Happy Christmas!

Flash

Enough said....

utopian work update

Here's a few things that have been keeping us busy...


Finalised Boomeco website:

3D Timeline animation for Polypool:

Simple 1 page 'catch-all' website:

Updates to 4itGirls, including animated flash header graphics, sale features and super-zoom:

With another couple of website previews coming very soon, a rails based intranet App and 2 iOS applications.... we'll get some screenshots done real soon!

Update iPhone to iOS 4.2 installation Error

If you are having some fun and games getting iOS 4.2 onto your iPhone then the following may help.

It seems the quick'n easy way to get the new OS onto your device for testing your Apps will no longer work. You'll find that downloading the updated OS and then restoring the phone in iTunes will partially complete, but right at the end you'll receive an error (often error 10) which leaves your iPhone in a state that needs fixing (restoring back to iOS 4.1 in iTunes).

Here's what you need to do:

- BACKUP your device.

- Ensure you have downloaded and installed the latest beta XCODE.

- Run XCode and connect your iPhone.

- Click 'USE FOR DEVELOPMENT'

- You may need to authorise with Apple using your DEV account.

- Once you are done, you'll get the option to restore the iPhone in XCODE. Ensuring the right OS is selected in the drop-down (other > select OS 4.2 that your downloaded from Apple), click restore.

- Once restored, fire-up iTunes and restore your backup. You 'may' have to try this a couple of times as sometimes the first time fails (don't panic!).

- Test away.....


Personally I think what we have to do now makes sense, it was too easy previously for anyone to hack-about and play with the new OS (non-devs just to get the latest features). Bringing it into XCode somehow makes me feel happier.

NOTE: no guarantees, do at your own risk!

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.

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.