Blog | Kyan

Neil Middleton
September 21, 2011

One web, one app

At Kyan we’re getting more and more requests for mobile application development. This is pretty unsurprising as you may expect given that lots of people now have smartphones in their pockets more powerful than the computers that sent man to the moon.

Ollie Kavanagh
June 20, 2011

One web to rule them all updated

Last week at DIBI (Design It Build it conference in Newcastle-upon-Tyne), all the design speeches were talking about the ways the web is changing. It IS changing — we’ve got mobile and tablets and netbooks and laptops, but as Jeremy Keith succinctly told us, all these devices are part of the same web. We think we can control its dimensions and can control how our users view our websites but that’s a lie. And this lie has meant that we are approaching designing for the web in the wrong way.

Why are Google developing cars that drive themselves?

Did you know that Google engineers have tested a self-driving car on the streets of California? According to their recent announcement they’ve clocked up over 140,000 miles.

Peter Roome
September 07, 2010

Simple Image Resizing for the web

Take me straight to the tutorial!

THE PROBLEM:

As you’d expect, here at Kyan, we work with vast quantities of images on a daily basis. It can therefore be quite easy to take for granted the knowledge we have acquired as a result.

Consider this with the continually falling prices and the ever growing specification lists of digital cameras and we find ourselves with a small/large problem; clients with giant photos, both in terms of dimensions and file size, that they find difficult to upload to the web. It’s not unheard of to download an image straight from a digital camera that exceeds 10mb.

Peter Roome
August 03, 2010

Free Wifi in Guildford

I was asked by a friend today if I could recommend any bars/restaurants/cafés in Guildford where she could access free WiFi on her laptop. Besides Giraffe I wasn’t aware of anywhere else in town so I posted the question to Yammer in the office and received a number of helpful responses. It seems that Guildford has a reasonable selection of access points; so it made sense to collect them all on a single map.

Paul Sturgess
January 08, 2010

Our latest trio of happy clients

Just before Christmas three new websites we’ve been working on went live…

The next generation of online Benefits reporting

benpal.com / Portfolio entry

Brand new look for home design partnership

nude-designs.com / Portfolio entry

Online promotion for web-based education application

blueskyeducation.co.uk / Portfolio entry

Paul Sturgess
September 02, 2008

Google to launch new web browser

The web is buzzing with the news that Google have officially announced their own web browser and it will be released (in beta) today.

‘Google Chrome’, as it will be known, has been built from scratch, is free and is open source.

Google’s has said it’s intentions for the browser are for it to ‘drive innovation on the web’.

Highlights include:

JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8 (faster javascript – open source)
A process for each tab (So if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t crash & better management of memory)
Task manager to view processes (Allows you to see which website is using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your cpu)
‘Speed dial’ home page comprising of your most visited pages
Google Gears is built in
Smart search directly in the address bar (aka Omnibox)
Uses a ‘Chrome bot’ on the google crawling infrastructure to test it works against the most popular sites on the web
The browser runs inside a ‘sandbox’ with restricted permissions to make it really secure (It cannot effect your machine or it’s processes)
Private browsing mode
Automatically checks against known phishing websites (These are available in an open api)

For the full low down I highly recommend you checkout Google’s comic they released.