Welcome to the team Joe!

At its root, Google+ is all about sharing, and connecting with others in a humanistic way. It integrates social services such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, and introduces new services: Circles, Hangouts, Sparks, and Huddles.

Yes, it has received 20m users in its first weeks with us, but I don’t think people should be comparing this to other social start-up stats. Google is an established brand; other platforms such as Facebook grew with its brand, while at the same time creating a new social world. Google has this foundation to learn and grow from, as well as the added comfort of being a global name.

I am also a bit dubious about the stats. I think that some people (like me) will sign up out of curiosity to have a look around and see what all the fuss is about. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are active users.

In its premise, I like the idea of Google+. I like the use of circles to create groups of friends who only see certain content. In a world where social and work can overlap, this makes thing easier. But all these elements seem like simple Facebook tweaks. I’m not sure if I need another platform to sign into, another profile to keep up-to-date, especially in an already saturated market. I know that I will still turn to Twitter to find out what’s going on in the world, YouTube for videos, Skype for instant messaging and Facebook for updates with friends, but I am not sure where Google+ will fit into my life.

Grouping friends, family and work colleagues into circles is useful but I don’t think it’s a
“delightful experience that rewards people” as Andy Hertzfeld, Google+ designer explained to Fast Company’s John Pavlus. He went on to say that ‘categorisation can easily become tedious, and fun animations help add a twinkle in the eye, some whimsy to the process.” Hmm. I’m not so sure.

The feature ‘Sparks’ brings content to you automatically based on your interests. Each topic you like will get its own “Spark” page and provide links to related articles, videos, photos, etc. Although it has had some negative reviews, if it provided quality, relevant content, this is something I would be interested in.

One issue that I have seen surface, is that if you have a business and social Gmail account. You have to log out of one to use Google+ on the other. And the same goes for if you have an Apps account, you can’t be logged onto the two at the same time, even though that may be inconvenient to a user.

I also find the concept of online ‘Huddles’ and ‘Hangouts’ between friends hard. Setting up video chats to play charades seems a little sad. It might be great for a quick chat but why not actually meet up and have some face-to-face interaction?

It isn’t all bad though Google+ is hot on the heels of Facebook over its many privacy issues. Google+ offers a huge array of privacy settings. Ultimately, respecting users’ privacy and giving every feature its own privacy implications.

With previous efforts such as Google Wave and Google Buzz behind them, Google+ has tried to tackle the four problems in social networking that they think others lack in. By creating a safe environment with solid privacy settings, taking time out of sharing, integrating video chatting and creating easy to set up social circles. Is this enough to make people switch though? When services such as Facebook and Twitter are viewed as part of normal day-to-day behaviour. Rather than ‘just’ a social platform, they are part of people’s lives.

It would be great to see some of these social platforms collaborating – maybe one day we could check Facebook updates through Google, use search fields on Facebook or  integrate the Google+ button or Google Maps into Twitter. In my opinion I don’t think Google+ has conquered it just yet. I think that the initial excitement and buzz will soon come to a standstill, leaving Google+ to be embarrassingly swept under the carpet, and plans to be dominators of the digital world put back into action… But, we’ll wait and see what happens!

Firstly, we are happy to say we have received an ’Honored Hot Crush’ PageCrush award, for the campaign we created for MTV – DJ Hero, that allowed users to sample the delights of the all new DJ Hero 2 as well as enter a competition to win some serious mixed up goodies…

Secondly, we received recognition from Web Design Served for the branding and on and offline communications we developed for LightQube, a premier lighting design consultancy.

We are also delighted to announce that we are Web Award Winners, for the design and build of the Digital Gurus (digital recruitment specialists) website. We created an approachable design and branding that reflected the energy of the brand and the ‘gurus’ it represents…

Here’s to more awards this year…

We are proud to announce the launch of our first project for MTV – a co-branded product launch with DJ Hero 2, and we are very happy with the results…

We had fun creating a campaign that allows users to sample the delights of the all new DJ Hero 2 as well as enter a competition to win some serious mixed up goodies…

The site went live in 5 languages, was built in flash – fed via XML, had basic social activation / conversion tools attached and some seriously cool animation…

We Love were responsible for designing, developing, copywriting and delivering the site within a very tight timeframe. So well done to everyone involved in the project (agency and client side)… And we look forward to working with MTV in the future…

To visit the site:  http://www.mtv-djhero2.com/

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April has been an interesting month in the development world. Just days before Adobe Launched the CS5 suite with the ability to create iPhone/Pad apps directly out of Flash CS5, Apple announced that only certain programming languages could be used to create apps for their mobile products. This doesn’t include Adobe’s CS5 suite. Now Steve Job’s has posted ‘Thoughts on Flash’ here: www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ to explain the move. 

Is the crack in the relationship between Adobe and Apple turning into a separation and divorce? 

I have decided to step back and try and see the big picture here. Is Apple trying to push us forward to let go of 3rd party plugin to view rich media? Do they want to keep a high standard by limiting the languages to develop in? Or is Apple feeling that their mobile app market is being threatened by cross platform development, so are proactively limiting now? Let’s have a look at some of the quotes from Steve Jobs himself: 

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…. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript? 

To conserve power and keep performance Apple has gone for HTML5, CSS and Javascript. If you have already created an app in Flash which will need to be ‘rewritten’ to support touch. Is this true? I agree HTML based apps would probably conserve battery power and could be comparable to a Flash App. Now if you are smart and stick to the programming life cycle surely you can adapt your Flash app to support touch with a class or two. You can reduce cpu usage in Flash by optimising your framerate. Wouldn’t that conserve battery as well? 

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies. 

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained. 

This quote does have logic. Using old decoders will drain the battery. So hardware decoding wins here. The only point I would like to make is that Software can be updated and improved. Hardware will need replacing to be updated. 

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short. 

Is this true? Has Flash had its day in the ‘PC era’? 

To sum up Apple says Flash consumes battery, has security issues, old video decoders and is a closed system. Flash is not the way forward and therefore it’s not in Apple’s Future. 

 As you should be aware by now, this has sparked quite a debate. The Adobe CEO has responded in an interview (can be found here: blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/) and Lee Brimlow, platform evangelist has produced a scathing blog on his site: theflashblog.com/?p=1888. I have seen some twitter comments to the sound of ‘I’m moving off Iphone development’ and ‘Moving to Android’. Could this move from Apple to put a walled-garden around their developing environment have backfired? What are your views and comments? 

Just to start the ball rolling, I will give you my view:
I think Apple has effectively created a double workflow for mobile app developers. Instead of using the middleware to quickly create apps for multiple platforms, you now need to use C/C++/Objective C as well to develop your apps. Doubling your workload. Apple wants you to limit your development to just Apple. It’s just not in their interest to help you create your apps on multiple platforms. Flash is a platform that is always being updated. If Apple doesn’t want it for creating apps, I’m sure Android won’t mind.

It seems to be a very honest article, and there are some good points in there which do give a lot more weight to their argument.

Check it out here…

Whilst looking up the cool new features, I came across this Adobe video where one flash application was accessible across desktops and mobile devices. No code changes required! Check it out.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=22vicDlzmkI

Take a look at these examples…

Starfield Tag Cloud (uses a 3D and particle jQuery engine by BugSoftware)

HTC Desire’s mini site uses this 3D engine

Shows how much jQuery has progressed and I’m very impressed. That being said I still prefer Flash for an all immersive experience. Take a look at this little website from HBO:

The problem
When you create an instance of the ratingClass you can setup a new StarIcon in its constructor. Then use that StarIcon as many times as you need. This compiles fine, but then on running your little rating app you find that only one StarIcon is showing. What’s up with that!?

The Cause
When you created the instance of ratingClass, you passed that StarIcon with it. That was just one new instance of the StarIcon. So your ratingClass is just referencing the StarIcon and that’s why there is only one.

Workarounds
For each item you want to rate, you could create a new array of new StarIcons when creating a new constructor. That could be 5 new StarIcons for each item, which seems a waste as you may only use 2 icons.

Or

Get your ratings class to load new StarIcons as and when it needs. So you are effectively hardcoding a display object into your class. This means you lose some extendibility of your class.

Solution
Ok, I took a long time getting to the point of this blog, but we are here now.
getDefinitionByName allows you to specify a class name in a string and then create new instances of that class.
For example, in our rating system I pass a string of the StarIcon class (var my_icon:String = “StarIcon”) during my ratingClass constructor. When I need to display a new StarIcon, I create a new Class definition using getDefinitionByName(my_icon) as Class. Now I have my definition, I can use it to create an instance of my StarIcon (var icon:Sprite = (new icondef() ) as Sprite;
Add the icon to the display stack and you can now create as many icons as you need. Below is the full code example:

//*** Main document class **
public class Films extends Sprite
{
public function Films():void
{
// declare a new rating of a film (Film name, rating icon, films rating out of 5)
var rating:Rating = new Rating("A few good men", StarIcon, 1)
addChild(rating);
}
}

// *** Rating Class ***

import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;

public class Rating extends Sprite
{
public function Rating(fileName:String, theIcon:String, itsRating:Number):void
{
// There would be a lot of code here to setup the film name and position it correctly. But for this example
// we just need the icon code

// First we need to create our definition class, which will hold our icon
var ratingIcon:Class = getDefinitionByName(theIcon) as Class;
// Thats it, one line of code – really easy. Next we use the ratingIcon to create an instance of an icon we
// can use
var myIcon:Sprite = ( new ratingIcon() ) as Sprite;
// Because ratingIcon is just class we need to specify the instance as a sprite.
// Now we have an icon we can use. So let add it to the display stack
addChild(myIcon);
// Done! Since this system would require as many icons as the film is rated, you would need to put the
// code in a loop and store your icons in an array.
}
}

This saves a lot of time creating new instances of an icon and passing it to a class constructor. Saved me pulling my hair out too!