It's the question on everyone's lips ATM. Answers at: http://www.isitxmasyet.com/

Listen to our June Podcast. Download

This weekend is the street fighter tournament! Grab your favourite controllers, your favourite sticks and get button bashing!!
I'll be taking my camera to document the days events, who know's I might even compete! I'll definately be giving the casual gamers a run for their money!

Click here to read more about it!

Here's this weeks links:

http://www.myinkblog.com/2009/05/16/a-showcase-of-popular-web-design-trends/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/21/web-design-industry-jargon-glossary-and-resources

If Street Fighter 2 was released in 1981 - http://vimeo.com/4504861

Cranfield School of Management makes a nice little apperance on one of the top design/developer blogs Smashing Magazine.

The Sub-Navigation for Cranfield consists of a rollover cookie trail which allows users more control over exploring the site, this enhances the user experience and quickens the web journey from point a to b. Smashing Magazine has picked up on our little cookie trail and placed Cranfield under 'Breadcrumbs with Sub-Navigation'.

Thanks Smashing Magazine for including us in your posts and to all of the hard work Creative Jar put in to create this stunning site.

Peace ^_^

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?

So I bought a nice A5 graphics tablet off of one of our developers Ben the other day and after the novelty of writing my name over and over again in photoshop finally wore off I decided to see what it could really do and think about how it could improve our work flow.

To kick things off I got myself a trial copy of Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro and started to have a play around. SBP is a basic program for sketching and although it isn't nearly as advanced as photoshop, it is very simple and easy to use and it makes it incredibly easy to just start sketching using your tablet and produces some nice results. I drew the Koi Fish in about 2 minutes, and best of all I didn't have to scan it in and use PS Levels to get it looking alright!

This got me thinking about possible uses for this technology in the studio. At CJ when we get animations in we do storyboards to illustrate how the animation will play out and what will happen. When we do these storyboards they are done by hand, normally by Greg and then scanned in and e-mailed over to the client.

This led me on to thinking if we did use this technology for storyboards, perhaps eliminating the need for scanning would encourage us to do a lot more sketching, and in my view this is no bad thing, as someone from Tricky Business once said at a user group, it's a lot easier to change a sketch than it is to change a photoshop file!

So I figure if we were all to do far more sketching at the early stages of a project and get everything laid out on paper (so to speak) before we even start designing then we could save ourselves a lot of back and forth between us and the clients and save ourselves a lot of time spent tweaking PS files here and there.

My thoughts - Get ya tablets on and start sketching!

I was going through my rss feeds from Smashing Magazine, being one of the creatives I thought that "Strategic Design: 6 steps for building successful websites" would be a good read. While reading through the post I came across something familiar! Carbonica! Nicely slotted in under "3. Determine your brand image", amazing!

It's really great to see something we've all worked so hard on popup on great sites like Smashing Magazine!

Thanks to everyone who has worked hard on this project and a big thanks to Smashing Magazine for using Carbonica.

we scored another seminar for early next year with the guys from NxtGenUG

Simon and I will do another whirlwind tour of the Blend tools, wiring up the C# to make it all dynamic

Sign up and come see us in action

http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=176

Hope to see you there, we're booked for Janurary 19th so plenty of time to get signed up

Back to the land of browser inconsistencies :¬(

I had such high hopes for the silverlight plug-in.  Cross-browser incompatablities can be the most time consuming areas of web development, so a browser plug-in overcomes these by sandboxing the application so it handles all of it's rendering internally

Or so I thought.  Having developed all my silverlight under Internet Explorer, everything renders fine with the default 100% heights and widths.  Rendering the controls is important for templated controls and the loaded event only fires when the control is rendered and the loaded event is important in order for the control to pipe up and accept some data from the dartabinding process. 

To my amazement, and slight relief, Firefox actually requires a fixed height in order for it to render.  By default, you are given a silverlight plugin, set to 100% height and width, wrapped in a div with a height : 100% style attribute.  Just change the containing div to a fixed height and your controls now render fine in Firefox :¬)

so from this

to this

<asp:Silverlight ID="Xaml1" runat="server" Source="~/ClientBin/NavTeqBannerMain.xap" MinimumVersion="2.0.31005.0" Width="100%" Height="100%" InitParameters="ctlid=SilverLightBanner" />

</div>