Robin WhittletonA Responsive Day Out
Recently Clearleft put on Responsive Day Out, a one day conference with thirteen short talks and some fireside chat. A seaside day out for our designers & front-end developers: how could we resist?
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Tags: conference, css, responsive
WXG reaches critical mass
Since we announced WXG – Web Expo Guildford – in May we’ve been working hard to create an amazing roster of speakers for our first one day conference.
Our criteria has been to invite people we want to listen to and we’ve been blown away by the response.
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Tags: conference, wmg, development, wxg, design
What is Web Expo Guildford?
When we had our first Web Meet Guildford in November 2010, we felt there was a need in the area for a regular social event for people who work in web.
We just wanted to chat about great work and new stuff and share a drink and it’s worked out pretty well.
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Tags: conference, wmg, development, wxg, design
No, imitation really isn’t the sincerest form of flattery
Being a web design company we’re pretty used to the idea that other companies might take a certain amount of inspiration from our work.
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Tags: copyright, plagiarism
Sticking your tongue out
Designers seem to love these:
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Tags: css, design
Behind our jukebox
If you take on Kyan as a client you’ll soon be aware that we love our music in the office.
We used to use a 3rd party music player, but decided a few years ago to build our own; this gives you a lot more flexibility in exactly how it works.
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Tags: jukebox, javascript, rails
Colophon the 2nd
I’ve had some requests for more info on the challenges involved in building the new site; read on for more.
For the most part the design is actually fairly simple. Nice clean fonts and a clear rhythm, but I had strong design direction which always helps when building a new site. I sit back-to-back with the designer on this so I could just turn around and ask questions if I needed clarity.
Kyan.com colophon
Now that our new site is live, I can finally talk about development decisions we made.
The site last had a makeover in mid-2008 so what we can do has moved on quite considerably, and we’ve tried to take advantage of that where possible.
The lurking cookie monster
Ever heard of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directives) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 (Regulation 6)? If not then it‘s perhaps more likely that you’ve read news stories about how cookies are going to be banned. Sensationalist? Only a little.
Stocking up at Kyan
There seems to be an inordinate number of whisky fans at Kyan, but that does mean some interesting stuff comes into the office. Witness today’s delivery.
Left to right, that’s:
- Suntory Hibiki 12 Year Old
- Ardbeg 10 Year Old
- Koskenkorva Minttu Liqueur
- Laphroaig Quarter Cask
- Glenkinchie 1989 / Distillers Edition
- Karlsson’s Gold Vodka
- Glenlivet 1992 / 16 Year Old / Cask Strength
- Johnnie Walker Green Label 15 Year Old
- Glenlivet 18 Year Old
- another Hibiki 12 Year Old
- Teichenne Chocolate Schnapps Liqueur
- another Laphroaig Quarter Cask
Any recommendations for other bottles to try?
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Tags: lunch, whisky
Smaller, more focused events
Last week I attended the inaugural Heart and Sole conference in Portsmouth. It was a fairly small conference at 150 people, but I thought it really showed the benefits of having a fairly tight focus on what you want to achieve when putting on an event.
Heart & Sole was initially conceived as a networking night for students and web professions on the south coast of the UK. Students would be able to get advice from professionals on how to get into the industry and agencies would be able to meet motivated people who would actively looking for jobs in the next year or two. This premise not only served as a base for the ensuing event but informed the choices that were made during the planning process. The final event ended up a fair bit bigger that originally planned and in a far more dramatic location (not having been in the Spinnaker Tower before I was somewhat taken aback), but the idea of a network event for students and professionals was still core and this made it unlike any other conference or event I’d been to. I know that the organisers are beginning to plan a second event with a similar focus, and I really hope it takes off for them.
From Kyan’s point of view we also host an event: Web Meet Guildford. Again, this started with a simple idea: ‘a dialogue between local web and design agencies would be a good thing’. Our event is a lot smaller than Heart & Sole but so far we’ve had two successful nights and made a lot of friends in the process. We’ll keep growing the event to include any new people who want to come along and we’ve got some plans for some more structured activities than mass beer consumption (don’t worry!), but at the heart the event will keep the same core goal.
If nothing else the small focused approach should convince a lot more people that it’s feasible to host your own event, and that’s got to benefit everyone.
It's difficult to code without power
I’m currently typing this post on my iPhone as the power on Guildford High Street is dead again. Being a web company has many advantages but coping with power loss isn’t one of them, as the silent (apart from the beeping UPS) testifies. Luckily our servers have enough power to shutdown gracefully and automatically, but desktop computers don’t like the lack of power and laptops and ipads lose connection when the switch goes down too.
Coping strategies so far have been an office wide spring clean, the designers hauling out the HB pencils again, and a general moaning from the developers who don’t have laptops and a current git repository clone.
Anyone got any tips on working around power loss? Ideas for web related work that can be done with a pen and paper and iPad with no net connection?
jQuery’s conquest of the web
We love Ruby on Rails at Kyan: it removes a lot of the complexity in setting up a web app leaving us free to build the stuff that actually matters. Take a front end development perspective though and things start to look a little … messy. Rails’ inbuilt helpers let you get client-side interaction up and running quickly, but at the cost of blocks of fairly impenetrable code that rely on the Prototype Javascript framework. Even if you don’t use the helpers, Prototype is still part of the default Rails install.
Around about the time we started concentrating more on hand-coded Javascript, we decided that coding in Prototype wasn’t for us and migrated over to jQuery instead. This is not to denigrate Prototype – it provided a very solid base for Rails with good browser compatibility – but jQuery has a much more compact syntax and a better plugin community. One way to migrate is just to remove the default Prototype links and include jQuery, but to keep the transition smooth we also used a project called jRails: a Rails plugin that rewrites the inbuilt helpers to export the jQuery syntax.
For a year or two this setup gave us the flexibility to happily hand-code our own front-end Javascript and take advantage of jQuery’s plugin ecosystem, at the expense of having to ignore various Rails plugins that expected Prototype to be available. More recently though we’ve seen signs that the rest of the Rails community might be following our move. Plugins started appearing with dual Prototype/jQuery helpers (the Textile editor we use for text entry for example). Now even entire Rails applications are dropping Prototype in favour of jQuery. We’re currently evaluating the Spree e-commerce platform which has standardised on jQuery over Prototype.
The news seems to have reached the core Rails developers: as of Rails 3 the framework is officially agnostic towards Javascript frameworks. The expected JS development methodology is now unobtrusive hooking, which is far better in terms of code re-use and lower complexity. Outside of Rails jQuery’s prospects are looking even better. Microsoft are now directly contributing code to jQuery, and ship it with Visual Studio. Some stats sites are even claiming a near 30% usage rate among top-10,000 sites which is pretty extraordinary.
Overall, we’re very happy with the choice we made. Congratulations to the jQuery team, and here’s the the next couple of years of progress!
Kyan vs. HTML5, round 2
Back in October I posted an article on our first steps with HTML5. Unfortunately, since then we’ve tripped over a rather large stumbling block.
That article dealt with the reworking of our intranet. Luckily for me as a front-end developer no-one in the company uses Internet Explorer; this isn’t the case in the wider world. IE has problems with the new HTML5 elements: it can’t style them at all. There is a a solution though (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher): create each element once using Javascript and IE suddenly understands that they exist. On the whole this is a very good solution, undercut by one fatal flaw.
Print stylesheets
At Kyan we view a print stylesheet as a common courtesy to users. With it we can strip out headers and footers and just leave the page content. While printing though (for obvious reasons) Javascript isn’t executed. This breaks our html5shiv script and means that the new elements are unstylable in all current versions of IE.
The workaround is to wrap all the new elements in wrapper <div>s and style those instead, but then you’re increasing the amount of markup compared to current HTML4 or XHTML1, and for the time being this isn’t really a tradeoff worth making. Of course, with the gradual reduction of IE in the marketplace this tradeoff is something we should keep on evaluating.
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Tags: html, ie6, print, html5, css, javascript
Kyan vs. HTML5
Here at Kyan we like to keep up to date, so new technologies regularly come under the spotlight. This week’s focus: HTML5. Jumping straight into an unknown is rarely a good idea for a client project, but with no such qualms about internal projects I elected to rework our intranet.
Currency conversion in JS
I recently had to make a couple of JavaScript currency conversion functions for a current project, so I thought I’d put them up here.
New additions to the Kyan team
Not sure how long they’ll last in the job though!
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Tags: kyantowers, snow
When grids fall apart
Around a couple of years ago the “what screen resolution should we design for?” argument had mostly become irrelevant. 640×480 was out, 800×600 was mostly out and 1024×768 was a reasonable minimum. With this step change over and new grids in place life should be easy, right?
Think again. The intervening time has seen an explosion in web use on mobile devices and the future looks to only diverge from your standard 1024×768 grid you’ve settled on. So what different screens can you reasonably expect your users to view your site on?
Easy image rollovers
Recently themeforest.net ran a quick tutorial on how to achieve an image slide effect similar to our homepage. I thought I’d go into some more detail about the design decisions we made.
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Tags: image, unobtrusive, javascript, jquery
Unobtrusive scripting with jQuery
Here at Kyan we love unobtrusive scripting: scripting that adds on to the top of an existing web page and extends it to add functionality and interaction niceness.
We often use a Javascript library called jQuery to help us add scripting to our sites, and it’s got a nice extension mechanism. Let’s have a look at writing a small jQuery plugin to add a simple piece of functionality to our site: a print link after a news story.
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Tags: unobtrusive, javascript, jquery
The future of CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) must have seemed like a good idea when it was first invented in 2000. Spam was beginning to become a major problem on the web and a method was needed to fight back. CAPTCHA at first glance seems ideal: a distorted image that would be instantly recognisable by humans yet incomprehensible to machines. Place some letters in the distorted image and get the user to type them back and bingo: you’ve stopped your spam problem.
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Tags: spam, captcha, accessibility, web