I was emailed a link this morning to view an online mountain biking magazine. I’m sure it would have been great, however, I couldn’t view it. All I was presented with was a blank screen. The magazine was built entirely in Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash). And I was trying to view it on my iPad (see previous blog!). Now, Adobe and Apple are in a dispute as to the security of Flash Apps and running on the Apple mobile platform (iPhone, iPad, iPod - this list goes on). Surely, with the proliferation of mobile Apple devices and the resent huge uptake of the iPad in the US, Flash must be on the downward side of the curve?

This aside, if any of our clients approached us to create an online magazine, the first thing we would take a look at would be accessibility - as we would see this as intrinsic to the establishing and growing readership. So, the last thing we would look at would be Flash - especially for the whole magazine.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of Flash. It’s changed and increase the way we view video online (YouTube) and when used effectively, there is no substitute - until HTML 5 arrives that is.

So, if there were only 14hrs to save the Earth, then I’d go with good old reliable and accessible HTML.

PS. Even more frustrating is that as it currently stands, I can’t use BBC iPlayer on my iPad either!

In this era of cloud computing and moving hardware to some unseen location, floating in the ether, it is interestingto learn about IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) that are now also available ‘in the cloud’. Not having to install software on your machine and deal with all the hassle that comes with it is definitely something that has legs.

Here are some of the available solutions:

Bespin by Mozilla Labs

Coderun Studio

Kodingen

Each has their own features and benefits but they all provide interesting UI and easy on the eye layout and styling. More investigation is needed into these and other solutions before actually making a switch from on machine coding to in the cloud coding but it is an exciting development for development.

Everyone wants to have the fancy stuff on their site, don’t they? Nice images, gradients, that fancy serif font the MD saw on the London based digital media agency with the cool anti-aliasing. It all looks nice on the design but when it comes down actual putting together the nuts and bolts PHP, XHTML, CSS etc it may not always be possible. Someone, somewhere is going to be disappointed.

The question of typography and web safe fonts is one that has a number of different solutions to help achieve that look the designer had in his mind’s eye, each with pros and cons. MightyMeta has taken much of the pain out of deciding which is best with this guide to getting a web safe font and related cheat sheet: http://www.mightymeta.co.uk/introducing-the-web-safe-font-cheat-sheet/

It’s time for a quick top ten run down of the most downloaded web browsers for the Windows OS.

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Internet Explorer
3. Google Chrome
4. Avant Browser
5. Opera
6. SlimBrowser
7. Internet Explorer 9
8. Windows Internet Explorer 8 for MSN
9. Apple Safari
10. Netscape Navigator

As you can see some old favourites in there as well as some unexpected ones, not least Avant Browser. This one being based on the IE rendering engine, I’ve not used it myself but will certainly have to check it out, although I’m not sure why you would want to create a browser based on IE with all its shortcomings.

I have to say my own personal browser of choice at the moment is Chrome; it’s quick, lightweight and just seems to never have any problems.

I was in a meeting the other day, where I was reliably informed that the font face Arial is in fact identical to Helvetica; they are one and the same. At the time I thought this was not the case but the re-assurance was such that I was open to accept that maybe I was wrong and they were in fact interchangeable.

Upon further investigation on the matter I discovered the following information about these two popular fonts:

Helvetica

Designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger. Helvetica’s design is based on the font Akzidenz Grotesk (1896), and classified as a Grotesque or Transitional san serif face. It was renamed Helvetica (Latin for Swiss) in 1960 after being revised.

Arial

Designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype. Was originally called Sonoran San Serif, and was designed for IBM’s bitmap font laser printers. It was supplied with Windows 3.1 in 1992 and only recently replaced by Calibri as part of the Windows Vista operating system.

Now whilst there is certainly common similarties between many of the two sets of characters there are very clear differences for ‘a’, ‘G’, ‘Q’, ‘R’, and ‘1′.

Of course as with many things in life there is always an element of ‘borrowing’ from whats gone before it would not be fair to say that Arial is a copy of Helvetica. However there are certainly not the same font; as Mies Van Der Rohe remarked: “God is in the details”. It always pays to check.

Related Articles:

• How to spot Arial
• Helvetica wiki entry
• Arial wiki entry

I recently read this post: http://carsonified.com/blog/design/setting-rather-than-resetting-default-styling/ which talks about using your reset CSS in a slightly different way; by making it your default styling.

Most of Miromedia’s sites, up to this point, have been built with a reset.css that attempts to start off a basic site which is consistent across browsers (based on Eric Meyer’s own reset.css). Once this reset is done we apply our own styles for the website framework, then the client specific CSS as dictated by the design. A fairly common approach.

Now, however, our philosophy has changed so that the reset becomes the cross browser baseline as well as the default setting for framework and CMS. This approach not only reduces the amount of CSS used in the stylesheet it also makes it much easier to read and diagnose problems. In addition to this we now place all website frontend CSS into one stylesheet, removing the need to use the @import rule. This reduces the number of HTTP requests and also helps prevent download stalling if a stylesheet cannot be found.

Changes like these help us to improve and develop our flagship product. Even at Miromedia we are constansly learning new things and new ways to tackle problems and increase performance.

Following on from Richard’s demonstration of the broad share of the browser market that Internet Explorer has, it is worth noting that we developers and the designers still need to cater for the relic that is IE6. Whilst your everyday user will probably be using version 7 or 8 or more likely Firefox, the corporate sector are still tied to the old browser due to the massive project of rolling out a new version in a corporate environment.

ZDNet has this to say on the matter: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31328

So, despite thinking that we should code to the latest browser technologies and new web standards, we should always keep in mind the clients main customer market and ask the question ‘what is the minimum browser that the site should cater for’.

One good reference site for all things that IE doesn’t comply with is here: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

(It’s all in the fold).

Earlier in the week I came across this article from cxpartners entitled The myth of the fold. The post details their findings from eye tracker testing to understand how users scan and view a web page and how the layout of content affects how the page is used.

In essence their findings show that with appropriate design the fold is not a barrier to the user experience; given the right visual clues a user will scroll a web page to discover content below the fold. These days almost all mice come with some form of scroll wheel so it is much more likely for a page to be scrolled before moving onto the next page.

Of course your web page should always contain the most pertinent information as high up on the page possible but this does not mean you have to cram everything above the fold just to get it into your users eyeline.

Morning all.

It is the end of another week and time for some more of the best blogs we’ve been reading this week.

The first is from Woorkup and gives Best practices and tips for developing websites for the iPhone. This has been handy for me personally as I’ve been working on an iPhone version of Miromedia’s site which we are planning for launch in Q1 of this year.

Next up is a post from makeuseof.com. This one gives a very clear breakdown of the steps for creating RSS feeds for your site. I used this to create the Miromedia News Feed so it does work.

This post about the influence of the Swiss Style on web design is very interesting and covers a number of aspects where the Swiss Style impacts the modern web site from layout and colour to font styles. Although the post itself may look quite long there are a large number of images to illustrate the various points made in the text and give examples of some of the artists work.

Ever wanted to setup new shops in Magento? Why not read this article about how to setup multiple Magento shops.

SEOmoz are putting together a set of Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice guides. These are currently up for peer review and will be added to over the coming months.

Here’s an interesting website performance post from dynaTrace which is definitely worth a look

Away from work and with the imminent return of Herr Schumacher to Formula 1, I came across this old, bit interesting YouTube clip analysing the Schumacher driving style. For me he is up there as a potential champion for 2010, despite being the oldest on the grid his talent is unquestionable and in the 3 years since his retirement I don’t believe he will have lost any of his edge or aggressiveness.

…it’s about where your link goes.

On page links are important not only for your sites usability and how you guide prospective customers around your site but also important to its SEO performance within the search engines. Having good internal linking can help boost our sites ranking. With bad links or at worse links that take users to the dreaded 404 Page not Found will do potential harm to your ranking.
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