RIP Google Wave

This morning i've woken up to the news that Google Wave has been officially canned. I can't say this news came as a surprise, Google has a fairly long list of previous failed projects and Wave was always going to be one of them. It was a good idea, poorly executed.

Eric Schmidt (CEO) said "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new." I have to agree with this statement, many great products are made off of the back of seemingly failed experiments. Projects that are were either way ahead of their time, or just executed wrong. Google wave falls into the latter category. The UX was dreadful and I believe they lost a huge amount of traction as a result. Many people just didn't 'get it', those that did were just frustrated by it's clunky and unintuitive interface.

It will only be a matter of time before someone takes this idea of real-time collaborative communication, wraps up in a nice interface and makes it a success. Where Google failed, someone else will succeed off of the back of it. This is the nature of what we do, it's all about timing and execution. There has to be a market for it and it has to be executed in a way that it's intuitive to use. If any of these components is missing, it's doomed to fail.

Google Wave could have been a success, it was the user interface that rendered it almost useless. I expect as soon as the source code is released (something Google is planning to do) there will be a number of projects rising from the ashes of Wave. Maybe then it will be perfected and become an integral part of how we communicate on the web in the 21st Century.

RIP Google Wave (May 2009 - August 2010)

Why the App Store rules are good (mostly)

To some, they are a complete pain - 'big brother', 'just let us do what we want' and 'you are stopping our creativity,freedom & choice'.

I disagree.

There are bad people out there, that like to do bad things. As proved with Windows when it's on millions of desktops, that's a heck of a lot of data that someone can capture, use and profit from.

We now have millions of iPhones - which is a real possible boon for the savvy hacker to exploit so they can steal your data. At-least they would if the App store was an open system like Android. It's not perfect (take for instance the flash-light app that made it through the gates with a little 'easter-egg' which allowed you to use your phone as a proxy server), but the vetting process does do a good job and protects its users.

Some feel they do not need protecting - I say go buy another phone.

To prove my point, Android the 'open' system has a lovely wallpaper app out there (Jackeey Wallpaper), downloaded by millions of users. Lovely stuff - until you find out that whilst you have been enjoying the wonderful imagery it has been sending your data off to some servers in China (browsing history, text messages, phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and your voicemail password). This is just screaming 'windows spyware'!

Enjoy your freedom.

Jumping on the iPhone bandwagon

There is a right hoo-ha going on right now in the blogosphere... It revolves around the iPhone 4 and it's serious problem with reception (cough).

Yes people, we have a problem - if you are into holding your phone in a really awkward way, if you are into being awkward then this is truly a massive problem.

I'm ambidextrous (great for drumming or doing a 'Ronnie' on the snooker table), so without thinking use my phone in either left or right hand mode. Guess what, I don't get any problems. However, I can recreate the reception issue if I hold my phone at a certain angle, in a certain way... and do you know what my thoughts are?..... it's really not a problem at all.

If you want to make it a problem then buy a bumper.

Logo Size

Source credit to Smashing Magazine

A nice blog post

I just thought I would quickly post a link to a great blog post that I read a couple of days ago:

Why Design By Committee Should Die

It's got some great points in it which we come across very often.

It's apt for us, and it's also apt for clients when they think about setting up an internal focus group to decide on how their site/app should progress. In most cases - don't.

Enjoy.

Welcoming a new utopian

We welcome Richard into the world of utopia 365. He comes to us with good experience of C/C++ (including OpenGL) and web technologies, such as our much loved Ruby on Rails.

As a customer of ours, you’ll no doubt be seeing Richard’s work appearing in your iPhone/iPad Apps and websites.

Taking an opportunity to make a difference

We were due to meet up with Pete (the boss) at Impatex yesterday evening to show off our new website design for them. The current Impatex website is showing it’s age and we’ve been working on something special for a while.

Unfortunately, Pete wasn’t able to make it in the end so we’ve taken a bit of an extra chance to tweak a few things. And I love what we’ve come up with! As more and more of our developments take on a ‘simplisitc’ look and feel (that doesn’t mean simplistic functionality, it means 'nice on the eye and user/visitor friendly'), we’re tending to design far better and less ‘busy’ interfaces. That is how the modern web should be and it’s wonderful to be getting there more and more with some of our wonderful customers. Big? yes, bright? yes, pretty? yes - all checked = all good. Getting things right without it being stupidly ‘busy’ is the skill, ‘busy’ is easy, ‘right’ requires thought.

Whilst it is true that I do the majority of the design on utopia 365’s work (Chris takes an ever increasing influence, especially with video and animation), I would not describe myself as a ‘proper’ artist. If you give me a paint brush and some paint, I couldn’t even paint a wall with it! I describe myself as a ‘layout artist’ - which is what web design, user interfaces and much advertising and printed material is all about. Every day I get better. Every day Chris gets better. Every day utopia 365 get better. Every day our customers get better. Life’s not bad in utopia you know!


PS. Alas, I can’t show off any screenshots until we’ve met up with Impatex next week, if they go with it then I’ll be more than proud to show it off.

DIY Swimming Pools by Polypool

Following on from the recent release of the utopia 365 designed and developed Polypool website, comes the newly launched DIY Swimming Pools website.

As you can see below, it shares a common(ish) look to the main Polypool company website, but with a few twists, additions and things (that’s a technical term that is).

We’re sharing common content between the two sites as part of our "Polypool Shared” project, within both associateMe and Rails directly.

Here it is.... almost as lovely as the main Polypool site from last month!

utopian concept

There's always lots going on in utopia, but as so many development firms know it's vital to maintain free flowing creativity. Once in a while we like to sit back and write something ‘fun’.

We have been developing our Ruby on Rails CMS system (associateMe) recently, with the addition of some fantastic gallery modules which are so simple to implement and manage.

There is a lovely system for uploading large images, and then producing various sized versions for use within the webpage (in what we call media blocks). These media blocks can be various sizes so we simply centre on the image to get the best fit. This works most of the time, but if an image is uploaded where we want the top area viewed we run into a problem as the image used is centred.

eg. We upload this image:

But we're using a letterbox view area on our webpage so we end up with this:

The normal solution is to edit the image offline by cropping the area we want to be viewed, then uploading and using in our media blocks....but, that's not smart enough for us...

Recently Andy has been working on a concept to allow us to control what areas of an image are viewed on a webpage.

This means we can end up with this:

If implemented into associateMe, will not only prove very useful for our general associateMe users, but hugely useful for our soon to be released eCommerce module for associateMe.

Enough words and pictures though, video demos are always much nicer!

Image Manipulation in Browser from utopia 365 on Vimeo.

Don’t forget to vote!

Tomorrow is the 2010 General Election. Don’t forget!