pay wall cuts off the social web.

However, the by-product of the pay wall for FT.com is thatit’s allowing the publisher to develop a deeper understanding of their users’behaviour, without contravening their privacy.  The benefit of this is improved targeting ofcontent, news gathering resources and better product development.

The risk is that The Times could lose its reach andtherefore much of its voice in the international, online news market.  However, if consumers see the value in premiumnews content, just as with valuable business information, then the pay wall will succeed.