Umamiblog

Hi to all the Brightstar Emerging Web Technologies and Trends conference goers who’ve found their way onto my blog. It was fun presenting to you yesterday and I had a good time listening to the other presenters as well. My slides are available here [PDF 8.6MB] as well as on the Brightstar website.

I did have an enjoyable time presenting today and as always it was good to meet more people who are working in the industry and interested in the emerging trends we are seeing.

Nigel Parker and Michael Samson also spoke at the event and Michael did a great job of live-blogging the event. Interestingly, he notes whether a presenter used a Mac or not (of course I did!). If you’d like a brief overview of the session I presented today, do check out Michael’s notes… I will be bit-posting my presentation on my blog over the coming days/weeks (its too large for a single post).

Alternatively, if you’d like to see my presso I’ll be presenting it as part of Intergen’s Twilight series:
Wlg: Wed, 28th March
Akl: Thurs, 26th April
Chc: TBC (May)

Last week we announced to the marketplace the acquisition of Kognition into Intergen. Kognition is/was a Dunedin-based company headed by Chris Auld.

I met Chris in my time in Dunedin and I remember one particular NZTE-organised event. Chris felt the key issue facing the industry was education (it still is…) and I remember getting him (and the others there) to also think of the community, aka the Johnson & Johnson credo.

Chris also gave me some advice on my business I never forgot. Put simply it was “don’t be scared to hire more people”. Well as it turned out, I was still shit-scared for about another year after that… then I kind of got over it (or decided to just take the step). Anyway, it’s all history now. I did have to laugh when I saw my old post commenting on the look of Kognition’s website.

The result of this merger is that we now have a Dunedin office, or one in all four major NZ cities plus Sydney. There are some exciting things happening at work, if you’re thinking of making a move… now is good! Send me your CVs!

Update: It was also picked up by the DomPost

S had an interesting experience late last week with everyone’s favourite state-owned postal service. We’ve been living to a bit of a tighter budget lately in an effort to save some dosh. So with S’s younger sister having her 23rd birthday S collected a bunch of wee presents and went to the post shop to send them down to Dunedin.

The task she wanted to complete was simple:

• send items to Dunedin
• but at a reasonable price
• and quickly enough so they would make it by Monday (this was on Friday)

After watching the person ahead of her in line get mauled by a particularly shitty service representative while trying to pay a bill, S walked up and started to communicate what she wanted. Needless to say, she received some pretty crappy service.

S learned for the first time that NZ Post has stopped the “Fast Post” option for packages so she now had two choices. Normal post for $10 which would take 3 days or courier post for $33 which would arrive overnight. So faced with having to choose between the package arriving a day late for the birthday date or paying 3 times the price S decided on the slower and cheaper option. Understandably she was a little disappointed that her sister wouldn’t receive the package in time for her birthday.

S then received a text message from her sister the next day… the package had arrived!

Now, the service S received was hopelessly poor. She left feeling absolutely wild and in no way did the representative try to help S complete her task – she just wanted to go through the motions/process.

So NZ Post technically exceed her expectations. The package arrived early and that meant it was there in time for her sister’s birthday – and this meant something personally to S.

Normally when a customer has their expectations exceeded, they like to tell a few people and spread the word. When they’re not meet at all they’ll tell around 10 people of their negative experience.

Because of the needlessly bad service S received while trying to complete her task, she has told a number of people of her negative experience even though her expectations were exceeded! Having the package arrive early means she feels that the service representative didn’t know her job or what she was talking about.

So congratulations NZ Post, as far as you’re probably concerned you did a great job and got a package to a destination in a fraction of the time you said it would take. But you’ve also just ensured your customer will tell people of a bad experience and you’ve also ensured she’ll never pay for the more expensive (and more profitable) option.

If you want to exceed someone’s expectations and create a positive experience, you have to treat people like they’re your valued customers…

Sarah just sent me this link about the UK Government moving to close hundreds of government websites. For users and taxpayers in the UK, this should be a great step forward and shows a lot of bravery.

Will it help to make the sites more useable and accesible if there are only a handful to update and maintain? Or will they turn into horrible bureaucratic beasts that no one can tame nor find any useful information on? Advantages would also include large monetary savings, but that may be at the cost of speedily updated information. I see in the comments on that article someone has already made reference to increased government control of information in the communist sense…

Given that NZ followed the UK in producing a set of web guidelines, I wonder if we’ll follow this approach as well.

Web standards are there to take the randomness out of web development and not to act as a policing tool.

Taken from Event-Driven Web Application Design, Christian Heilmann.

Sigh, I’ve been infected by the 5 things internet meme… but I just can’t resist!

The culprits: Tim Haines and Nigel Parker

1. When I was 3 I was traveling on the Interislander from Picton to Wellington. Some girl pushed me off the slide in a small playground and I landed on my arm. My parents took me to the Wellington hospital where the doctors shook my arm a bit and said it wasn’t broken. So, my parents carried on with their trip and after 3 days of me screaming they took me to the hospital in Hastings where my arm was x-rayed. Supposedly it was quite apparent my arm was broken in 2 places.

2. I used to do figure skating as a kid (and was damn good at it too!) because it helped you to become a better ice hockey player (but no one ever believes that).

3. I once had a client bill me for $2500 because I didn’t check my email one weekend. I don’t really miss those sorts of antics now I work for someone else.

4. The most viewed image (by far) on my flickr account is Trey standing next to some of the local fauna in Spain.

5. When I first met my wife, I thought she was a hard core bogan. She in turn thought I was “developmentally challenged”.

Which means I hereby tag: JD, Jeff, Ingrid, Pablo, Trey

Webstock mini

There were two web related events on in Wellington last week. Wednesday night saw Webstock mini at the Town Hall. Ingrid has blogged it much better than I could’ve so if you’re interested in the speakers and what they had to say, follow the link.

Something that was announced at the event was that the next full Webstock conference probably won’t be until early 2008. To me that’s rather disappointing and feels like an opportunity lost for WSNZ and Wellington as well. I won’t be surprised if something starts to happen in Auckland in 2007 and some of the momentum from down here is lost. However there may very well be some valid reasons for the wait – we’ll just have to wait and see.

Microsoft’s Expand Your Portfolio

Microsoft, under the super organisational skills of Nigel Parker, lead a tour around NZ to show off their new Expressions toolset. As a MS Gold Partner we’ve been aware of Expressions for quite some time now but hadn’t yet understood what MS was trying to achieve taking on Macrodobia. The message we got was that we “wouldn’t be replacing those tools anytime soon”.

That notwithstanding, the demonstration did show some promise especially around the areas of the WPF/E and XAML stuff. My general feeling around creating new formats, a.k.a. Sony, is that you’re generally being an asshat. But there may be valid reasons for a new approach to the interactive web that Microsoft is exploring – they’ll just need to communicate them clearly. One positive tick for WPF/E is that it is cross-platform compatible from the get-go. Well, almost…

Where almost everyone agrees this will make the most impact and has the f…ing cool stamp is the how the next generation of .NET applications will be designed in Expression Studio and then have that almost seemlessly applied to the application/development. That is a mega oversimplification but go have a look for yourself and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

It was announced this morning that the iTunes Music Store was being released here in NZ. Fantastic! I remember watching a webcast of Steve Jobs announcing the iTMS for the first time. I had only just started sipping the Apple koolaid having bought my first Mac (a shiny iBook G3). I remember thinking “OMG, that is so freaking cool! 250,000 songs!? That’s huge! I wonder how long it’ll be before it gets to NZ”.

After double checking Wikipedia, iTMS was first launched in April, 2003… That was three and half years ago! In that time we’ve seen video iPods, G5s come and go, and hell freeze over with the Mac plaform switching to Intel chips. It’s a bit of a joke we’ve had to wait this long, apparently we are the last English-speaking developed country to receive the store.

However, all of that is now past us and I’ve already signed up and bought my first few songs. My first legally (of the paid variety) downloaded song was Evermore’s Light Surrounding You, sweet! And at a $1.79 per song…

How does $1.79 compare to the rest of the world? Well I’m glad you asked that question, here is a table of currency converted (using Apple Calculator, of course) prices for the US, UK, EU, Aussie, and ourselves, ordered by price.

Interestingly, and even after GST, we’re cheaper than all 4 stores bar the American one. Not bad at all.

Have you joined the iTMS already? What was your first song?

Today, and it feels great to say it, one of the biggest projects I have ever worked on went live. The Department of Conservation started their public website project many many months ago and set themselves an enormous task, which included reducing the amount of content pages on the site from a 5 digit number down to 4.

We redesigned the site with a large amount of effort going into rethinking and reimagining how users would access content. We also worked to develop the site putting it into the most excellent EPiServer CMS.

A unique feature of the site is something we’ve called DRDL. Or Dynamic Resolution Dependant Layout. What that actually means is that, using a little bit of Javascript and a lot of CSS, we ‘tweak’ the content depending on the size of your browser window. If you look at the site in a 800×600 screen you’ll see content that fits within your window, if you look at the site in a 1024×768 screen, you’ll also see content that fits nicely within your window. It’s a great way to help maximise screen real estate usage, at the web’s most popular screen resolution size, while not excluding those at lower screen resolutions.

It’s also probably one of the projects I’m most proud of too, and I did a lot of work with Nick who was an absolute superstar. Go have a look at the new and improved DoC website »

Also, as a parting note, apologies for the lack of updates recently. Life seems to be getting in the way. But that is also a very very good thing

Over the weekend I finally got around to installing Akismet on my blog. Akismet is a spam filtering service that works by capturing information about spam caught on all the blogs using it. It them tries to learn from the spam and refine it’s rules to help block future spam.

Spam had been on the rise for me but Movable Type’s anti-spam was doing reasonably fine, until now. In the past I had tightened it so it was a little more ruthless. Sadly, that wasn’t enough anymore.

JD had recommend (and raved about) Akismet to me a while ago. I never looked into that deeply, mainly because I knew Akismet had been developed by the WordPress crew so assumed there wouldn’t be easy integration with MT. I was wrong and I’m a little annoyed at myself that I didn’t install it sooner.

It works brilliantly. My blog has received a few hundred pieces of comment spam since I installed Akismet. So far NONE of them have gone through.

According to Akismet’s “Live Spam Zeitgeist”, 93% of comments are spam. For me that would be closer to 98%. Rather depressing really…

Farmers, like most of New Zealand’s big retailers puts out a catalogue of specials to the wider public, by letter drop, a couple of times a month. A lot of work goes into producing and designing these catalogues (not including distribution!) and the experience you have as a “user” is one of being able to pick up something very versatile where you can flick through and find the information you need quickly and easily. As well as that you have this very tactile catalogue which can be kept for easy future reference (“how much was that breadmaker again?”).

Catalogues work as a marketing tool for these companies and are useful (even if we don’t always want to admit it) for us as consumers. Ask anyone who has moved into an apartment and no longer receives coupon books or catalogues.

It’s also something the web can help deliver on. While the web isn’t as good as paper for versatility, it does perform better as a reference and can be accessed from multiple points (including at the office :S ).

Traditionally, New Zealand’s companies have been slow to move in taking their marketing catalogues online in a usable form. If you were lucky you’d have access to a 5MB PDF file that excluded almost anyone on dialup and would’ve amounted to 1-3% of early Jetstream plans traffic allowance. Sometimes you’d have access to giant Jpegs that would be almost unusable for most computer users.

So what do you do? Well a little over a week ago, we[Intergen] helped Farmers go live with a Flash-based catalogue for their website that lets users literally flip through the pages of the catalogue. It helps to present the catalogue in a format that users are familiar with as well as using the web’s strengths for a better experience (zooming, one-click page turning, etc).

Go and give it a spin yourself »

Need a comparison? Try Briscoes.

It’s old news now that IE7 has been sprung onto the world, it’s also old news that IE7 will be rolled out as an automatic update.

I had been dreading it’s release. I just needed to think of all the work we’ve had to do in the past to get pixel perfection from IE5, IE5.5, IE6 (compared to our open source browser buddies), and then I imagining that we’d probably need to do that all again with IE7 but without the solid knowledge we now have of IE’s hacks, tweaks and whatnot.

As per usual, our worst fears are seldom realised and I haven’t been scratching my head too much with how IE7 has been performing so far. I’m even impressed slightly (shhhhh, don’t tell anyone). The single most handy piece of advice I’ve needed and used so far is to invoke IE7′s hasLayout “concept” like so:

_height:0; min-height:0; /* IE hasLayout fix */

Note that _height works for IE6 (no surprises there) but not for IE7. It does however include support for min/max-height/width, unlike IE6, and invokes plus fixes it for us.

There are also some good comments on the aptly titled IE7 CSS tweak show and tell at Zeldman’s blog.

Download IE7 » or read my notes from listening to Tony Chor (Group Program Manager, IE) present earlier this year at Webstock.