The action packed second video instalment of codegent news for our monthly newsletter Third Thursday. Let us know what you think!

The team do some Circus Skills training!

Other links referenced...

• Our new HR referral scheme - Help us hire, get Cash!
• Stephen Fry tweets about Pownum
• Tepilo featured in HSBC Customer Newsletter
• Google UK adds house-hunting to Maps - The Guardian
• 10 of the Most Inspiring Flash Websites of 2010 - Hoxton Hotel
• UR7s launch the National Sevens Series

We are 6 years old now and in that time people have come and gone but in all of the hires we have made there has been one consistent pattern; we have found our best staff through our own networks - i.e. all of you.

To acknowledge that fact we have launched a referral scheme, which means that if you put us in touch with a potential employee and they end up joining us (and pass their probation period), we will give you 500 English Pounds to do with what you will as a 'thank you'.

You can't say fairer than that!

Shock horror Flash doesn't work on the iPhone or the "magical" iPad. Steve Jobs has declared its death, and decreed that it's not worthy of inclusion in Apple's market leading mobile platform. Dropping Flash in favour of HTML5 is akin to replacing floppy drives with CD-ROMS we are told. You don't need it, you will be better off without it, it's time to stop living in the past and embrace the future. Naturally Adobe (the makers of Flash) aren't too happy about having the door slammed in their face. Adobe tried launching a campaign online but were forced to accept they have lost the battle. However the war is only just heating up; Google's latest phones support both HTML5 & Flash.

The controversy has been fodder for bloggers, sparked flame wars between fans, and led to an awful lot of FUD (fear uncertainly and doubt) being spread online. This puts many of us in the industry in an odd position. For years Apple and Adobe have been the pillars of the creative industries. As developers and designers we have a love hate relationship with both companies. Designers need photoshop to get their work done, yet vent about it online. Developers love apple hardware, but have a hard time accepting the App Store's restrictions on how they can write their apps.

Which side are you on?
Despite what you read online I don't see a major split in the web community between HTML5 and Flash or between iPhone and Android for that matter. On the contrary, I see lots of overlap. In our industry it pays to have multiple disciplines. Lots of the popular games for the iPhone are written by people who are also Flash game developers. The people doing the cool 3D demos in HTML5 are often the same people who pioneered 3D in Flash. Those of us working on the cutting edge do not erect walls between technologies, we tear them down.

Flash has a long history of bringing innovations to the browser: animation, fonts, audio, video, 3D, and networking to name just a few. Recently we have noted interest and momentum building behind HTML5. It's about time browsers had native support for many of the things Flash has supported for years. The 4 "modern" browsers (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox) are competing against each almost daily to take the crown as being the fastest, and most feature complete implementation. Competition is a good thing, after years of stagnation it's an exciting time to be working in the web. If you are stuck using a "legacy" browser (hint: the one with a blue e) do us all a favour and upgrade today, I promise you won't regret it.

Unfortunately outside of cutting edge Mobile web it's hard to fully utilise all the advances offered by these "modern" browsers. The elephant in the room remains every web developers pet hate; Internet Explorer with it's stubborn 50% market share. Even if Microsoft were to support full HTML5 and CSS3 in IE9 (unlikely), we won't see IE7 and IE8 disappear for years to come. Many sites are only just getting around to phasing out IE6. The key strength of Flash has always been that it's cross browser; unencumbered by the incompatibles and quirks that have plagued browsers. With penetration rates hovering close to 100% and a fast upgrade cycle driven by automatic updates it's no wonder Flash has become the de-facto standard for delivering video and rich experiences online.

So where does this leave HTML5 and CSS3?
Some features lend themselves to progressive enhancement, enabling HTML5 drag and drop file uploads or offline storage for those with capable browsers is an easy win. Using the latest CSS3 properties to render nice UIs while still degrading gracefully to support IE can be tricky, but is doable. It doesn't have to be pixel perfect, it just needs to work in older browsers. This leaves those features that you can't degrade gracefully without falling back to an alternative such as Flash. This category includes the much hyped video tag and canvas element.

Video support in HTML5 is still a bit of a minefield, there are 3 different codecs (H264, WebM, and Vorbis) that may or may not work in your browser, some with critical hardware acceleration, others lacking. In order to provide the best experience on the web and mobile you need to encode and deliver the video in multiple formats as well as providing a Flash version for those without HTML5. There are other rough edges too, such as fullscreen support; which depending your browser works differently or may not be supported at all. My advice to clients is to do what YouTube is doing and give users the choice to pick what works best for them.

This brings me to canvas element, a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. Many of the demos show it being used for amazing Flash like experiences. Unfortunately there are problems here too. when you do a lot of animation and graphics processing you are going to burn CPU. Lots of it. Technology can always be abused at the expense of your CPU, those annoying battery draining banner ads can be rendered using canvas on the iPhone too. Recently Flash player added code to throttle down processing on browser tabs that are not active. I expect a similar feature will have to be added to browsers to control canvas abuse. Then there is the legitimate concern of accessibility, while it can be a challenge to create truly accessible Flash, it is at least possible.

In conclusion
Despite all the challenges I think it's our duty to push for the adoption of the latest web standards. While I may not agree with Steve Jobs reasons for banning Flash from iOS, I'm grateful that the controversy has put the spotlight on HTML5. I take issue with the assertion that Flash is a dead technology, on the contrary I see Adobe continuing to innovate and evolve Flash for many years to come. When noise generated by all the bloggers and fanboys has died down, it will be left to us humble web designers and developers to make all these technologies work for users.

When I was a kid, growing up in the 70s, I had a comic book and in one of the stories the main character had traveled to the distant future (1999) where everyone flew around using jet-packs. All his meals were delivered in pill form, but tasted of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and the menial chores were performed by different shaped robots. The comic writers were right, in that technology has had a fantastic impact on our lives, but these clichéd predictions were sadly not to emerge.

In the 80s, at school we were introduced to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. In particular, Orwell’s 1984 painted a shocking picture where the state was able to eavesdrop on your every move. The government lied about the country’s economic output to keep morale high and censorship was a recurring theme. I remember reading the book around the actual year 1984 and thinking ‘thank God none of this happened’.

And although today, we have one of the highest CCTV cameras per capita in the world (in West Sussex there is 1 camera for every 2,000 people) and the government can intercept and record every one of our digital communications, I think something else is more interesting...  maybe it’s because it’s that time of year again where Big Brother comes on our screens for the summer that I'm thinking about this, but I reckon one thing that George Orwell and his contemporaries didn’t predict was the degree to which technology has allowed everyone to spy on everyone else. And there are a few developments and very small leaps of faith that make it easy to imagine a whole Brave New World of our own, where we semi-willingly enter into a state of “Total Transparency”.

OK, let’s consider a few tools out there:

• Twitter – let’s you tell people what you are doing/thinking
• Twitpic – let’s you take a photo and share that with the world via Twitter
• Twitpic face-tagging – let’s you take a photo, say who’s on that photo and share it with the world
• Foursquare – let’s you tell people where you are
• Whoshouldifollow – tells you what sorts of people share the same interests as you based on your Tweets
• Facebook – let’s you connect with Friends and also is a place where you can share your Tweets and Four-square updates. Also you can tag photos and videos.
• LinkedIn – let’s you connect with business contacts and get introduced to contacts of your contacts
• Twilert – allows you to set alerts to monitor people’s tweets and can be based on subject, person, location etc
• Google Goggles – an Android-only application that allows you to identify items in a photo (such as a painting or a book). It has the potential to recognise faces but this functionality has been withheld over privacy concerns.

Working together these various tools could tell you a lot about a person.

Here is a positive application:

You are a printer who is going to a marketing conference. You set up a Twilert to find people who say they are going to the conference and either supply the printing trade or buy printing services. You also run a whoshouldifollow search to see if anyone else is thrown up with a similar interest. You follow them on Twitter. When you get there you check Foursquare to see which of the people you follow is at the conference. There are one or two that you really want to meet. You send them a DM via Twitter to ask if they want to meet up. But there are a lot of people at the conference and it may be that people don’t check their DMs, so you lookto see if they have been tagged on Twitpic so you can recognise them as they are wandering around and can introduce yourself. It would be unlikely that you would realise your shared interests or simply bump into each other at a conference, so these tools could connect people in a very useful way.

But here’s a more sinister application:

You’re in a bar, you see a few people that you want to meet. You do a quick scout of Foursquare and see that there are a few people there. None of the avatars are actually of their face so you have a quick look on Twitter to see if any of the people on Foursquare have Twitter accounts. Of course they do, and you check out the Twitpics that they have been tagged on. You can recognise one of the people in the bar. You run a Twilert on their name and scan through the last 100 bits of activity around their Twitter name. You deduce that they hate football but love Thai food. You go to their Facebook page and realise that you used to work with one of their friends. You see pictures of them with their family and see that they recently went on holiday to Egypt. You notice that they are single. You see what age they are and where they went to college.

I’m not sure there is a single application out there that would do all this for you yet, but I’m sure we could build one if we thought it was worth it. Depending on how we marketed it, we could either bill it as a tool for networkers or a tool for stalkers.

So in some ways this Total Transparency is great: it’s like a multi-layered, interactive dynamic business card. It can connect you in ways we could never have imagined and, to an extent, it can be controlled by the user. But on the other hand, if you want to participate in this super-connected world you have to accept that much of your life will necessarily be on display to everyone and this information could be used by less scrupulous people.

Just a final thought. Face-recognition is a technology that exists. Google Goggles is still in its infancy and the face recognition element of it hasn’t been rolled out yet, but like all technologies it’s going to get better and cheaper, and even if Google doesn’t do it someone else will. Surely it must only be a matter of time before someone can walk into a club, point their phone towards the face of someone they like the look of and every Tweet, Twitpic, Facebook photo and Foursquare location relating to that person is instantly downloaded for their viewing pleasure.

We’re all Big Brothers now.

In the past few years, one of the biggest areas of change for the Web has been the amount of Internet users who are accessing websites via their mobile devices. You are probably aware of the facts: today, 71% of smartphone owners are browsing the Internet (88% of iPhone users do, 92% for Android). And this trend isn't going to stop: 4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide are expected by the end of 2010(1).

However, accessing Web content on a mobile device is still a rather inconsistent experience. Dozens of mobile browsers exist, each with different rendering capabilities. Designing and building mobile sites brings some unique situations and challenges. For web developers, optimising websites for mobile browsers is often a painful and difficult process.

But things are changing: the latest mobile browsers, available on the iDevices (iPhone, iPod, iPad) and Android phones (Nexus One, Motorola Droid) are game changing, offering a much superior browsing experience to their users. Amazing results can be achieved, as web developers are now able to make use of the latest web technologies, even on mobile devices.

It comes as no surprise that the US mobile browser usage is now dominated by the iPhone, with 64%(2), and Android, which comes second at 19%. Both Apple and Google are pushing mobile browsing, and empower their users with tools far ahead of the competition.

But whether or not you decide to focus your mobile strategy on the iDevices and Android specifically, here are a few things to consider when going mobile:

Simplify
The key to a successful mobile site is simplification: simpler navigation, fewer options (especially in web apps), a reduced amount of text, and possibly fewer images. While webpages made for the desktop often get crowded (banners/ads, huge blocks of text, countless buttons and links etc.), mobile websites have to remain simple. What is important on the page has to be kept, but the rest should be cut out. Less is definitely more on mobile. With fewer (carefully selected) options available to the mobile user, the site gains usability and the viewer is likely to continue browsing your site.

Think lightweight
Because of the limited bandwidth on mobile devices, as well as the inherent hardware limitations, an important focus has to be put on optimisation (load speed, image compression). Your visitors using mobile devices do not need high definition pictures, neither do they need ambient sounds or music. Pages have to be leaner, so users are spared excessive bandwidth costs and enjoy a faster browsing experience.

Prioritise content
What is crucial in your mobile strategy is to put "function before form" and present users with a customised experience, relevant to mobility. Your mobile site has to be contextually relevant to your users, and first address how content is consumed. If you are an online reseller, you might want to put the search bar at the top of your page and a quick way to find a local store (which are the most likely actions users will need on mobile); if you're a small business with an online presence, you would probably need quick access to your phone number (e.g. a "Call us" button) and address (e.g. "here's our address, view it on a map"). The logic is that your viewers who are accessing the website are on the go and probably have something very specific in mind!

Do not neglect the Mobile Web
Having a mobile website doesn't mean removing images from your website. It deserves it's own strategy and requires dedicated development. As the number of users browsing the Web from mobile devices continues to rise, you cannot miss the opportunity to shine!

References

1. Mobile Subscribers to Reach 2.6B This Year
   
2. Net Applications, February 2010