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I’m spending the longest day of the year in a darkened hall at Alexandra Palace. Mashed is an event for software and web developers. The general idea is to get together with like-minded coders and ‘hack’ or build some kind of application in 24 hours. We’ve had some presentations from the BBC, Yahoo, Lonely Planet (who are today releasing their API exclusively to Mashed attendees before it goes public in 48 hours) and others, and there are prizes on offer for the best hack that utilises some of the data or APIs on offer.

These people are serious. There are around 300 guests, lots of whom have come from across the country and brought sleeping bags. The BBC is here, and several film crews are roaming around. Microsoft is here, but everyone’s on a Mac. It’s a recipe for productivity: geeks have been left alone in a room with their machines (and free food and coffee). There’s even a soldering iron in one corner.

Personally, I’m a little confused, being a bit of a front-end fairy. But Si is having a good time. He’s planning an app that mashes the Lonely Planet image library with data from the Hadley Centre for climate research. I might go for a lie down in the ’soft zone’.

For the past month or so I have been working on a big project for Castle Gibson, the restored furniture retailer. Castle Gibson have decided to close their bricks-and-mortar treasure trove on Upper St in Islington and move their business online.

In collaboration with Sheridan at Wall Creative, who designed the visual layout, Simon and I built a catalogue and shopping cart system. The user interface is clean and simple: browsers can click on an image from the thumbnail grid to view larger images in the main window, or use the catalogue menu. If they’re interested in an item, they can add it to their enquiry, then click submit.

The user-friendly admin area is arguably the pièce de résistance though. It makes the business of uploading images to the catalogue and choosing how to display them a breeze. A closer look under the hood will be published in due course.

Probably when we should have been working, we were tumbling.

A tumblelog is essentially a blog without the baggage. You set it up for free in seconds, then publish your links, images, movies, quotes, whatever. For me it comes into its own by serving as an RSS feed aggregator: you can publish your del.icio.us links into it, as well as your Flickr photostream and loads of other bits - then feed it all back out again.

Projectionist is reliably offered as the daddy of the tumblr, while Max Wheeler’s Penguin Classics tumblr had many of us wishing we’d tried it first. For the record, here are mine (which switches between colour-riot and ultra-minimalist about every 5 days) and Si’s.

A few months back I pulled off another against-the-clock website build. Last-minute seems to be a trend among fashion designers. MA student Fiona Campbell needed a site in advance of her forthcoming exhibition at London College of Fashion. Fiona specialises is sustainable footwear, and wanted to use a website to promote her expertise online and offer consulting services.

Thankfully we had some great photos to work with, and after a bit of to-and-fro we settled on a calm, muted visual feel with a mix of blues and slate grey. While I put the structure together, Si came into play with an easy-to-use blogging tool so Fiona could publish news snippets and keep the site fresh.

I’ve decided to move my albums to Flickr and upgrade to a Pro account. Zenphoto may be free and better than ever, but for exposure, community and inspiration, it’s got to be Flickr. Since I made the switch I’ve been practically addicted.

The other reason for the switch is that I’m re-designing this website. It’s been over a year, and it needs a freshen up. More of which very soon.

At the end of December ‘07 we launched a new website for the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation. (more…)

Following on from my post on Flat-hunting with Flash, I’ve just noticed another odd usage of Flash on the Curzon Cinemas website. In this case it isn’t so much about Flash not being the right tool for the job; it merely highlights an unnecessary cosmetic application of Flash on a site that really doesn’t need it.

On the site, try switching to the non-Flash version via the link in the bottom right-hand corner. The non-Flash home page looks pretty similar to the Flash version, except:

• the content is constrained to the viewport and the four columns of info become scrollable
• the image blocks at the bottom of the page are thus kept in view
• there’s a cascade effect as the page loads and the text drops into view

My angle on this is:

• if the main reason for wanting to constrain the content to the viewport is keeping the image blocks in view - why not bring them further up the page?

Curzon has a perfectly functional HTML website with a nice URL structure that helps its performance on Google. Each HTML page can be viewed in Flash or non-Flash - but if you’re in Flash mode and you navigate away from the original page, the URL doesn’t change, which is potentially confusing for the unsavvy.

The point is that Curzon didn’t need to deploy Flash. Improvements in the home page structure would remove the need for keeping all content in view at once, by prioritising more popular content (i.e. what’s on now - not what’s on in a fortnight). The cascade effects are initially cute but actually become tedious when you’re really looking for information. There’s no value added by what would have taken extra time and expense in development.

The very presence of a non-Flash option implies an awareness that some visitors might find it annoying, or inconvenient, and would prefer to view the site normally - which is not great web strategy.

For a good example of a beneficial implementation of Flash, check the superb Barbican home page.

A favourite of mine, this page displays ever-changing content inside a set of 6 vibrantly colour-coded windows. In this case, Flash is used to add visual dynamism to a rigid HTML table grid; it’s effective and attractive, but it’s used sparingly.

In mid-October A List Apart published findings from their Web Design Survey. (more…)

Look, what is wrong with Firefox? I run version 2.0.0.8 on Mac, and it crashes frequently, sometimes as often as 3 times in a day-long session. And then a couple of times during an evening session on my laptop. If it weren’t for Firebug and the Developer Toolbar, I’d be long gone…
Hitting the ’share on facebook’ toolbar button will crash the ‘Fox reliably. What gives?

Pictobrowser is a nice Flash slideshow tool for your Flickr photos. Thanks to Times Emit for this tip. (more…)