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Building a New Web: A New-level of Interaction
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At the heart of the new development process while working on websites is the emphasis on improving how we interact with the websites we visit, and making them more intuitive to use for those that haven’t learned how to use a computer yet. Ideally, the websites will be intuitive enough that people will no longer need to use trial and error or follow tutorials before they understand how to use the site. A key element to that is providing real-time feedback without the need to take the user to a new page or make them refresh.
Now that the more basic elements of website design are well established, people are free to focus on making sure that the site is user-friendly and a joy to use. One way to accomplish this is to make the site more lively with subtle animations that give the user hints that they can interact with it. Users can hopefully appreciate the time that is saved whenever an action is made or feedback is given without the need to take them to another page. Instead, JavaScript is used to make the update right on the page they’re already on. It can show it instantly if it’s a small amount of information, but if that’s too jarring the developer might add in a little animation.
JavaScript has influenced a large part of the development of HTML5, and is also available to a larger percentage of the users on the internet than years prior. That in consideration, interactions in the way that provides real-time, easy to understand, and a level of consistency will most likely use your web browser’s built-in JavaScript capabilities rather than using an external plugin.
In my last post about animation, I mentioned how Flash still has it’s place in web design but simple interactions are the first thing to be changed from being programed in Flash to JavaScript. This really furthers the point.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a full-service advertising agency and Internet marketing firm that focuses on branding, developing and executing marketing roadmaps, and growing companies.
Building a New Web: Seamless Animation
For years now, there has been only one way to make things animated on the web. Flash quickly became the dominant technology for animation due to the complete lack of competition. It also provided a great vector graphics platform that’s capable of providing graphics with a very small file-size. There is another technology for animation, but it isn’t a fully-capable Flash replacement. JavaScript provides support for very simple positioning, resizing, and color animations, but doesn’t have the ability to do anything more advanced than that. Considering that JavaScript wasn’t built with the intent of using it for animation, things as simple as rotating an object simply aren’t possible so it isn’t a viable solution for most applications. What it manages to do is provide a nice middle ground between a static page and exporting and embedding a flash animation.
The latest development is an iteration of an existing website design technology called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS has been used for years as the primary technology for styling websites. When you view sites without CSS enabled they all look the same; white background, blue links, the same serif fonts, nothing positioned in the correct place, etc. Essentially, CSS keeps most websites from looking like they could have been made in Microsoft Word. This latest version of CSS (using HTML 5) is drawing the attention of web developers because it will provide full support for advanced animation.
Not only will CSS provide support for the basic animations that were availble through JavaScript, but it will also provide the capabilities of rotation, skewing, 3D, and more. There will also be a performance boost compared to other animation technologies, because CSS has been fully optimized for the single purpose of rendering graphics on a website. It will also be able to utilize the powerful graphics cards that computers ship with today, and that’s something that has yet to be taken advantage of on the websites that most of us visit.
It is important to compare Flash and CSS because it’s worth understanding the advantages and disadvantages of choosing one over the other. There’s no denying that Flash has a well-established install base and provides vecor graphics capabilities that are still some of the best out there, but for the most part CSS is giving Flash a run for it’s money in terms of animation. I’m not proclaiming Flash to be dead, but I definitely hope that this level of competition will push Adobe towards more innovative thinking than they’ve had in the last few years.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Building a New Web: Geolocation
In my past articles, I’ve mentioned how always-connected portable devices are changing the technological landscape. No area is being more influenced by this than geolocation. This concept was first introduced in GPS devices that could do no more than show where you currently are and hopefully help guide the way to where you’d like to go. The technology behind it is mostly unchanged, but now that the number of people with location-enabled devices is on the rise there are companies and communities exploring new uses for geolocation.
The iPhone has seen a surge of apps that allow you to “check-in” at any particular location. You can then decide to send out a message to your friends so they can come join you. The apps also keep track of each time you check into a location so they can integrate a game component into their service. They award “badges” to users that complete a certain objective such as, “Gym Rat” where you visit the gym over 10 times in 30 days. They also provide ranks for the top visitors of a certain location, and the highest attending visitor is commonly known as the “Mayor” of that location. These new services are a great idea considering they encourage meeting with friends, going out more frequently, and help promote / advertise your favorite businesses. The most popular services out there are Foursquare, Yelp, and Gowalla. Check them out, because they might provide an app for your phone even if it’s not an iPhone. Yelp is the latest to provide check-ins so it’s a little limited at the moment, but also provides the user-reviews that made the site so popular. These services are still very early on, and they’re providing a good amount of competition for each other.
Website designers are now able to integrate geolocation into websites as soon as the HTML5 standard gains a larger install base. This seems to be yet another feature that gained popularity through the iPhone’s App Store and is now being included as a capability of the new web. Developers will rejoice as they won’t have to make and maintain a separate app for every device out there, and instead built it into a website that every device can use.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Building a New Web: Offline Access
With the rise of small and easy-to-use applications (commonly known as “Apps”) created by the popularity of the iPhone comes many things to learn from and integrate into website design. One of these new capabilities is to be able to store information locally so the user is able to access their information while they don’t have access to the Internet (aka “offline access”). A side benefit is that there’s no need to re-download things that don’t change, like a downloadable app, so it’s a much faster user experience. This is also great for those that have Internet access, but for one reason or another is slower than usual.
To help speed up the adoption of this technology is the increase of Internet enabled portable devices and computers being used along with the increase of websites that provide software as a web service. Software as a service is where a more traditional program that you download to your computer has been converted into a Web site. It still offers the same capabilities in addition to being able to access the same information from anywhere that has internet connectivity.
Offline access is new and isn’t yet supported by the majority of Web browsers that people use. So there’s something that’s lost in the process of turning a program into an online application at the moment, and that’s the ability to access the information without internet connectivity. Once the offline access capability is more ubiquitous, you will be able to see this feature being offered by more and more Web sites. It bridges the gap between the benefits of a program that you download and an online application. Google has been using a similar technology for their services called “Google Gears” that they created themselves, but they have stated that they will be moving over to this new standard introduced in HTML5. There’s already iPhone specific Web applications that are using offline storage, so there’s no need to wait for it to re-download over the cellphone’s Internet access to use it. This is one small part of HTML5 that will be a key component to opening up what’s possible on the web.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Building a New Web: HTML 5 Video
Flash is widely accepted as the method that video is distributed over the Internet. It quickly became the standard as sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Break, Vimeo, and other content providers started to use it as their means of online media distribution. Before Flash, people would embed Windows Media Player or Quicktime to play back video on a website. This method was slow and not everyone with PCs had Quicktime installed and people using Macs weren’t capable of playing a Windows Media Video. Almost all of those people had Flash installed, so the widespread adoption of Flash for playing video was well justified.
In any technology industry, the drive to improve the accepted standard is unavoidable. Flash is far from perfect. People encounter crashing and performance hogging websites due to their use of Flash. Another issue that’s come into play is that Flash is solely owned and developed by Adobe, and people can’t help but feel like they don’t want a single company to determine what the future of online media will be. For example, Microsoft Internet Explorer is one piece of software where one company single-handedly slowed the development of Internet technologies from making years of progress. There are various enhancements that Adobe has been capable of adding over the years, but has chosen to only include them now such as search engine optimization, graphics acceleration, and more. Apple has added another reason to prefer open-standards over Flash by not supporting Flash on their devices. They claim it’s due to battery usage and poor stability, but others say it’s due to Apple wanting to force people to use their App Store to provide services that were once available via Flash. Either way you look at it, the solution needs to be something that is faster, more reliable, and isn’t owned by a single company. Now there’s a new video distribution method that aims to fix everything that Flash video has gotten wrong, and it’s HTML 5 video.
Both YouTube & Vimeo have recently launched their web players that are 100% HTML 5 and don’t use any Flash. Not many web browsers are capable of HTML 5 video at the moment as it is still a developing Internet standard. It’s a good sign to get two big name video sites showing their support early on. Once the standard is finalized, the available web browsers will be capable of supporting it. There are even ways to enable HTML 5 in older versions of Internet Explorer for those that prefer to use IE. HTML 5 video will be able to provide all of the custom designs and functionality of modern Flash players, but will be fully optimized for speed and reliability in addition to promoting the use of the latest version of web browsers (while not forcing you to use any one in particular). This is the first article in a series covering the new website design and development technologies.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
