As you may know from previous posts, we’re loving jQuery. However, the other day I previewed a site over Vodaphone’s 3.5G mobile broadband and it all went horribly wrong. Vodafone seem to be compressing data in such a way that jQuery simply doesn’t load. The site appears just fine over T-Mobile’s network, so clearly not all carriers are doing the same thing.The solution? Thankfully it didn’t take to long to find (unlike our ongoing battle with IE7 over PNG transparency). Use the compressed version of jQuery and all is suddenly right with the world.

We’re huge fans of Ruby, and make use of Ruby on Rails whenever we get the chance. MVC frameworks feel so natural in web development, getting sites up faster while keeping everything neat and maintainable is a nothing less than a great thing.

But as great as Rails is, it’s at the point now where it’s feeling a little bloated. The truth is, a lot of applications don’t need a kitchen sink, some don’t even need a kitchen. Rails makes a lot of excellent decisions for developers, which cuts a lot of time out of the development cycle, but I can’t help but think the rigidity of rails is making me churn out cookie-cutter rails sites.

Enter Merb, a younger Ruby MVC framework which bills itself as “a hackers framework”. It’s developing quickly, and we’re getting excited about the release of version 1.0. It’s shaping up to be an excellent tool, and I’m looking forward to getting some Merb projects into production.

(Short) List of cool things:

• Thread Safe
• Built on Rack
• Merb::Worker (run tasks in background thread)
• Slices

Merb puts the big decisions in your hands, you choose which ORM to use, which javascript framework to use, and how you want to template (currently DataMapper, jQuery, and Haml for me ). It gives you just what you need to build whatever you want, how you want it while staying small and out of your way.

My favorite thing about Merb is how small and tight it is, in the most recent merb-gen you can even specify how you want your app structured, from the default structure (which is still much smaller than Rails), flat, and very flat. With very flat being just a single file - nice. With the default structure, it’s all every intuitive as to where everything is, and the configuration is simple.

If you’re a fan or Rails, I’d suggest taking a look at Merb - or least keeping it in the back of your mind. I’m sure it’s something that will only gain more and more attention, and some well deserved hype.

Everyone knows that the cool kids aren’t reading Pitchfork anymore. Why? Because they have a really lame flash menu that makes it impossible to navigate the site if you don’t have a flash plugin installed. This sort of thing isn’t unheard of, and while generally frowned upon, I don’t mind a flash menu if it does something interesting or unique, or is used on a site that pretty much offers flash content exclusively - though not even newgrounds.com uses a flash menu!

The problem is it’s a requirement you simply shouldn’t place on your users, especially if you’re offering something simple, like album reviews. Not everyone can or wants to install flash. What if you’re stuck using links? Okay, its not that big of a deal with you’re using a text-based browser (you should probably be working anyway!) but what about an iPhone? A big empty box is surprisingly unhelpful in navigating a site in mobile Safari.

We know flash is not the best thing to use as a navigation menu, but what I really don’t get about Pitchfork’s menu is that it has to be the most pointless use of flash ever. You roll over the text which turns black and the little arrow spins goes grey. That’s it. It doesn’t give you a hug or make you toast, it just has small effect that pretty close to the basic CSS :hover effect. Blink and you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Their hover effect is nice and subtle, but I don’t believe its worth the tradeoff. So I decided to try to duplicate their animation with jQuery, and while not perfect - it does mimic the effect: check it out

There’s a few problems with this.. My animated gif arrows are pretty lame, and if you mouse over the links too quickly it doesn’t finish changing to color back to grey. Also, an issue in IE causes the jQuery to print raw HTML everywhere when automatically adding the <span> tags. These issues could probably be resolved and overall, it’s probably not the most elegant solution.. But that’s not really the point. There are lots of ways we can create a nice little effect on a navigation menu in an unobtrusive way that doesn’t leave some users behind. It’s always better to put usability and accessibly above visual effects - especially when they’re not particularly exciting!

Over the last few years, air travellers have got used to ‘demand-led’ pricing. If your dates and flexible, and you book far enough in advance, you can get some insanely cheap flights. Putting to one side the fact that entire countries are being evacuated because of global warming and sea-level rise, it’s a win-win situation for both travellers and the airlines.

The great success of this model has led to companies in other sectors trying the same techniques - with mixed success. The train operating companies seem to love it, but customers - sensing the death of the ‘turn-up-and-go’ railway - are less enamoured.

One area that hasn’t yet seen this model widely implemented is the training industry. But, as with airlines, the model is a win-win scenario for training companies and their customers. In fact, we’ve just implemented the system for anew training company web site (launching very soon now).

The pricing matrix provides generous discounts, depending on how far in advance a course is booked, and how many places have been sold.The system gives real benefits to both the training company and their clients. The training company benefits because more advance bookings allow them to confirm events earlier (since they know they have at least enough participants to break-even). Clients benefit because if they commit to training far enough in advance the can save 75% on standard course prices.

Easy!

Texas is not a place I know a lot about but, based on George Bush and Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, I’ve not been convinced I’d like it.  As a card-carrying liberal, I’m also dismayed by the state’s execution of more than 400 prisoners between 1982 and 2007. In many ways the state seems to embody everything about post-9/11 US that we liberals despair of. So it’s been great to have my prejudices challenged by the arrival at Osborne Brook of Robert Crim.

Robert’s from Austin and ’seriously’ Texan.  Yet, in his first few weeks working here he’s proved to be articulate, talented, and great with customers. And whilst we might disagree about the role of the desirability of a market-driven economy, he’s not nearly as neo-conservative as I feared.

Robert’s background has been in programming and hosting support. He’s served time at The Planet (the Texan ISP not the fictional Metropolis-based paper) and he’s proving to be a whiz at configuring and maintaining our vservers.  His PHP is great and he’s giving me a run for my money with CSS.

So, whatever I may think of Texas, we’ve certainly gained a lone star. So if y’all need some friendly advice from Osborne Brook, we’ve got the man to give it.  

It was only a matter of time, but I have actually written my first plugin for the fantastic jquery framework. There was a time when I thought that coding in javascript was a bit of a chore, having to write whole chunks of code to achieve simple things, but then came jquery. At first it seems like alot to get your head around, but when the penny drops you wonder how you ever did without it. I am now often heard saying “hey check out what I just did in one line of code” (and the designers even feign interest ). An example:

$('.hideme').hide();

The above line finds all of the elements on the page with the (pseudo) class “hideme” and, yes, hides them. This is especially good for accessibility, since when the page loads they are visible. It gets better:

$('#feed).load('feeds.php #headlines li');

That uses ajax to load just the list elements of the container ‘headlines’ from the page ‘feeds.php’ into the element with the id “feed”. (it’s actually easier to read the script than say it in English!)

Anyway, while building a page I found myself using very similar code in 3 different places, so the obvious thought arose - “how do I make this more modular”. A quick read of the plugin documentation for jquery was all it took to produce something that, in one line of code, enables me to have the selection from one select box (drop down) change the options in another. Being juery though, this action is not limited to just one select box, but any select box that matches the jquery selector. Lovely!

 Feel free to take a look at the code

Typically I have been a cautious upgrader, and enjoy mocking my colleagues when they trash their trusty systems in favour of the latest and greatest OS release. With the arrival of Leopard, however, I happened to have “broken-in” a new copy for a client who had moved from Windows XP (hoorah). Needless to say I was envious from the word go, and came back to my office to proclaim that we should upgrade now.

The differences (between Tiger and Leopard) are, at first, quite subtle, but the more I use it the happier I am that I upgraded. Some of the gems I have appreciated so far:

Finder. The finder window has a useful sidebar that groups things nicely together - nothing to get too excited about yet, but OK. However when I later wanted to send a photo to a friend, I discovered that the “Attach file” finder window had a new section called “Media” down at the bottom….. this had 3 links - Movies, Music and Photos which were all very neatly linked to the respective programs for that type of media, so I found the pictures from the iPhoto “Kids, Summer 2007″ roll in no time. Lovely.

Spaces. Having no extra desktop real estate, and having been used to a Linux desktop, I was no stranger to the concept of Spaces (multiple virtual desktops) - but God love them, Apple have done it so well it makes you weep. Press F8 (always learn your keyboard shortcuts!) and you get the flattened out view of all your “Spaces” from which you can pick an application and drag it to any other desktop you like. The fact that Exposé even works on this screen, is just the icing on the cake.

Time Machine. Due to the hype before launch, I promised myself I would get too excited by Time Machine - it’s just backup after all managed with something akin to LVM snapshots, so what’s the big deal. Well there is no big deal, but at home (on the Mac-Mini) my daughter managed to drag one of my work folders to the Trash and empty the Trash shortly after (she’s 4 and swears she didn’t know!). Fortunately I had just bought an Iomega drive (such a good pal for the mini btw) and thought that I might as well activate TM to see what it was like. So I pressed the button, then got the Doctor Who style space time line, went back a few days, found the folder and it was back. This is not really rocket science but, as ever, the implementation leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy inside.

Having been a Windows sysadmin in the past, the upgrade process was always something that was agonised over and planned and scheduled and downtimed etc etc etc. Nothing as whimsical as “ooh it looks soooo nice” would persuade me to upgrade any of my clients’ PC’s, let alone my own. But I changed my Tiger stripes for Leopard Spots with reckless abandon as was rewarded with a machine that I love even more than the last one.

Just thought I would add my own little observation to our blog - regarding the incredible Nintendo Wii. OK, this may well be old hat for some people out there (life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and…[fb]) but they have really created something incredible here. It also does something that I think no other game or device has done - it makes the game playable by anyone, and accessible to all the generations.

Over the summer holidays my family were the perfect promotional tool for the Wii. There ‘wii’ were having a tennis tournament (Wiimbledon) and someone thought to take a picture. The youngest player was 3 (she was admittedly much better at the boxing) and the oldest player was 67. The best player, and eventual winner, was 11 years old - I guess that figures.

A few weeks later my 92 year old grandfather came over and watched us all playing. He wanted a go. Another fantastic aspect of the Wii is that (most of) the games are very easy to learn how to play. In his first round of golf he shot 1 over par. Not bad at all. He then went out and bought a Wii for himself - on the Internet.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling increasingly conflicted about the iPhone’s UK debut. Emotionally I want them to be available now (especially in light of my trashing my N95 in a freak cycle accident yesterday), but logically I know that Apple would be be making a big mistake in shipping the current incarnation of the iPhone to the UK. Why? Solely because of the lack of 3G support.

Statesiders don’t seem to think the lack of 3G is much of an issue. I can only conclude this is down to (very) patchy 3G coverage. In the UK and Europe, where there is pretty good 3G coverage (and many people already have 3G cell phones) the picture is likely to be very different.

The iPhone is directed at early adopters; geeks who want (and/or need) the internet on the move. The trouble for Apple is that in the UK those geeks have already made the jump to 3G (or even 3.5G). For example, on my trips between London and Brighton, my N95 gave me a pretty solid 384kbps connection; my 3G USB modem often gives me 1.4Mbps.

So, no matter how cool the iPhone is and no matter how much I want one, I know that buying one before 3G is supported would be incredibly frustrating. The thought of surfing at GPRS speeds makes me break on in a cold sweat, and I know that it would only be a matter of weeks before a 3G-less iPhone would be thrown off the top of a very tall building.

I know Vodafone share this concern and for once I hope Steve realizes the limits of his reality distortion field. A 3G iPhone would be a killer device; a 2G one would do nothing but hurt Apple’s European reputation.

Simon and I have been in web design in one way or another since 1992 (remember Mosaic 1.0 and its revolutionary ‘image viewer’?). In the intervening fifteen years only one thing has remained constant - change. The web is constantly evolving as new technologies become available and users find new (and often unexpected) ways of using them.

At the moment we’re in the process of rebranding ‘Small Fry’ as ‘Osborne-Brook’. As part of the process we’re completely rebuilding our site - something we last did 2005. Since then there have been significant advances web technologies and we’re looking forward to the chance to cut loose and incorporate some funky features with Ajax.

However, what strikes us most about the last couple of years are the cultural changes that have taken place. Although these may have been enabled by the rise of web 2.0 technologies, they are primarily the result of a quantum shift in how businesses perceive the web.

Web applications (such as LinkedIn and Salesforce†) are becoming an integral part of many businesses and a significant proportion are trying to colonize (and monetize) social networking sites such as Facebook. Whether this change is for the good or not, it’s the ‘brave new web’ in which we all have to compete.

These changes show the value of continually assessing your web strategy. This goes for us as well!

In 2005 we dismissed a company blog as largely irrelevant; in 2007 it’s the first part of our new site to go live. That’s why we like working in this industry - challenges and change are all around us.

Don’t forget to drop back to see our whizzy new site in a couple of weeks!

† or Salesfarce as we like to call it when we have to try to integrate client’s sites with it!