Google’s Halloween Image is Slide-A-Riffic
Today Google’s choose to do a Scooby Doo Ghost-Busting theme for this halloween but I am not here to talk about the theme but rather the mechanics behind it.
I have heard the control they choose to implement be called many things such as slider, carousel, gallery, ad-rotater, and best of all multiple image thingy-majig. However I don’t know exactly what to call it. But the principle is very simple. You line up a set of images in div’s or unordered list set the width of the first div to the size of the picture and then tell it not to overflow that div hiding the rest of the images. You then move the images based on the navigational queues to the furthest left. Kinda like shuffling cards.
I have seen this control used on several hundred websites and even this one. It is a great way to get multiple ideas across in an unobtrusive and pleasing way.
However a few questions arise as there are so many librarys and methods to do this.
What kind of library do you use to accomplish this effect, do you use a library?
Do you prefer the slide or fade transitions?
What should we call this control?
Leave answers below or tweet them to @davidbates
Thanks
David Bates
Adobe Flash 10.1 The Good, The Better, and The Scary
Today Adobe released their new version of the flash player 10.1 and I will say it was a much anticipated update for me. I love flash and have developed in it since it’s early day when it was another product altogether. Flash started out as a way for me to program desktop apps that looked and felt the way I wanted as I have always loved to be able to create the interface and then program it to do what I want. Since then my love of Flash has faded in and out as changes and flaws where found in the system. I almost completely wrote off flash until YouTube and Air had launched. I had been writing projectors for autoplay cd’s for years and air gave me a whole different type of application delivery mechanism. Anyway I love flash and even though I use Silverlight quite a bit, when someone needs a project completed in a hurry and want it to look custom my default is always Flash. So with that here are my thoughts on the release.
The Good:
As you all are aware Apple recently hit Adobe below the belt saying that security flaws and memory errors. I would have expected that in Adobe’s press release they would have addressed that first. But instead they slyly take on the mobile market slating that performance and low power was their main focus. This should make Google happy as it show them that Adobe is not lying down and taking Apple’s low punch lightly.
Better Hardware video decoding… they already own most of the video market. HTML is too early and silver light is just now hitting the market hard. I would have liked to have seen more about HTML 5 video and how Adobe was going to provide tools for video publishing compatible with HTML 5.
Mac Specific Improvements: this is a straight jab at Jobs. I read this as here you go. You wined and we fixed it, now put us in the iPad 
The Better:
Mulitouch: I have been having to use third party apps to accomplish this thusfar it is great to see this come to the mainstream and is also another sideways jab at Jobs
Multi-Tab memory usage: This is much improved and a much anticipated release. If you have a ton of windows open and multiple flash objects they each have their own memory space. Adobe has streamlined this now.
The Scary:
Ok this one paragraph scared the heck out of me:
“Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low.”
This is scary because what if you are running a mission critical flash app and you run out of memory? They also did not state whether it was physical RAM or paged? Scary stuff.
Hope you enjoy
David Bates
#BEMEDU Google Analytics March Madness Training @BEMINTERACTIVE
Today I was invited to join BEM Interactive’s March Madness Google Analytics event. It was a great overview of Google Analytics that I used as a refresher since it had been 2+ years since I had taken any real time to mess with GA. However I also come away with some high level tips from BEM’s GA Ninja Jeremy Shaffer. This guy really knows his stuff and can speak to a crowd very well… something I am still trying to master So without further adieu I would like to share you with what I took away from today.
1. Without a good foundation IE. hosting/website design analytics won’t do you a bit of good. Analytics are meant to help you streamline and custom tailer a site for a visitor, not fix a broken site.
2. You will not magically gain traffic by installing analytics. It takes a full market strategy to drive traffic and analytics can quantify if a strategy will or has worked.
3. Just running reports showing numbers will not get you anywhere. You need to be qualifying questions instead. How can analytics tell me I sold a product from this campaign for example.
4. Define conversions for your site. Having traffic is cool but at what point in your site do you deem their visit valuable? Is it when they click order now? When they visit your careers page? Fill out an email sign-up sheet? define these conversions and then use analytics to quantify them.
5. Quantify valuable metrics. You may have had 43,00000000 visits to your site over the last year but where did they come from and what did they do? How long did they stay? Did they bounce? (yeah that one is for Jeremy Shaffer for those of you who where there.
6. Segment traffic. It is great to know what is happening with all of your visitors but when you get down to answering questions about specific ad campaigns segmentation really helps you find out about your traffic patterns and customers.
7. Analytics should help you come up with solutions to problems. You can report a problem but you will really shine if you can also suggest a solution based on traffic patterns.
8. Don’t get in the mindset that web based analytics cannot help quantify your traditional advertising. You can give customers unique urls or include tracking data in the url so that you know that traffic to that url is from a traditional campaign.
Hope this is helpful to you, if you have any other tips leave them in the comments below.
David Bates
Windows Phone 7 Series
So Windows is making a mobile operating system. Yes is the short answer, and it is brilliant but it seems up until now people never associated windows mobile with Microsoft maybe it was due to Microsoft itself never hyping the OS or maybe it’s the manufacturers fault. Who knows, who cares… As the local tech person for everyone I know I have had a lot of questions that start something like “why would Microsoft try to get into the mobile os business now? Is it because both Apple and Google have one? They must be trying to copy them huh?” I just smile and say well windows has been in mobile phones for a very long time… remember the Motorola Q? They all shrug and then say “yeah but it sucked”… and I say yes that is why they put so much effort into windows phone 7 series, because they needed to to stay in the game.
So now that I got their attention I delve into why Windows Phone 7 Series is an OS worth having such a long name. I think they got it right. First they are requiring the device manufacturers to have certain features like touchscreen, accelerometer, and three hardware buttons along the bottom. Then they are basing the phone on an already existing platform, Silverlight and XNA both of which are highly used on the xbox 360 Microsoft’s gaming platform. Finally they are making the tools free. This is a big step for Microsoft and you can still see on the http://developer.windowsphone.com/ they still charge $99 per year for developer access to legacy SDK’s and samples. What freelance developer wants to pay that… especially when Apple and Google both have free tools (Apple is not completely free as you have to buy an Intel mac) and the phone up till now did not have powerful processors or GPU’s. Windows Phone 7 Series even goes one step further to make the software on the phone support full multitasking or as some like to call it multi-APPing. Combine that with a slick UI and sound UI standards we have a real contender on our hands. I wish this phone would be released a lot sooner than the Christmas time-frame that they currently predict.
Now I have downloaded the SDK and even followed the keynote given at http://live.visitmix.com/ to make a picture viewing app. It worked great, was easy to follow given I already knew the tools from silverlight development and fast… on my computer the emulator outperformed any picture app I ever had on my IPhone. I can’t wait to see what comes of the app store and I hope that MS takes a hint from Apple and Google and decide to make it free to publish apps but charge for advertising and take a cut of sales. If so I’m in.
Thanks for reading
David Bates
#GoogleGSO
I have been chatting up the #GoogleGSO thread this morning after hearing the JoshInTheBox Google Song on 1075KZL this morning.
Play it here:
It seams like there is a lot of discomfort around how the city of Greensboro is handling the marketing campaign to try and lure Google into our town. First they abandon their 1,400 follower twitter account in order to create a new branded one instead of simply using a hash-tag, and then they pay $10,000 for RLF to build a wordpress site, which is Google’s competitor for blogspot. when there already where good standing grass roots movements like http://www.google4gso.com/, and the twitter hashtag #GoogleGSO on twitter.
I hope we get it, it would mean a lot to our community but if Greensboro as a city is going to make these kind of basic mistakes on a marketing campaign we made need to look for better business leaders to help us next election season.
One thing I will give them credit for is the google crate… that is awesome
Thanks
David Bates
