system error

Not really a massive surprise, but probably had to be done in the light of the WebM video codec. H.264 faced no real pressure from OGG, as OGG was shit.

Read more on TUAW

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So maybe it’s over a month, I’ve not kept count. What do I think of it? How have I ended up using it? Pros? Cons? Read on!

My mate Robbo was heading to Las Vegas about a month before the UK launch date of the iPad, and he was toying with the idea of picking one up. “Grab us one, kidda, I’ll sort you out when you’re back.” I says, and he did.

Pretty much everyone’s first question was “What on earth are you gonna use it for?” (except the wife, her’s was more along the lines of cost and current computer count in the house–5), to which I didn’t have a good answer. I have an iPhone and MacBook Pro, but being a nerd, an iPad was a prequisite. Read more…

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You may have read about my frustrations about the current HTML5 <video> implementation, it’s short-comings and general deflating-balloon sad-trombone-ness.

Enter JW Player, and their HTML5 beta. Read more…

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This Thursday saw the official re-launch of the Creative Times website at The Cornerhouse, Manchester. A limited ticket event, with some live acoustic music from I Am Kloot.

Creative Times, in their own words, is an online magazine for the creative community – produced by and for people working in the creative sector. They want to showcase creative work and talent, but also want to be community driven, so it’s their members who write articles and push for content.

Add to the magazine format a forthcoming diary, job board and a directory, and you can see how Creative Times would start to be a first port of call for creative types who dwell in the North West. Long term, these kind of things live or die by content, and I hope the community does well to provide and engage through it’s own content. Read more…

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Andy Clark put a tweet out asking for some bearded web design folk to take part in a survey, because as he put it; “There is no way of discerning how the experience of a bearded designer might differ, simply because there is a complete lack of representation.”

I was honoured to have been asked, or maybe I was one of the few who could be arsed to answer. Either way, check out the hard hitting questions and answers session…

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So Google bought the On2 VP8 codec for $124.6 million, then open sourced it (hopefully avoiding patent issues), hoping the up-take would make it the de facto codec online. Opera and Mozilla have been quick to support it, IE 9 says it will with a plug-in (err?) but no word from Apple just yet.

Told you OGG was shit.

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Spurred on by @rewindgaming’s massively misguided (I’m kidding!) top 10, I feel the need to set my stall out and tell you all what I consider to be the finest Sega Mega Drive games ever crafted. Read more…

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After my last post about HTML5 video and thinking everyone’s getting ahead of themselves, I’d like to point out I’m not that stupid that I was going to ignore it completely, until I’d had a chance to try it out in a real world work environment situation. I can now ignore it. For a few years/implementations, at least.

It had been weighing on my mind that one of clients has a lot of video, and a lot of their audience are Mac users. This will probably mean there’s a high percentage of iPhone users, and in the coming months, iPad users.

So I’d been thinking about wrapping the Flash video player we have with the <video> tag and seeing how we go. A bit of an experiment, being eager to use these HTML5 elements because they show so much promise of doing things “the right way”, without kludgey plug-ins and so forth. So armed with a chapter on multimedia from messers Bruce Lawson and (the real) Remy Sharp from their forthcoming HTML5 book, I embarked on a journey of discovery. Read more…

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Time for another conference road trip!

The inaugural DIBI Conference took place at the Sage in Gatehead on the 28th April, with a fantastic crop of speakers and promising bunch of attendees, judging by the twittering.

DIBI’s format is a little different than a traditional conference, being a two track event. DIBI, which stands for Design It. Build It., was aimed at both developers and designers, with two sets of sessions running all day. Attendees could chop and change and “jump tracks” as they liked, and since a lot of the crowd were front enders, this seems quite a logical thing to do.

The journey up involved the usual road-tripper Chris Mills, but we picked up Dan Donald too, and headed up to crash at Phil Sherry’s house, since he’s now resident in Gateshead. Yes, this small fact did make the trip more appealing! Read more…

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This year I had the great honour of being a Foreman and juror at the D&AD Student Awards 2010, which was held down in Olympia, London.

For those of you who don’t know, a D&AD award comes in the shape of a pencil. As a creative, a Yellow Pencil is one of the highest honours bestowed upon you by your peers. It’s career defining, and can only be bettered by a Black Pencil…

However, I only had a hand in awarding “Baby Pencils“, a slightly vertically challenged version of the full professional award, but nonetheless, the honour of being asked to take part in the Student Award judging, and to be a foreman for the two briefs I was judging was incredible. Read more…

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