The creative room has undergone a few changes in the past few weeks, as you may of noticed from the smell of paint and white spirit!
The creative team have worked hard to achieve a room we're all proud of, well we can't be letting the technical team have a better room than us can we?

Have just returned from Coventry after doing a Designer-Developer workflow seminar for NxtGenUg. 

Really good crowd last night I thought.  We had a few issues with controls not rendering and events not firing on our Mix07 application, as is the way with a live demo I suppose, since you don't have time to iron out the imperfections and all that.  We even had a bit of time to demo a pet application of mine, DynamiChazm, which allows for dynamically updatable and taggable DeepZoom images.  More to follow in a future blog :¬)

Thanks to Richard Costall for hosting it and allowing us to present out 'thang'.  Simon and I had a great time

We have recently been looking at integrating a lot of features from Windows Live into various websites.

It's pleasing to be able to report that LiveId has signed up to the OpenID protocol. Not exactly breaking news, but certainly something that makes us feel comfortable with continuing to push Live Services. What this means is that at some point in the future, you could have one ID (as long as your ID provider has signed up to the OpenID protocol) this allows you to login to any website using your one ID. Imagine having ONE login for ALL the websites you visit - sounds simple - but it'll probably take a few years to get off the ground.

Have a read about what this means http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/10/27/421.aspx

I am always hammering away at our creative studio, telling them they have to use web compatabile fonts in their web designs. The implications on accessibility and SEO have always been just to big to ignore. On a recent article in Smashing Magazine I came across the term sIFR.

sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, is a standards-compliant way to deliver rich typographical text in a flexible manner to over 90% of web users. Not having had chance to fully read up on it yet, I cannot say if this is going to be a sucess or not, but I am keen to find out and would be fantastic if we no longer have to prevent some of creative elements having to be dulled down, due to a restriction on fonts.

For more in depth reading on SIFR - check it out here http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/ 

Browsing the internet recently, I came across some interesting thoughts on quality control for websites. I particularly liked these 5 fundamental base questions to kick start any test process.

• Why did I make this site? What is the site's purpose?
• What are the business goals, if any, behind this site?
• What has to work for this site to be effective? What has to work for this to even function as a web site?
• Who is the audience for this site? Can they use this site?
• What is core functionality offered by this site? Can all users at least access this core functionality?

If you fancy reading more: http://www.philosophe.com/qc/qc.html  

We had an issue on an early version of a silverlight app we wrote.  the whole thing was a banner which was fed data from a SharePoint list.  The site itself was multi-lingual so the same sentence coudl be one and half times as long in, say, the German version as it was in the English version

Being a data-binding kind of person (?), I opted to use Silverlights inherently powerful DataBinding features and have it fill the text from a custom object I got from the list.  However, since th controls were coded into the xaml, the size of the box was causing truncation in some instances, forcing us to set it to be the width of the logest piece of text we would ever encounter, not a very clever solution but good enough for the dev site

Re-visiting the code for live, I had a brain-wave.  I knew that silverlight could handle the dynamic sizing, Blend was all over it and the area was expanding and contracting as needed.  So, i broke it out of the xaml, turned it into a usercontrol, and then added it to the canvas at run time, after i'd set the text from the data.  Then, when the control renders, it's the correct size for the text it contains :¬)

Job done :¬)

Ever been to a site and been accused of having an old browser?  Like it warns you to upgrade you Internet Explorer version from 6 to 7 before it will show you stuff?

Seems there's a few Windows machines out there with some dodgy Registry settings.  There is a key in there which hard-codes your user-agent, rather than letting the broswer do the talking

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings\User Agent\Post Platform]

This should be empty in order to post the corerect version. There are some facebook users who are getting the IE6 version and messages because this key is hard-coded to IE6  

WARNING : EDIT YOUR REGISTRY WITH EXTREME CAUTION!!

Recently I had to do some Research & Development into a pre-built chat system using Windows Live Messenger for a client who wanted to offer Live Chat Support on their new website, and stumbled across this gem: The Windows Live Messenger IM Control.

Just 2 lines of code on your webpage and you would find an iframe which allows users to log into their own Windows Live Messenger account, (or just type their name!) to begin a live chat with you. Everything from the users end is done through the iframe, whilst you can chat through your Windows Live Messenger application, as you normally would if you were chatting to someone on your contact list.

Of course there are a few settings you have to change, but all the instructions can be found here.

I myself was quite thrilled at this point of what you could achieve, when we (Gareth and I) realised that if you are a support team; you would probably want more than one person to be able to recieve messages from the IM Control, but with how Windows Live Messenger is set up at the moment, this isn't possible.

This is where Windows Live Messenger 2009 Beta 2 comes in. With the next release of Windows Live (no release date yet specified), you will be able to log into the same account in multiple accounts. Hence fixing our problem: If your support team were all signed into the same account, the messages sent from the IM control will appear on all of their computers. Of course this comes with a slight catch, if you do something to the chat on one computer, this change would be replicated on every computer that is signed into the account e.g if you were to close a conversation window on one computer, this would happen across all the other computers.

So if you were looking for a quick and easy live chat, 'straight out of the box', then this is extremely cool indeed! :)