Photoshop Amusement

Here is a short post highlighting a site I came across that caused me to literally laugh out loud.

Now, I'm no photoshop expert (ask Andy), but some of the images on this site are just so obviously wrong you have to wonder how on earth they made it to print/web.

If you need a laugh then take 5 minutes out to look through some of these gems!

View them all over at Photoshop Disasters

But here are a couple that I could not resist sharing (some as classic as the recent MS hash) - if you can't spot what's wrong with these then you get the job! :-

utopia solitaire update

Due to huge demand for our development and design services this year, our happy clients have monopolised pretty much all of our time. This has meant we simply haven't had the chance to get utopia solitaire finalised for launch. In some ways that's maybe been a good thing - we've re-visited it a little now, improved the UI and are (finally!) close to releasing it.

As you can see from the screenshots below, it's looking nice - and the utopia theme is optional! :-) You can choose from 100's of different combinations of card and table designs to create your own favourite look.

All things being equal (and assuming Apple's acceptance) utopia solitaire for iPhone and iPod touch will be available on the iPhone App Store this month! We're hoping to get it to Apple for review by 12th September.

utopia solitaire will run on 1st gen iPhones and iPod touches and above (unless things change over the next week). We don't want to limit it to later models only. You will require iPhone OS 3.0 though.

Romsey Town Football Club website

The utopia 365 designed, developed and hosted brand new official Romsey Town Football Club website is here. Best of luck for the new season guys!








Here's what it has...

- Tons of CMS and goodies

- Sponsors and Google banners + other methods of distributing advertising

- Fully updateable Latest News

- Create and Manage teams within the club at will (e.g. First Team, Reserves, Under 18's, Women's, etc..)

- Create and Manage competitions for individual teams (e.g. league, FA Cup, etc...)

- Create and Manage profiles for club staff (e.g. Chairman, First Team Manager, etc...)

- Create and Manage profiles for players, for any team already created within the club

- Add and Manage fixtures and results, for any team within the club, in real-time.

• Set the competition


• Set the opponent


• Set (or update) the kick-off time


• Set (or update) the match status (Pending, Result, Abandoned, Postponed, etc)


• Choose the club lineup, including substitutes, from the clubs players list


• Set the opponents team lineup


• Create and Manage match reports (including: goals scored, red and yellow cards, substitutions, etc)


• Match reports automatically added in to results and latest news


• And so very much more...

We aim to expand upon this in the future and launch a great service for other football (or rugby, cricket, etc) clubs. More details when we have them, but as a basis, we're going to have a fabulous service to offer to football clubs up and down the country, both amateur and professional alike.

Please feel free to contact us if you'd like to know more.

AppReview review iChoose

The people over at AppReview have awarded iChoose their "Best" rating.

Nate from AppReview told us, "There are an extremely small number of apps that have received this rating, numbering barely more than 300."

Considering the number of iPhone Apps out there, we're kind of pleased with that.

Palm pre webOS - go get your Mojo on - but, is it an iPhone Killer?

The Palm pre (US) (UK link here) has caused a minor stir and lead to inevitable comparisons with the iPhone. Just Google Palm pre vs iPhone.

So, is the pre an iPhone killer? No, of cause it isn't. Is it a rival? Well, maybe. Or, probably more likely, maybe not.

When you think about it, Apple created a new market with the iPhone. They haven't really taken over or dominated the 'smartphone' market per se. They haven't really impacted on the the Nokia masses and haven't really impacted on the Blackberry crew - 'smartphones' are very niche.

The iPhone isn't just a phone, it's a super phone with cool bits and bobs for the iPod generation. It wasn't made as a smartphone, it wasn't made to compete with Nokia, it was Apple engineered to appeal to exactly the same people that buy iPods and Mac's. Clever, and only Apple have the brand to do it - copy Apple and you loose. Microsoft and many others have continually failed when trying to do the same thing.

It is my belief that the reason the iPhone took of so was purely because Apple made it and iPod owners and the 'cool' people bought it, and more importantly craved it, lusted over it and actually used it. The success of the iPod should never be underestimated when looking to the success of the iPhone. Everybody that tells you they don't want Apple kit is either lying or in self-denial. Mac vs PC = Mac everytime, iPod vs Zune = iPod every time and sadly for Palm, iPhone vs pre = iPhone every time.

Although, credit where it is due. Palm appear to have a lovely phone on their hands with the pre. I've only 'seen' it in the developers simulator, but it has a nice looking and snappy feeling UI that I'm sure will appeal to a lot of people, and developers. Of course as things stand, developers are limited to coding web apps for the pre, but that's no bad thing for a new platform. Palm provide the Mojo SDK which allows developers to produce apps using web standards such as HTML 5, JavaScript (heavily Prototype although you can use other frameworks such as jQuery as well, which is a huge plus) and CSS. They give you widgets for most of the controls you'd want to implement and CSS styles and what not for implementing a proper pre UI with your app - I am actually really impressed, honestly. It's a platform that many web developers should be able to get into with a bit of tuition and practice - although, as ever, the pro's will always get the most out of it.

One big plus point for Palm is that they appear to be far more open and approachable than Apple are from a developers point of view. Working with Apple is often not a nice experience, and very often a hugely frustrating one. But in practice, developers troubles will have little impact upon consumers so it matters very little in the grand scale of things. We can't dictate what to develop for if nobody buys the said hardware.

We will certainly be keeping an eye on the pre and look forward to working with our customers on apps for it, but as an iPhone rival we feel it's unlikely that Palm can re-create the success of the iPhone and in particular the App Store - nobody else has.

I'm sure you'll be hearing much more from us about the pre and any pre developments we get into in the future, so please feel free to come back and visit us, or drop us a line if you want some work done.

IE6 be gone...

It's no secret we want to see IE6 support dropped by everyone, but this little article gives us hope that the message is getting out (and we can hear the cheers around the world from other developers).

Have a read - surely you must agree?

http://u2w3.com/1b9db

Supercharge your SEO with 1 Tip!

SEO, no matter what people tell you and how much they charge is a dark-art! There are no guarantees as to how and when you will get listed in the major search engines.

Sucker?

Many of our customers frequently get 'spammed' by various organisations offering 'instant search engine results','get your site listed now' services if they part with their money. They obviously work (the requests) as these guys keep doing it, but thankfully the majority of people are able to spot something that seems too good to be true (with many replying to these guys saying "well how did you find me if I'm not in the search engines?").

Prove you're worth it

On research there really are a wide variety of rates being charged for SEO. Some are justified but my advice would be that if you take on SEO services then agree a reduced fee for 3 to 6 months. If they are confident in their results then in most cases they will oblige. After the trial you can pay regular fees - which can then justify £200+ per month charges.

1 Tip that works

There is 1 simple thing you can do though to enhance your SEO. Blog - but not just any Blog. We really push the use of Blogger (which is where this blog is hosted). Why? Because it's part of google and in most cases you can write an article and within a few hours it's listed in Google! SEO is all about getting your content listed to be found, so using Blogger is a win-win solution. Generally the search results from Blogger tend to be quite high in ranking. You can brand up the Blog to match your site and all the hard work of management and hosting is taken care of for you. You then get another avenue of links and traffic pointing to your site, all of which generally appears quickly in Google.

As mentioned it's no magic pill, but it helps and other than paying for any design branding the cost is free. Free SEO that works.

Weekly Planner

As part of our local community work (that's just us trying to be good guys when we can) we're working on a nice little Weekly Planner / rota for a volunteer Community Responders group (hard working folk who give up their free time to provide essential medical response). You can view their website here.

It's taken us a little while to get round to it with work commitments and what not (sorry Sue if you're reading), but the result will be Weekly Planner by utopia 365 - and we think it's looking pretty good right now.

A lot of our work tends to be fairly bespoke, but we obviously use great development community products such as Ruby on Rails and jQuery all the time. Our plan is to give a bit back and release this into the development community at some point, probably under a Creative Commons licence, but we'll announce more about that soon.

Click image for larger version

Renaming an Xcode project

If you're anything like me, you always start off your lovely new iPhone project in Xcode by giving it a cool name with a space in it somewhere - quite why I don't know, but I always do.

That's fine for when you're working in your development environment, but before you submit your App to Apple you have to ensure there is no space in the executable name. One way of doing this (that I've used many times in the past) is to create a new project and then drag all your code and resources back in.

This got a bit tiresome, so I thought I'd write a little script to automate it - but before doing so had a quick Google.... and Monte Ohrt has the ideal solution, a bash shell script to rename Xcode projects.


usage:
renameXcodeProject.sh <OldProjectName> <NewProjectName>


You can find it here. Perfect.

What's going on with Twitter and is it good for business?

A little history on Twitter

Twitter seems to be exponentially growing at the moment. From what started as a 'what am I doing' type messaging service, Twitter has crept into some really diverse areas.

Incase you have been hiding under a rock, let me explain a little bit about Twitter:

"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as Tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive Tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications." - source wikipedia

Essentially, think of Twitter as an SMS message but over the internet.

Twitter started life around 2006, but popularity really took off in 2007 - yes it has been around for some time (in internet time scales), and yet it's only in the last year that it appears to have been pushed by all.

If you use any social sites like Digg, Stumbleupon or del.icio.us then you will be aware that during any given day several posts seem to be Twitter related.

We're now seeing (in the UK), our local government business advisors (business link) running courses showing people all about Twitter and how it is the 'thing to get into' with various expos around the country running Twitter keynotes.

I can sit down with Sky News on and throughout the day they will refer to their 'Twitter correspondent' - a Twitter corespondent! Now that's a new job title. Little did the Twitter creators know just where their simple message service would infiltrate.

For my business?

With Twitter reaching so many then it makes sense to explore its usage for your business. However, like all good things Twitter gets spoilt by SPAM. Getting the balance for your business is key to it being useful, but one important must do step is to at least sign-up and protect your brand. If you are called utopia 365 then you want to try and get utopia365 as your user name on Twitter (no spaces allowed). To explain, Twitter accounts have a simple webpage on the Twitter.com website which displays your Tweets (Statuses). This page is called whatever your account name is, so if I sign-up to Twitter as utopia365 then my Twitter page would be found by going to http://www.Twitter.com/utopia365.

I now have the choice to Tweet (and view Tweets) on my webpage, or I can use a Twitter client on my PC,Mac or mobile. A Twitter client is just a piece of software to view and post updates to my Twitter page.

When you sign-up to Twitter you can (and should) fill in your profile. Here you can tell people a little bit about yourself (which is useful for people searching for you or your services/products).

You can also customise your Twitter page by changing your background, font and colours to reflect your brand and identity.

If we look at http://www.utopia365.com and http://www.Twitter.com/utopia365 we know we are talking about the same company.

   

Contact us if you need help with this.

So with our Twitter account we can now post messages and hopefully people will be interested.

What to write?

This really depends on what your business is. To some just letting people know what you are up to (perhaps what project you are working on or if you are at an expo) will do. An online shopping site might want to let you know about special offers etc. that you may have. This was bordering on the SPAM lines several months ago but it is generally accepted now that if people are following you it's because they want to know whether you have a good deal or not. It's nice to offer vouchers or discount codes to your followers.

Others who offer a service such as IT Support might want to talk about recent IT related news, quick fixes for common problems or perhaps some performance tips. This tells people you know what you are talking about and are willing to help/approachable. Whilst it might not directly result in a sale, it will enhance your reputation and that's something worth achieving.

Perhaps you have job vacancies in your business? Tweet it and you will find a cheap, but popular way to recruit.

There is a great article in the New York Times talking about how Twitter may start allowing easy purchasing, shopping reviews and more.

Is it working?

If you are going to 'Tweet' then you'll want to measure if it's helping. There are a couple of ways to help achieve this:

1) When posting links, here use a URL shortening service which logs clicks such as U2W3.

2) Ensure your analytics can track and filter traffic sources (i.e. your Twitter page).

Applying the above when I post a link on Twitter, before shorten it using a service like U2W3. Lets say I want to post about "http://utopia365.blogspot.com/2009/06/internet-in-your-pocket.html" - using U2W3 I generate a URL which points to the above but gives me a shorter URL "http://www.u2w3.com/182b5".

That's not the most useful part though. When someone clicks this link it gets logged, tracked and I can see people are actually looking at what I have posted:

Looking in Google I can see that Twitter is also one of my traffic sources, so my Twitter account is indeed drawing new visitors.

Steps

1) Sign up to Twitter and configure/customise your account

2) Signup to a URL shortening service such as U2W3

3) Ensure you have some analytics such as Google

4) Ideally use a Twitter client such as TweetDeck, Nambu or Twitteriffic. There are lots of advantages to using these but that's another article

5) Tweet (ensuring links are produced from a service like U2W3)

6) Monitor your followers and follow others with relevance.

7) Use a service like http://monitter.com/ or http://Twittermass.com to help with step 6.


A miracle answer?

Don't believe the hype. It's very rare to have an overnight success using Twitter. Building a solid marketing campaign through Twitter with useful information and worthy followers will take time. Stick with it, nurture it and watch it develop. You will make mistakes. We're first to admit that our own Twittering needs to be cleaned up and brought back on track.

Need help?

Contact us