Once the code has been checked out from our version control server the development environment is at the individual developer’s behest.  For a while now I’ve been using a tool called Intype, which styles itself as the “The text editor we’ve all been waiting for” which is apt, because I’ve been waiting for the thing to be finished and stable for almost two years, now.  While I like the customisable formatting for various scripting languages, it’s been in an officially ‘unstable’ state for as long as I’ve been using it.  One of the biggest problems is the way that, every morning, it takes a good ten minutes to scan all my projects on my machine before it’s ready to be actually used.

The search for the perfect web development environment is constant and I’m always looking for something new and interesting, and ShiftEdit has recently caught my eye.  This is a text editor that buys in to the increasing trend for in-browser apps (something Google is desperate for people to get on board with, as it’s the entire basis for their new ChromeBook laptops that can run the Chrome web browser and not much else).  It allows you to sign in to the app and manage all your projects and start your development straight from the browser.  For someone who, like me, allows Google to run his entire life and has each instance of Chrome synced to his account, this instant access to one development environment is a very attractive prospect.

I’m not the biggest fan of the move from natively running apps and storing your files to having everything kept in the vaguely sinister ‘cloud’ but I can’t deny the usefulness of allowing Google (or similar service) to manage and serve you your entire life at a click of a button.

If ShiftEdit proves useful, it might be time to suggest making it a standard for the office, especially if it could solve the problem of not having your normal development available when working from home or responding to emergencies at 3am.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Intype appears to have crashed again.

demoMedia is one of the UK’s most exciting and fast growing, interactive Digital Design Agencies based in the heart of the City of London.

demoMedia has successfully focused on the Corporate Conferences and Events market place for over a decade, supporting and enhancing our globally recognised international portfolio of clients’ digital reach and footprint via a close-knit team of innovative and highly skilled web designers and developers. It is through this success that the demoMedia story continues…

We are now looking for a Project Manager who would like to be part of our expansion and help us build a digital future.

As Project Manager, you will work closely with all members of the demoMedia team, from accounts to the dev team, including executive management and our clients using your highly honed skills to exceed customer experience and ensure smooth running of a multiple projects, ensuring they are delivered on time and on budget. You will ensure that the challenge and requirements are understood and will work closely with the team to define the solution.

As a senior member of the team, you will be empowered to handle accurate financial management of projects as well as take on pre-sales duties by adding value to the business development process.

Interested?

Here are some of the things we will be looking for in our Project Manager:

• 5-7 years of relevant experience preferably in a consulting or agency environment
• Relevant qualifications, Bachelor’s degree preferred
• Advanced knowledge of one or more of the following: software development life cycles, web technologies, web development processes and the delivery of solutions with creative and engineering components, media and advertising projects, digital strategy projects
• Advanced understanding of project management methodology including the ability to identify and resolve issues, manage risk, develop detailed work plans and specifications, perform resource allocations and run team meetings. (i.e. Prince 2, PMP, Six Sigma, etc)
• Ability to work on multiple projects and manage multiple project coordinators, leads and/or managers at one time
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. English language is a must
• Excellent organizational and time management skills
• A love for the internet and all things social
• Expert Microsoft Project and MS Office skills
• And, most importantly – happy to report to a Bichon Frise, namely Loki.

If you think you have the skills, see if you like the environment…

Although we represent some of the world’s most recognisable brands in the world we have an informal nature. Behind hard work is hard play and we like to have fun both inside and outside the office. Games nights, pizza, pub quizzes and film nights are the usual order of the day. It’s a fast paced, challenging and dynamic environment where no two days are the same. There are no walls, glass prisons or segmented desks here and the only person likely to be micro managing you, is our resident Chief of Staff – Loki the Bichon.

You got this far, why not send your covering letter and CV to Jill Dumas at info@demomedia.co.uk

Salary is dependant on experience.

We do not require agency support for this position but appreciate you looking!

So what is responsive web design?

Responsive web design is, put simply, a website which can be viewed at any resolution. The CSS is developed in such a way that the page elements can adapt to different devices. CSS3 introduced Media Queries, which allow you to serve different CSS Style Sheets depending on device resolution, without the use of of Javascript. Using this method this makes your developed site far more flexible when designing for multiple devices. CSS Media Queries, Fluid grids, & image sizing adapt the content of the website to any device.

Throwing your budget a lifeline

With the ever growing number of devices on the market today, having a ‘one size fits all’ website makes perfect sense. Desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smart phones, all have wide varieties of resolutions. This presents a huge challenge when designing & developing websites to cater for everyone.

Most projects simply do not have a sufficient budget to develop multiple versions of a website. This is where planning and building a responsive solution is really beneficial. You do not have to create a mobile version of your website for different devices, just develop one site than can adapt itself to different resolutions.

Responsive, or Mobile?

Some projects may not require a responsive approach, and clearly need a separate mobile website to be developed. Facebook, for example, has a mobile web application, which is vastly different to its bigger brother. The content is the same, but the design, layout & user experience have been designed specifically for mobile devices.

It is in the hands of the designer to decide the correct solution, responsive web design is never going to be suitable for all projects. Having said that, best practice in design would have had most designers considering these potential problems already. Liquid layouts (thankfully we don’t see too many these days) had been using percentages to calculate the width of columns to cater for different browser resolutions since the birth of CSS. Responsive web design is the next step for universal accessibility.

Tell me more…

I have only lightly brushed on the principles of responsive web design, if you would like to know more about it, take a look at this article by Ethan Marcotte, over at A List Apart.

Ethan has published a book on the subject, for which he also coined the phrase, appropriately titled ‘Responsive Web Design’, which you can order from A Book Apart.

With the rapidly increasing popularity of OSX, we often forget that Microsoft have been responsible for some fantastic visions of the future. Even back in 2001, over a decade ago, Microsoft were having preliminary internal presentations demonstrating the use of gesture based navigation and interaction. Piquing the interest of Steven Spielberg, he went on to use this technology with the consultancy of Microsoft in his 2002 film, Minority Report, showcasing this contact-free method of interaction which became so synonymous with the film, having UI designers quoting ‘Minority Report’ style interaction. 

This tool later went on to become the Microsoft Surface, being released roughly the same time as Apple’s iPhone. Because of its price and requirement for localised and specialised development, the unit became too costly for anything other than branded marketing efforts. Even so, it was a great technological showcase for Microsoft which has had people referring to it for both inspiration and guidance. 

The Surface has recently been relaunched in v2.0 now, with price reductions and big changes to its practicality, further extending its possibilities in real world use. Would love one at home!

Moving the game even further, Microsoft presented the world with a romantic notion of the future, engaging people with an interface that promoted interaction. With some great visuals and imagination, they appear to really go to great lengths to demonstrate a very viable future.

Then, they go to town on a global vision with their fantastic ‘Product Future Vision (2011)’ video. It’s an all out showcase of technology illustrating how technology can reinforce relationships, focus more on doing rather than the organising and providing the world with a free form method of sharing that has no limitation in technology. How this all works in practicality remains to be seen, but having someone like Microsoft think about all these things today is a comforting thought.

As interface designers and service providers to digital communications, we all have a say in the future of the peripheral and its impact on all of us. It is truly an exciting time with an ever evolving landscape that does not seem to want to settle.

We’re not actually that far off from that pledge and we, at the very least, continue to launch a new site at least yearly. To some, this may come across as a strange method of marketing and solidifying your brand. To us, this is simply a demonstration of our own ability to continue to interpret modern design and development in its evolving iterations.

One thing we continue to champion is the beauty and simplicity of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We’ve never believed in Flash and have actually applauded Apple’s decision to rebuff it. Even though, no doubt, it’s a corporate strategy with some end goal, for us, it simply meant the massive advances in HTML 5 that we’ve seen so far.

This is an isolated opinion and even here, at demoMedia, we are divided in that. However, we all agree that there is no place in the binary world anymore for sites built entirely in Flash. We’ve always put our money where our mouth is by living by that principle, as does our own website.

We welcome comments on the site, good and bad, but note that any bad comments will be immediately edited to show them as hugely praising. Haha, just kidding. No, seriously.

Anyway, this site’s a keeper. I’m very proud of Iain for the design and the speed with which our devs have built it. Based on WordPress, we continue to use this awesome framework to support our ongoing efforts to maintain our no.1 global top spot recognition as the best company in the universe. Ever.

When it comes to external links, however, the waters are muddied slightly by the fact the website owner usually wants to keep people on their site, so the default behaviour of links is thrown out in favour of forcing the link to open in a new window or tab. In my experience, you can guarantee that any client will ask this to be done for external links. The thought of taking the user away from site is just not an appealing one, which is of course understandable but the problem is that decision is almost always made without thought for what the user will be expecting to happen when clicking the link. For example, if you have an external link that, by default, opens the site in the same window then the user has the choice based on their knowledge of the link.

If it’s clear that the link will be taking them to another site, then they have the option to force the link to open in a new window or tab using the right click menu or the middle button on their mouse. If a developer has instructed the link to open in a fresh window, however, the choice is completely removed and the user could end up having the website behave in a way they are not expecting.

Counter arguments are all based on the assumption that the website knows better than the user. “What if they don’t know how to open a link in a new window?” is the main point, but personally I would rather trust the user to know this basic functionality and leave the choice with them.

At the end of the day, if your site is interesting and appealing enough, having a link take the user away from it shouldn’t matter. Tricking the user into non-standard behaviour just to keep your site open is, at the end of the day, just not worth sacrificing usability and consistent behaviour.

Firstly, lets clear up the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com offers users a free blog, hosted by WordPress. Over 285 million people view more than 2.5 billion pages each month. WordPress.com users produce about 500,000 new posts and 400,000 new comments on an average day.

WordPress.org is the place to go to download the WordPress publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. This provides development teams with the files required to install the WordPress platform on the required server.

Initially created as a blogging platform, WordPress has developed into arguably the most complete and comprehensive web publishing tool available. Match this with its Content Management System, impressive security tools and its lovely user friendly interface, its easy to see why its so popular. WordPress has a huge open source developer community behind it, constantly updating & improving the various plugins available. Perhaps the largest factor, though, is the fact that WordPress is free.

User friendly Content Management System

The WordPress backend interface is very well designed, and simple to use. You require no technical ability or coding knowledge. The layout of the user interface instantly feels intuitive.

Search Engine Optimisation

The visibility of your website depends on many factors, but clean, well structured code is a must. Combined with semantic code, WordPress offer various plugins and tools to allow you to optimise your website for search engines, quickly & efficiently.

Themes & Widgets

As previously mentioned, WordPress has a huge developer community. One of the best features of the WordPress platform is the widget based approach to design & layout. Through the backend, users can modify their theme a the click of a button. Themes are available free of charge, whilst others are paid. There are currently 120 themes to choose from on WordPress.com, coming from various sources, designers & developers.

Security

We are all aware of the headaches of ‘Spamming’, irrelevant hyperlinks posted to blogs and forums, usually taking users to suspicious websites containing malicious code. Usually scripts or automated bots target high traffic websites. WordPress comes with anti-spam protection in the form of Askimet. This tool is regulary updated to keep one step ahead of the spammers.

Currently WordPress is used by over 14% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites. These including TED, CNN & TechCrunch to name a few. There’s no denying the Platforms popularity, and it’s market dominance will no doubt continue to grow, which is no bad thing.

One of our favourites is getting early release betas of Apple software. Now although this does allow access to some fantastic new features for iPad and iPhone, it does also cause problems with bugs, frequent crashes and inoperable software. I accidentally pressed dial on a contact I hadn’t spoken to in ages and no amount of key bashing would end the call. Even though I pretended to not be there, listening to the echoing “Hello..? Anybody there?” on the other side of the line was a little embarrassing. Hard reboot required…!

Having used iOS 5 for a few days, we’ve been able to evaluate some of the key features of what Apple call their most advanced iOS yet. I’m quite surprised that it’s being heralded as a completely new release. As an isolated instance, to go from 4.3.3 to 5.0 is an overly exaggerated step and would not justify a complete new release. However, I believe with the announcement of the iPhone 5 around the corner (Autumn 2011), there is no doubt a plethora of updates that we, as iPhone 4 users, simply aren’t privileged to. One of these has been hinted at Facetime over 3G, which would be fantastic but no doubt expensive to use on some UK tariffs.

Tools

The most usable tool for me has been the new placement of the camera icon on the homepage. Prior to this, using the camera, especially when security conscious, would mean you’d have to click your home button, punch in your four digit code, quit the program you were previously on, navigate to the page that hosted your Camera icon, then wait for the app to load.

Now, it’s just a case of double clicking the home-button at any point and you are shown a direct shortcut to the camera app. Quick and easy, perfect for those of us who like to snap shot compulsively.

The icons within the camera app have changed also. The grid layout is a helpful hand and goes to add credibility to what is already an excellent photography device.

iMessage is interesting. As an avid Whatsapp user, iMessage looks set to take over the messaging platform that Whatsapp seems to have dominated lately. The key feature of this is that it now allows messaging between iPhone and iPad users too. It’s a nice looking utility and features the message delivery notifications that make Whatsapp so unique. There is also a colour change between iMessage dialogue and SMS dialogue. I assume this is to differentiate between those who have iOS 5 and those who do not.

Having it integrated into the iPad though is a great feature as there was always a black hole in communication. Now, with Facetime available for the iPad 2 too, it has expanded the usability of the iPad significantly. The only thing that’s being mentioned across the internet is the startling lack of inclusion into OSX Lion. How perfect would that be, all your messages accessed by your desktop?

Design

An area of fantastic design is the new notifications. Although startlingly similar to suggestions Dear Apple put to Apple, the new Notifications system has been designed to remove the irritating habit of iOS devices stockpiling all your notifications one on top of the other. Previously, you’d have to keep on clicking ‘OK’ over and over until all your notifications are met.

Now, each notification is placed on the top of the iPhone in order of chronology and swiping each individual notification takes you direct to the application itself. Very neat, very tidy. To add, there is also a new notifications centre. A swipe down from top to bottom now pulls down this tool and here is listed all your recent notifications, together with Tweets, Facebook posts, emails and messages.

Apple have now seen fit to combine this area with other useful information. Right now, it includes localised weather (now the weather app knows where you are) and stocks and shares. I can only assume that Apple will open up this area for further development.

Newstand I see as a more commercial tool to encourage users to buy publications. Books, magazines can now all be stored on this virtual news stand – of course, all purchased through the App Store.

Reminders will no doubt wipe clean the masses of To-Do list applications that populate the AppStore. It’s essentially a task list generator, very simply designed, allowing you to add to-do list items. The novelty, however, is location sensitive reminders.

At first, I was very excited by this but in reality, it’s proving to be a little hit and miss. In theory, you can tell your iPhone to remind you on things based on your geographic location. So, for example, “Pick up umbrella when leaving office”. This would be great, except it only has first part of postcode, so it covers a large area. I really hope this becomes more specific as it would be an amazing tool for me, constantly forgetting things to do before I arrive or leave locations. However, until this app becomes more location specific, then I’m not going to be reminded unless I’m 2 miles down the road.

Additionally, it seems this app continually uses GPS when running in background as my GPS indicator remains on. Battery usage did seem excessive but being a Beta copy could result in any number of reasons.

Twitter integration is perfectly fitted into the iOS. You can now sign in to your multiple Twitter accounts once from the settings screen and then tweet from Twitter enabled apps, including Camera, Photos, Safari, Contacts, YouTube and Maps. Amazing that almost every other developer recognises that users have multiple accounts, except Twitter themselves!

iCloud is safely hidden away for now. It’s there, but it simply doesn’t work.

Other things I’ve noticed:

• Email options changed so that you can now mark multiple mails as read. You can also Flag emails.
• iPad Safari search has changed, allowing you to search words on the page you’re on from a different search box. Tabbing system has now been introduced on iPad also, so it’s now similar to the desktop Safari, no longer has thumbnails.
• Both iPad and iPhone now have Reading List in Safari, allowing you to add all your websites to a Reading Digest version, stripping all unnecessary formatting so that it allows you to quickly read pages.
• The Calendar app now has a landscape view which allows you to see a top down weekly view of your schedule.
• As per the very original iPhone, the Music and Video icons have been separated, removing the iPod icon – a good move in my opinion.

As far as a developer view point, it seems this is a stepping stone to prepare people for the iPhone 5 – what this may entail is as always a closely guarded secret. Near Field Communications is the next buzz which will double the iPhone up as a digital wallet, allowing you to make purchases and confirm identification with the technology.

For me, it’s just another opportunity to play with perhaps the most impressive consumer device ever created.

Despite the wish and endeavour for a website, perhaps with some eCommerce or some simple homepages with CMS etc., they simply did not have the budget for a consultative approach that is the method used by agencies in this industry. What they wanted was a sub £1,000 offering that they could have up and running very quickly without the intimidation and fear that can often go hand in hand with large scale projects.

Even though we are working within organisations profiting from $billions per year with the project planning and roadmaps that often represent such organisations, we still very much attempt to appeal to the SME sector. But the level of project and account management necessary with these large scale projects make it very difficult to provide cost effective web sites for the small business.

Web Temple was formed for this exact reason. demoMedia still exists to lead a consultative approach to its work, building largely bespoke, custom made solutions generally for the corporate sector and building upon its strengths in the Conferences & Events arenas, providing excellent CRM and CMS led tools.

However, when there is a significant gap in the market, quite often when demoMedia is unable to assist in offering value led solutions to SME’s, Web Temple is placed ideally to offer services for small businesses, new initiatives and individuals who simply don’t have the budgets for large scale consulted projects, or quite simply they are looking to experiment a new business without the large overheads.

Because the business is based on WordPress and Magento CMS solutions, they are able to shave a significant amount of development time off each project, passing savings on direct to the client. That’s how it becomes possible to build websites from less than £1,000.

Not only that, but there’s a unique offering where they are providing iPad Web Apps from £1,000. This tiny investment makes it possible for any business to experiment with this fabulous device.

The main objective of WebTemple is to make successful, small business websites and without a degree of marketing the new site, we can compare it to having a shop in the middle of a field with no access. Therefore we ensure an ongoing core of SEO to make sure the site becomes visible amongst the other millions of websites out there and to insist on good, relevant traffic to your site.

demoMedia and Web Temple will be working very closely together going forwards. Their markets are quite different and without pretending to ignore any cross selling opportunities, Web Temple will benefit from the masses of high end corporate experience demoMedia has gained over the past decade. Conversely, demoMedia also exists in order to provide Web Temple clients a platform to leap into more bespoke, marketing led solutions utilising the very best in both companies’ talents.

Get in touch with their sales team at 0207 608 3003 or visit their website where you can customise your build options:

www.webtempledesign.com

demoMedia hasn’t always been a formalised agency model. We’ve carried that baton for about six years with the previous four acting out as consultancy.

However, over the past few years we have developed an expertise within a specific sector. We’ve worked on 100′s of Conferences & Events work for a plethora of clients. From Deutsche Bank to Toyota and from Allen & Overy to De La Rue. This has led to a recent evaluation of our offerings. We have successfully provided clients with a diverse range of production capabilities. From iPad applications to commercial websites, charity offerings to social networking API mashups.

And we won’t stop this diversity for the world. This creative range offers us many rewards and the freedom expressed from a creation for Roundhouse is complemented by a conservative offering pushing limits on a banking website for Deutsche Bank. However, we’re going to start shouting about what we’re really good at, and that’s Conferences & Events platforms that assist delegates in corporate registration systems with CRM and CMS capabilities. We have a bulging CV highlighting the skills we possess but also our experience in this sector is transferable.

Every opportunity to work on a Conferences & Events website is an opportunity to progress and evolve the site. We don’t want to pigeon hole ourselves, but if we’re really good at something, surely we can shout about it?