Author: development

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Apple attempts to change education, one “i” at a time

posted by Development

On Thursday, Jan. 19, techies, fan boys and the like gathered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for an education event hosted by Apple. There, Phillip Schiller, Apple’s vice president of worldwide marketing, unveiled some great new innovations for the education community. A new version of their e-reader app, updates to their university Web portal and an e-book creation tool.

Let’s start with that last one… iBooks Author. It is a new desktop app available only on Mac OSX Lion. It allows anyone to create an e-book. Anyone. For free. Users can then publish their book to the iBookstore or iTunes U (more on those in a minute). But the really great thing here isn’t that anyone can create and publish a book. The exciting part about this is that Apple is pioneering a relatively new format. It isn’t just a book. It’s more than words on a page. Apple gives users access to a wealth of multi-touch widgets. Interactivity. Additionally, users can add videos, keynote presentations and interactive 3-D objects.
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Data Team Manager Bruce Williams reflects on a busy 2011 for his team and in the industry

posted by Development

Our 2011 recap chatter series continues as Bruce Williams, Data team manager, reviews an eventful year as his team added members and expanded services.

We didn’t sit still in 2011, nor did we sell off our belongings and wait for the apocalypse. Some believe that 2012 will be marking the end of days; we in the development world would simply settle for the end of some inferior browsers as well as the wide adoption of new technologies and services by our clients.

Going through our 2011 yearbook, we found it to be one of the busiest in planning and architecting new, custom solutions with our clients. This past year, we reiterated that we can execute just about any digital project imaginable, and we also found that a good deal of our time was dedicated to mapping and developing new processes and applications for our clients. Not only did these requests come from new clients and potentials, but also from our very valued existing client base.
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The Digital Marketing Stack

posted by Development

An email just came in from the website! A potential customer emailed you directly after perusing your corporate site and is requesting more information.

You follow up with that customer, of course, with pricing information and await a response.

It never comes. In a month, you forget that potential because your inbox was so cluttered that the emails eventually just caved in on themselves. You never follow up, you never get a chance to discover how they found your site in the first place.

You never post to the website the specific question the customer asked so others might find the answer more quickly because you don’t want to pay a freelance developer hundreds of dollars for some edits. You never mention the topic and answer on Facebook or Twitter because you don’t even know who is listening.

If this sounds ridiculous yet familiar, don’t feel bad. In our experience, there is always something more you as a marketer can be doing to generate more visibility, better service and higher sales.

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Resolving a Web browser quirk: Lines and gaps caused by zooming

posted by Development

Among the ramifications of being a front-end Web developer is that we’re constantly introduced to unusual new quirks from Web browsers. Today, we bring you a strange rendering quirk from some of the least-quirky browsers. We've observed it on iPad's Safari and on newer versions of Firefox for the Mac. Need a refresher on how browsers affect the way a page displays? Read our recent post on Web pages.

Identifying the problem
We’ve noticed when we zoom in or out on a Web page to a ratio that isn't a multiple of two (such as 150 percent or 66 percent), the site will sometimes have strange lines running through it. Sometimes not. What's going on? The browser is rounding.

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How does a Web page work? The role browsers play in the way your page looks and functions

posted by Development

Websites may be programs in a sense, but they don't run directly on your computer the way a program like Microsoft Word or Windows Media Player does. Not only does the Web browser visually contain the page on your screen, but it’s responsible for receiving and following the instructions that define the Web page. This can cause certain features to become unavailable, depending on the version of the Web browser.

Newer Web development language standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 define an abundance of new and impressive instructions that the browser can follow. However, browser versions released prior to the establishment of these standards won't follow these instructions.

Additionally, determining which instructions from a standard actually make it into the browser software is at the discretion of the browser's developer (such as Apple, Google, Microsoft or Mozilla). As a result, the implementation sometimes won't completely conform to the original specifications, causing differences in interpreting these instructions.

A graphical, highly customized website can only be presented as perfectly as the browser that interprets and renders it. Rather than an image, which is a collection of pixels, a Web page is a collection of elements. An element can be an image, a piece of text, an interactive control such as a text field that permits responses to be entered into a form, or a container that helps determine the page's visual layout and structure.

Most of the instruction interpretation discrepancies between browsers (and legitimate browser bugs) fall under the category of how to visually style and determine the behavior of these elements.
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