Playgroup | Helping brands build genuine brand equity

Speaking at the Internet World Exhibition in London, Mozilla's Tristan Nitot expressed concerns over media plugins for your browser. Applications such as Flash from Adobe and Microsoft's Silverlight were called into question. Nitot explains: "You are producing content for your users and there is someone in the middle deciding whether users should be able to see your content".

I have never thought of Flash, in particular, as threatening the openness of the web as so many users have it installed but Nitot claimed that both Adobe and Microsoft have a history of poor support for 3rd party browsers. To support his claim Nitot cited the lack of Internet Explorer on Mac/Unix systems and Adobe's slowness in it's attempts to update its Linux version of Flash.

Nitot: "If you consider proprietary technologies, think hard; are you really trading convenience in the short term with independence in the long term?". Something we should all be thinking about really. However with the advancements in the JavaScript field, spearheaded by Google, and the Web 2.0 movement there is emerging a real alternative to using Flash for websites that require lots of user interaction.

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It seems Microsoft have abandoned their attempt to purchase Yahoo... for the time being at least. I took an interest in this story as on the face of it, it seems a strange move from Microsoft. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have struggled to gain market share on Google for a variety of reasons but at a base level it is because they both have inferior search algorithms. Even working together their market share would be a distant second to Google.

It seems the directors at Yahoo were just playing hardball and had no intention of selling to Microsoft, no matter what the offer was. Their shareholders must be extremely annoyed as the price offered, for a fading brand, was extremely generous. Very few companies will be able to match it, and none probably will.

I am slightly disappointed that it didn't work out as a Microsoft-Yahoo success story could have provided a real alternative to Google. It is always good to have choice and it would have kept Google on their toes. It is not surprising that Google tried to sabotage the deal and tell everyone that would listen that it was bad for the industry - they were hardly going to rejoice from the rooftops.

With the dividing line between application and web service becoming more blurred by the day there will be many more Microsoft (king of the desktop) vs Google (king of the web) battles I'm sure.

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The new designs for the British coins have been recently unveiled. There were 4,000 entries to a public competition to find the new designs; it was won by someone called Matthew Dent.

The six designs on the 1p through to the 50p coins can be pieced together to form a complete image of the royal coat of arms. You can see images of the coins here.

While the new designs are unique and a definite improvement I feel there has been a real missed opportunity here. Yet again the coins are plastered with the Queen and the royal coat of arms. The Queen is nothing more than the head of a dysfunctional family that has no relevance or interest for the vast majority of the population. I believe the coinage of a country should reflect the values and customs that that country holds dear. While there is no denying the fact that Britain is known for its Royal Family, they play little or no part in today’s society.

Britain has provided the world with many important inventions over the course of its history that could have been recognized. Inventions and discoveries that have saved peoples’ lives and changed the way we live our lives. One of the most recent ones, the World Wide Web, has changed the way we will communicate forever.

I am not suggesting we stick the WiFi logo on the coins but some reference would hold more relevance to people today. Why not have The London Eye or some reference to sport (we probably invented half of them) as we are a nation of sports fans. There are many options available that could showcase what it is like to live in Britain today but it seems we are stuck with the same archaic drivel for many more years to come.

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You can now access Playgroup's web site content through your favourite RSS feed reader, or embed the content on your own site, if you so wish! We recommend you try Netvibes if you haven't already. Netvibes allows you to add content from all your favourite sites in one place, including various news sources such as the BBC and social networking widgets.

Links you will need:

Blog feed: http://www.playgroup.com/blog/rss
News feed: http://www.playgroup.com/about/news/rss

Each Playmate also has their own blog feed. To find out more visit the playmate's page you are interested in.

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Check out Ajax Rain, it has loads of demos and examples of Ajax and DHTML in action. With the desktop-feel becoming more prominent on the web and everyone harping on about Web 2.0 it is good to look at sites such as Ajax Rain for inspiration.

I have also been looking at Mootools, a popular Javascript framework which allows for all the fancy Ajax effects. Most of the effects they demo on their site could prove useful in web design, one that I particularly like is the Morph effect. If applied properly it can work nicely.

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Recently upon boot-up my laptop has decided to start prompting me with an “Invalid license” error message with a nice OK button. This unhelpful and useless error has got me thinking of classic computer error messages.

Firstly, for those of you who can remember the Eudora mail client (I was forced to use it back in the day):
“Excuse me but Eudora could use some help”
OK

Then there is the famous Microsoft Office error, which I’m sure you have all encountered:
“You are closing the Office Shortcut Bar. The Office Shortcut Bar will start again automatically when you start Windows. Do you want the Office Shortcut Bar to start automatically when you start Windows?”
YES | NO

Other less than helpful messages:

“User Authentication. Your session has expired. Please re-authenticate”
OK

“Symbol table full – fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer”

"You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler"

It’s not just programs that like to entertain though; here is a selection of phrases my university lecturers used on at least one occasion:

“A floppy is essential” – One teacher trying to explain to me the benefits of saving my Pascal program onto a floppy disk.

“It looks at the address bus and says: ‘It’s for me’”. – The same teacher, this time enlightening us on PCI architecture.

“I could leave the program as it is and satisfy myself” – What can you say to this?

“If the cubicle doesn’t have walls the locked door doesn’t do its job” – I think this one was used when talking about multi-threaded programs in Java. Even giving it context, it still makes no sense.

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After lots of planning and hard work the Playgroup web site is finally here. Working closely together with Jamie, the design lead, we just about hit the deadline. The site essentially started out as two independent mini sites comprising of an about us section and a blog section. As development progressed and it became apparent that content from both sides crossed over we amended the original idea and now have an integrated custom built solution which we are all happy with.

This is only phase one of the web site and we hope to roll out the next iteration in the next month. New features will include a full site search, tagging of news and portfolio pieces (as well as the current blog entries) and full pagination and archiving across the board. There will also be some subtle design tweaks.

For those of you who are technically minded: the site is coded in Object Orientated PHP 5 with a MySQL database backend.

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After swearing I would never use a Mac I finally succumbed last week and have been using an iMac at work for the past 7 days. Being in an office where you are one of only three people using a PC you start to feel like a dying breed.

I have never been a hater of Macs per se; I usually find the users of the machines the actual problem. They tend to be annoying individuals who love to show you their shiny new toy at any opportunity. As Charlie Brooker excellently put: "Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui."

Despite this, every six months I consider buying a Mac, before meeting one of the aforementioned and decide it’s best to stay clear. At my last company my colleagues found it hilarious to stick post it notes on my machine saying "MAC’s rule". Notice the inclusion of the non-required apostrophe and capitalisation of a non-acronym. I didn’t feel the need to respond, a two worded insult with two grammatical errors tells me all I need to know about that person: drama student, Mac user.

I have been finding using the iMac an experience, both good and bad. The screen is like its own little ecosystem, pink and greens spouting up bottom left, air bubbles popping up top right, I could sit mesmerized all day. I cannot sign off without mentioning the lack of a hash key on the Mac keyboard though, utterly unforgivable. I know Apple like to give us little and charge a lot (£300 locked 2.5G phone springs to mind) but what's going on?!

All in all, so far so good.

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