Archive for the Web Development category

Well, I finally did it! I have an app in the App Store. Last week an app for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis was approved by Apple. You can download it for free here.

This was a fun project that I was able to see from start to completion. I had a chance to try out a number of javascript libraries that I’ve been wanting to try. Some didn’t work out, but others did. I decided on Backbone and it was an absolute delight to program with. It kept things organized and automated just the right amount. Too often, I feel that frameworks try to do too much. Backbone was just right. Quick, effective and never in your way. For animation I used Zepto, which was great as well. Its touch events seemed much more responsive than others I have tried.

I also used iScroll to achieve the fixed navigation. I had hoped to get the app submitted before Apple released iOS5, which fixes the CSS fixed positioning bug. Depending on how many iOS4 users we have will dictate when I can remove that from the app.



Download the app for free here.

I don’t know about most web developers, but for the life of me I can never remember all the necessary meta tags that should go on a site. I remember which ones, but never the exact syntax. From standard ones, to the new iPhone/Mobile, as well as geo based meta tags, I typically grab them off the last site I did or will do a search for a “meta generator.” I always end up going to 3 or 4 different sites to grab all the tags I need.

Well, last weekend I decided to change this. I want to go to just one place to generate my meta tags. So, I created Meta, Please. I researched and tried to dig through and locate the most common and still relevant meta tags. I believe that this site covers them. That said, meta tags, like HTML, are ever changing. So I anticipate this site changing over time. If there are any tags that you feel should be included, please let me know, I’d be more than happy to add them. I also created a GitHub repository for the site, so that other developers may contribute as they’d like.

PhotoSeed, a site I recently developed was just named webpick of the week for Communication Arts. I’m very happy to see this get the recognition that I believe it deserves. Spencer has an amazing collection, and I worked hard with him to ensure that the CMS offered him the flexibility that he needed for all of the different types of content, while still allowing him the possibility to easily create relationships between that content. The collection on the site is truly unique and can’t be found anywhere else on the web. It’s an amazing resource for researchers as well as people who are new to photography. I often lose track of time just refreshing the home page. Jay David, as he usually does, designed a beautiful site.



In addition to the CommArts award, another photo based site I worked on, DART St. Louis (which I wrote about here), was an Awwwards site of the day.



Over the past couple months, I’ve been working with Curt von Diest and Jay David to build a website for DART St. Louis. DART St. Louis is a participatory photography challenge. In April 2011, over 250 creative St. Louisans threw darts at a huge map of St. Louis City. Over the following month, participants visited the area where their dart landed and took a photograph.

Sadly, since I now live in Indianapolis I wasn’t able to participate as I have done in the past. In fact, I wasn’t even in the country when the site launched! Thankfully everything went off without a problem and the site launched with a final party at FK Studios.

Check out the actual site at http://2011.dartstlouis.com/. You can also learn more about how it was developed in my portfolio.



Today, Steve Jobs published his thoughts on flash. You can view it on the Apple site here:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Two paragraphs in particular caught my eye:

“Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

“Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.”

Steve’s got a great point with this. It’s very similar to my thoughts on iPhone and iPad apps:

The iPhone and iPad are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Apple, and Apple has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Apple’s products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Apple and available only from Apple. By almost any definition, the iPad and iPhone are closed systems.

Rather than develop iPad/iPhone apps, I choose to use HTML5, CSS and javaScript – all open standards.

A couple months ago, with all the press focusing on Apple’s announcement of the iPad, Steve Jobs made a comment that Flash is dying and that people need to push HTML5. Since this comment, I’ve heard from many clients who want new sites and want to avoid Flash because it’s a dead technology and has no future.

I never thought I’d do this, but I think I’m going to come to the defense of flash. I don’t like programming in flash all that much and I find it quite frustrating and annoying (I had hopes that when Adobe purchased Macromedia it’s type support would get better… not worse).

Don’t get me wrong, in 15 years I don’t see a huge place for Flash. But in the now, and in the next 5 years, it’s still going to have a very strong presence. I believe this for a couple reasons:

1. Upgradeability (Spell check is getting mad at me for that word, but it’s the best word for this reason): If you want to upgrade flash, you can now do it without having to restart your browser. In fact, it often takes less than 5 seconds (really!). It is such an easy process that almost everyone upgrades without even realizing what they are doing (I won’t get into if this is a good thing). Therefore, within 6 months of a new flash version over 96% of web users have it. That’s some amazing penetration. Web browsers on the other hand (Internet Explorer in particular) is on the complete other end of the spectrum. People still use IE6. Yes, it is in decline, but a lot of people (and more importantly, businesses) still use it. There is no easy way to upgrade. A user has to go through Windows Upgrades application (which studies have shown that most people do not use). Microsoft seems to have finally gotten back into the browser game and has released IE7, IE8 and is even working quickly on IE9, so perhaps this will get better. But the bottom line is that right now (and for the next couple years at least), most people do not upgrade their browsers.

2. Video. There is a lot of hype around the HTML 5 video tag. Sure, it makes it really easy to embed video. It’s just one tag. Sounds great right? I think it is, but the markup isn’t the problem here. The browsers are. Just like in the late 90’s and early 2000’s we had to have a Netscape version of a site and an IE version of a site. Now, we’ll have to have video in one format for some browsers and in another format for other browsers.  In my opinion, video is the one thing that flash does well. Why? Because of my reason number one above. Flash gets upgraded often, and can support better and better video codecs/formats as they come out. Browser manufacturers can’t agree on formats. And as time goes by and new formats come out, it will become even more of a mess.

In a perfect world, the browser manufactures would agree on standards. And as new versions came out, people would make sure the upgraded. These two things don’t happen. Therefore, flash isn’t going anywhere.

The claim that flash is dying reminds me of the late 90’s and all the claims that XML was going to revolutionize the world and every new site and application should make use of it. Sure, XML is a solid tool, but 90% of the hype wasn’t necessary. Flash will go away at some point. But not nearly at the speed that people claim.

Over the past year I’ve looked a bit into iPhone App Development. I have an iMac at home, I use a powerbook at work, and I talk on an iPhone. I love to work on mac’s. But I must admit that I have absolutely no desire to start developing iPhone apps.

It has nothing to do with the programming language, the IDE or anything regarding development.

It really comes down to two reasons.

One main reason is that I despise building something for one platform. I don’t want to build an iPhone app, rebuild the same project as an Android App, and then again as a Blackberry app…etc.

It’s the browser wars all over again where we had to build a Netscape version, an AOL version and an IE6 version…etc.

The other big reason has to do with Apple’s policy. It can take weeks for an app to get approved. And there is no gaurentee your app will even BE approved. I know one company that built an app for a client, submitted and had the app rejected because Apple didn’t think it would have a large audience. Really? So do we need to submit a business plan with our app that projects what Apple’s return will be?

Of late Apple has been critical of Adobe Flash and has been trying to promote the open standards of HTML5 (while I like Flash, I applaud a company the size of Apple trying to push HTML standards forward).

Last month, Apple removed over 5,000 apps that it deemed ‘inappropriate’. Really? So on one hand it promotes open standards, but on the other hand they want to create their own standards and change them after the fact. These apps were already in the store – meaning they had been approved. And many of them have been purchased many many times.

I hope they don’t pull an Amazon and go into the phone to remove the app.

At TOKY, we’ve built a couple sites for clients who wanted a site search. Rather than re-invent the wheel we’ve tried using Yahoo’s search (this was pre BOSS) as well as Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE). We have had problems with both search applications. In particular, the results would be different from page to page. For instance, when searching an item it may tell me that there are 300 total results. But then three pages into those results it would tell me that there were really only 37 total search results.

This would make it quite difficult to include total search results for a search on the page. It also prevented us from providing pagination as a method of browsing the results. Instead we can only provide Previous Page / Next Page style navigation of the results.

I contacted Yahoo, and they explained that they were working on it. The issue was mainly because the search would hit a different server with each search call.

I tried contacting Google, but never had much luck getting an answer.

However, after testing CSE a bit more, I noticed that this issue was consistently happening on certain searches and at certain pages within the result set. Therefore, the issue couldn’t have been the same as it was with Yahoo’s search app.

I started playing with every parameter that can be customized when calling CSE. I found one that seems to fix the problem: filter. Here is what the API says about filter:

“Optional. The filter parameter activates or deactivates the automatic filtering of Google search results. See the Automatic Filtering section of this document for more information about Google’s search results filters.

The default value for the filter parameter is 1, which indicates that the feature is enabled.

Note: By default, Google applies filtering to all search results to improve the quality of those results.”

I turned this filter off and search results were consistent from page to page. Google may recommend that the filter is enabled, however, in the majority of my tests the first couple pages of results were the same with it on or off. If the filter was turned on, I would still encounter the issue where 3-5 pages into the results the total number of search results would drop dramatically.

If the main difference is that I get extra pages of search results, I’ll take it. I’d much prefer that over the chance of changing the total search results from page to page or even worse, using pagination and allowing the user to go a page of search results that doesn’t exist.

This plugin has a new home. It will now permanently be hosted on Wordpress.org:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vimeo-badge-widget/

If you downloaded it off my site, you may want to re-download it from Wordpress.org. One person who was trying to use the plugin was running into problems because their server didn’t have cURL installed. I found wp_remote_get() in the Wordpress Codex. Sadly, it’s not documented at all.

So, if you’d like to make a call to another server, it looks like wp_remote_get would be the function to use. It checks to see what is available on the server and then uses the appropriate function. You can use it as so:

$response = wp_remote_get($remote_url, array(‘timeout’ => 60));

About a week or two ago I was building a blog for a client who asked if a Vimeo Badge could be added to their sidebar. I expected there to be a plethora available. However, I was stunned to find that this was not the case. I tried Vimeo RSS, but I wasn’t really satisfied.

This afternoon I decided to write my own. Just a simple widget that allows a user to select the number of videos, and then grab the videos for a user, a users album, a group or even a channel.

It was also my first venture into Widgets since Wordpress released 2.8 and their new Widget API. I must say, I’m really impressed with the new API. For someone who has never used it before, I was able to develop a widget in under two hours. It’s nice, simple and very intuitive.

I’ve submitted it to Wordpress and hopefully it will be in their repository soon. In the mean time, you can grab it here: http://tylercraft.com/vimeo-badge-widget.zip