After the initial buzz of getting this website onto the iPhone, I decided to have a closer look at the code that Dashcode had churned out. I came to the conclusion that it was pretty crap, so started looking around for alternatives and stumbled across IUI, a JavaScript library that restyles your semantic XHTML into iPhone-styled screens.

The result is this, a semantically written set of XHTML templates which work across all graphical browsers and a iPhone-specific look and feel for (yes you guessed it) the iPhone.

Now I can relax and get to work on learning how to write my first iPhone App!

For the past few days I’ve been working from home and decided to take advantage of our new flat screen TV (as you can see below).

The resolution isn’t as high as a Mac flat screen, but at 32 inches the wireframes are almost popping out of my screen.

Sometimes you just have to go BIG!

My friend Richie sent me an invite to this useful online storage and file sharing service last week. Dropbox allows you to sync files and share folders across multiple computers (Mac or PC). You can also use it for remote back-up.

You may say, well I only have one computer, so I don’t need such a service, but it does come in handy. My last few days working at Dare Digital last week were from home (another train strike). I usually have to email across my files at the end of each day, so this not only involves sending an email but is generally limited to files under 10MB (no one really appreciates massive file attachments).

Anyway I thought I would try Dropbox out. So I installed it and set up a shared folder, allowing access to the guys at Dare. All I had to do now was to just drop any updated/latest files into my Dropbox on my Mac and they were automatically “beamed” over to the work computer (and backed up online).

I can see it coming in quite handy for future projects where I work remotely. Thanks Richie!

I’m pretty pleased with my current organic search listings on Google at the moment. Check out the screen shots below for a little evidence. All down to coding this site in an accessible way, writing relevant content and having industry knowledge of search engine optimisation.

Keyword phrase: Freelance Information Architect London

Keyword phrase: Freelance IA London

Keyword phrase: Freelance Information Architect Essex

Keyword phrase: Freelance Information Architect UK

It came to my attention yesterday that maybe Coxy’s year’s of fiddling about with code and not really doing much “proper” work may have finally resulted in something worthwhile.

Beej told me yesterday about the race between the CNNbrk feed (developed by Coxy) and Ashton Kutcher to get 1,000,000 Twitter followers . Next thing I know James is all over the internet doing interviews with US and UK newspapers explaining how he developed the automated feed a few years back that takes breaking news from CNN and delivers it to mobile phones via a Twitter feed.

The long and short of it is Coxy is now, in a funny way, semi-famous in the geek arena.

BTW: Kutcher’s feed pipped the CNN feed to reach 1,000,000 followers by about 30 mins, still, good going from a Hertfordshire kid who taught himself to code!

You can now get all the latest news from Hungry Browser through the new widget I’ve just launched for Netvibes. It is availalbe for OS X, Windows Vista, iGoogle, Opera and Windows Live. Go check it out!

The new Freeview website is now live and is looking so much better than it was previously. I was part of the team that assisted in the redevelopment of the site and was in charge of developing the Information Architecture for the new site. Hopefully the new visual design and structure will be welcomed with positive feedback!

I came across these interesting data visualisation projects whilst working on the IA for the redesign of the Freeview website. There are some great ideas here involving the presentation and manipulation of data objects. As IA is very much about communicating ideas to clients and teams I am hoping to use some similar presentation techniques on future conceptual IA.

MooWheel

MSNBC Spectra Visual Newsreader

Reclam Literatur Doner

For more info about cool data visualisation experiments and projects check out: visualcomplexity.com

Over the past few months Amazon have been tweaking their existing site to improve the design and user experience. They have done a good job, but I couldn’t help but notice that they have only gone half the way to using Web standards in their redesign efforts. Here’s a little (non-exhaustive) summary of what they are missing:

• The HTML isn’t really that semantic, if you remove the style sheet the content doesn’t really flow that well – a(ccessibility barrier to non-graphical browsers)
• No DOCTYPE to inform browsers of what version of HTML they are using
• A huge amount of page specific CSS and JavaScript, could this have been moved into an external file to be reused elsewhere?
• They are STILL using tables for content and page layout – very inflexible, non-semantic and harder to update, increases code to content ratio (lowers SEO – although Amazon are all over SEO)
• Page design doesn’t scale well when you increase the font size
• No use of access keys or tab indexes so a user can’t tab logically through the navigation
• No use of skip to content or skip navigation links

Amazon still provides a great online shopping experience, but you have thought that if they had gone to the trouble of redesigning their site they would have taken a few lessons out of Yahoo’s book and gone down the full Web standards route.

Just updated my installation of WordPress (the blogging platform that powers this site) to WordPress version 2.5. There’s some great new features including bulk image uploads, a new admin interface, customisable dashboard, media library and lots more! Hopefully it will inspire me to update this site a little more over the coming months.