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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.

Out of the box, it was a thing of beauty. Typical Apple packaging means you’re in love with the inanimate object before it’s dropped it’s negligé. Weighty, solid, beautiful screen, bezel of a good size for holding and intuitive controls meant it felt like you’d already known about this new thing for a while.

The screen is fantastic, the battery life astounding and the multitude of ways I’ve been using it––equally impressive.

At first I was almost reticent to try and use it whenever, and the fact that the iPhone is always in my pocket meant it was the first gadget I’d reach for. However, over the weeks, I’ve got more used to typing on the flat glass untactile keyboard, and actually quiet like it. The screen makes reading for any extended period a breeze, and I caught myself thinking it was more akin to reading a newspaper whilst on the throne.

The boy loves it. He’s familiar with the iPhone, so when he picked it up and had a go first time I didn’t have to show him *anything*. He ended up in Safari on Vimeo, watching a bunch of my videos, which was amazing as he’d never actually used a web page before that moment. As you can see in the video, it was just purely intuitive. You can hear my amazement!

The amount of games I have for him (and me) on the iPhone means we hit the ground running with loads of content on the iPad. When games are 59p, you don’t mind taking a punt on them, and we’ve got some crackers for him. Clicky Sticky is a current fav, creating his own scenes with aeroplanes and stuff. In fact, quiet often I’m relegated to the iPhone as he runs off with the iPad!

Travel
The other week I went down to London for the D&AD Awards ceremony, which was an honour, and I decided to not take a laptop, just the iPad. First time without the trusty laptop interface to the online world. Would I cope? The train ride down was great. Logged on to wifi, emailing, surfing, chatting, listening to music, watched an episode of Lost. A couple of Oriental ladies were very interested so chatted to them for a bit and let them play with it while I went to the toilet. Loads of glances, and some crap joking from the Scottish rail staff about robbing it. Err yeah, another beer please!

#protip: a banana makes an excellent iPad stand. Non-slip, tilts the iPad a great typing angle, biodegradable and provides a tasty treat when you’ve finished work!

Taking the iPad to the gym has made me a few more friends too. Since I’d had it there before the UK launch, there were a few points and stares, but one guy came over and started chatting. He turned out to be a security analysts and consultant, who loves Apple hardware. Great geeky conversation ensued!

Around the house, these last weeks the iPad has been indispensable for watching the World Cup while moving around the house! Streaming via TVCatchUp has been great. Not perfect, but to wander from room to room and have the footy in hand, supoib!

In summation, I’ve found the iPad to excel when it comes to consuming media. I sit at a desk all day, and most nights, creating stuff. The iPad is a chance to kick back and look at all the wonderful things on the internet, providing they’re not in Flash…

In the living room, when the wife is watching tele, the iPad presents less of a barrier for conversation than a laptop. If we’re sat in there and I reach for the iPad to wiki or IMDB something, it doesn’t put up the same fence as a laptop, which kinda says “I’m busy, don’t interrupt.” I feel the iPad is a lot more informal, and less intrusive.

It’s a fantastic bit of kit, and while it will have it’s detractors, I’m loving every minute with it. And so is Eloy!

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Enter JW Player, and their HTML5 beta.

The JW Player for HTML5 is a fully skinnable and configurable player based on the new <video> tag found in HTML5. It is built using javascript (jQuery) and enables a seamless fallback to the popular JW Player for Flash. Currently, our HTML5 player is in Beta. Certain functionalities that we consider essential are missing in this Beta version and will be included in the 1.0 release, which we anticipate to be this summer. We encourage you to provide us with feedback on this beta version so that we may incorporate it into the 1.0 release. If you are a developer interested in learning more, please visit the Developer Site.

So I’m pretty damn excited to see this, because as one of their working examples, they show an example with just an MP4 file. Just a single MP4 file! It’s like they read my whinge!

We’re already using the JW Player on the D&AD site, but not at version 5 yet. However, for the coming revisions, we’ll be updating and serving MP4 video to iPads, iPhones and iPods via JW Player for HTML5 in the near future (providing the geeks are happy with everything where they’re concerned!) The JW Player uses the same skins from the Flash Player with the HTML5 player, meaning continuity without bloodshed. Nice.

Colour me happy.

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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.

The evening also provided a good chance to catch up with folks I know, like @lodge28 and the Moo Marketing lads, or others that I talk to online but have never met. Highlight of the night was finally meeting the brothers Eccles, David and Andrew, from Fudge. Having talked with them both over Twitter and email what must be 2 years, it was really nice to have a beer with two sound blokes.

Networking. It’s brilliant.

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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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Told you OGG was shit.

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I’d be struggling to put them in some kind of numerical order, so alphabetical it is.

• Bare Knuckle II
• Devil Crash MD
• EA Hockey
• Elemental Master
• Gunstar Heroes
• Rainbow Islands Extra
• Sonic 2
• Strider
• Street Fighter II – Special Championship Edition
• Thunderforce III

Had to miss out some right stonkers too, like Golden Axe and The New Zealand Story!

What makes my list better than @rewindgaming’s is that all these games mean so much to *me*, which is part of the fun when arguing about games! The name of each one conjures up a time and a place that I remember well, and the box art just leaps into my mind. I remember completing the games, or beating friends, hours and hours spent in front of my old 14″ Sony Trinitron memorising enemy ships and bullet patterns, until Thunderforce III could be completed without so much as a scratch on my shields… yeah, I’m a shmup fan. No apologies.

However misguided he was, he got Sonic 2 right, Soleil was fun, and I’d never heard of or played Light Crusader, despite being by one of my favourite gaming houses, the Japanese legend that is Treasure.

Fairly sure my mate Ian would come up with a completely different list from this, all based on his favourite memories too.

Oh, and I reserve the right to come back and change this list as I see fit, as I discover more gems via my collecting of Japanese Sega Mega Drive games!

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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.

The good news. Getting up and running, playing video and setting the poster frame was ridiculously easy. Having the chapter to hand was fantastic, because a reference source is needed with anything new. Very happy to see the video running in WebKit browsers, nice playback bar (Safari’s looks a little more cultured (figure 1) than Chrome’s basic big bar (figure 2)), but the video didn’t look quite as good stretched as Flash in Safari (you could see some cross hatch type lines were the scaling was implemented), but seemed better in Chrome. Not a show-stopper.

Right, cool, lets push this further. I want to style that playback bar. What’re the CSS classes and IDs? Oh. I have to “roll my own” in JavaScript? Are you kidding me? This is the beginning of the bad news.

<rant>

That’s right. If you want to customise the playback bar in anyway, you have to write it. In JavaScript. I don’t do much JavaScript, in fact, very bloody little, and I was very disappointed in this. I guess I was hoping for a bunch of default elements I could target, move and style. Still, I guess it won’t be long til some clever sod has written a js-playback bar generator online, where you can choose all your desired elements and attributes. A cookie for the first one, from me.

Ok, so slightly disheartened, we go looking at how the video reacts in other browsers, and it’s fall backs etc., aka, the bad news steps up a gear.

Here’s where I misunderstood something about <video>, the fall back content you put in between the <video> tags is only there for browsers that do not understand the <video> tag. It is not there for browsers that do not understand the video codec. Let me repeat that so we are clear. If the browser understands <video> but does not support your codec (h264 in my case), the browser does NOT fall back to the Flash code or instructions and links you may have put inside the tag. Once I’d understood this, I kinda went “oh yeah, that makes sense.”

What does not make sense is that at the moment, is how browsers that don’t support h264 behave. Opera still shows the play bar, and holds the poster frame (figure 3) which for all intents and purposes, will make the user thinks the video is still going to load. There’s no alert and no warning. Firefox is a little smarter, and knocks back the poster frame to an opaque black, and puts a cross in the middle (figure 4). No real description of what’s happening, but at least the user is told that something is amiss. To my mind, this would be a perfect time to use that fall back content that’s in between the <video> tag, but aimed solely for older browsers.

So I started googling and asking a few knowledgeable people on twitter about this, and it appears this is the way it is. Rich Clarke of HTML5 Doctor fame agrees that yes, it sucks at the moment, but that’s the way it is. Tom Leadbetter, who wrote this piece on HTML5 video for HTML5 Doctor, says he can’t see if he’s missing anything, but did point me to a method of JavaScript browser sniffing to write in the correct code at run time. WTF!? 2010 and we’re back to using browser sniffing.

Rich says he’d like to see OGG win, as do all of the Opera crew I know, but I have to be brutally honest, I hope it doesn’t. No hardware acceleration on playback or encoding, shit meta-data containers, lower quality picture quality to file size ratio… it’s like saying I’d like to see everyone driving a Trabant. I think it’s a disgrace that these browsers that don’t support the given codec can’t do anything better about handling it. And before you accuse me of being biased against OGG/Opera, if Safari can’t handle being fed *only* an OGG file, with no h264 file, then it better do a better job of handling it gracefully.

So it appears, that at the moment, if you have a handful of videos, and you can encode to both OGG and h264 formats, and don’t want to style a playback bar, <video> does a great job. If however, you’re maintaining a client’s site that has over a thousand videos, and possibly no way of getting your hands on the originals that the h264 videos were encoded from to encode an OGG alternative, and you want to style a playback bar to fit in with your site’s branding, you’re in for some tears.

</rant>

On a lighter note, I will, however, highly recommend Bruce and Remy’s book, Introducing HTML5. I’ve been lucky enough to unofficially review a few chapters from Bruce, and I really like what I’ve read, and it’s practical. It’s aimed at people who’re crafting away with HTML4 or XHTML, with hands-on examples and where needed, theoretical discussions of unimplemented tags or methods. We shall be buying a copy for the JP74 offices as soon as it’s published.

Figure 1. Safari

Figure 2. Chrome

Figure 3. Opera

Figure 4. Firefox

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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!

We went straight to the venue when arriving, to pick up Phil, who’d been on an HTML5 Doctor course, taught by another mate of ours from Northern Digitals, Rich Clark. A quick wave/face pull at the window to put everyone off their stride, we then disappeared back upstairs to grab a drink. Here we met Gavin, Ellie and a few more of the DIBI organisers. I’d met Gav briefly at Speak The Web, but he was happy to chat with us while we quaffed a drink. This attitude from the organisers was there every moment of the conference, you could go ask them anything, and they were more than accommodating. Big props to them for this, as it made the whole gig feel a lot more accessible. Paul from Technique in Manchester also caught up with us for a pint, whom I’d met at a Transmission event in Manchester, and was to stick around with us for the next day.

Back to Phil’s to dump our gear, then after a veggie curry and a few cans, we headed off to The Forth to meet another mate from school who Phil and I hadn’t seen in around 15 years. There was no mistaking Simon Slater when he walked in, he’d hardly changed a bit! So we stayed in the excellent Forth pub for a few and caught up with him.

On to the pre-party, which was on the Tyne at Pitcher and Piano. Up the stairs, blag Si in at the door, get the beers in. Then start craning around to see who’s about! The pre-party was pretty well attended and it wasn’t long before we were bumping into twitter contacts and putting names to faces. The atmosphere was really laid back, and I think this helped the approachability for everyone.

I think we partied a little too hard at the pre-party, as I kinda remember heading to bed at 3.30am, and didn’t really arise ’til after 9am…

Anyway, hungover, and late to the conference, we skipped the keynote and Wolfram lecture, going straight for coffee and muffins, pocketing many little bags of Haribo for sugar fix rushes throughout the day.

I decided to go for the Build It track to kick off, the first session of which was run by Elliott Kember on jQuery. I’ve used jQuery a total of once, since our nerds at JP74 prefer MooTools (they can actually code javascript!), so there’s no need for me to get involved really. I learnt a lot in Elliott’s class, but it was not without it’s floors. There was a lot of code, but no visual examples of what was happening, and I think it may have been technically aimed a little low for some of the attendees, but his style and enthusiasm was irrepressible.

Next up, nearly half the hall exited for Sarah Parmenter’s iPhone design session. I was too hungover, and felt well up on the HIG rules for iPhone interaction, so decided to stay for the Last.fm vs Xbox360 class. This was wryly and dryly delivered by David Singleton, who nearly thrashed my head when he said it’d be more technical than Elliott’s jQuery sesh. He lied, though not on purpose. It was about scaling the API and hardware to meet demand of an Xbox version of the Last.fm service. Really insightful process and decision making about how many features you can cull in moments of intense use before a user drops your service. Good stuff.

Lunch, burger, juice, coffee, more chat, meet more faces, both old and new.

Design track for this afternoon, as the speakers all looked excellent.

Tim Van Damme. Photo by @drbparsons

First off was Tim Van Damme, recently of Gowalla fame, urging us to keep evolving with not only our design, but the tools we use to create our designs, lest we become lazy monkeys. Good thinking, excellent art, Tim’s talk was enjoyable, although he himself admitted it was brief. Gavin stepped up and asked plenty of good questions to finish the session.

Next up was Simon Collison. I’d seen Colly talk at Speak The Web, and both his presentation and delivery were excellent. A very measured speaker, it serves to underline he knows what he’s talking about. This session drove at the principles of designing to communicate, highlighting basic rules, methodology and why we do things a certain way. Well worth a watch when the sessions are streamed on the DIBI site.

Short break, laugh that Phil fell asleep twice in that last sesh, cans of Red Bull.

Dan Rubin took the stage to host a talk on usability testing, in which he sighted two examples of real live client work and how they made a difference. Really insightful stuff, I thought Dan’s talk was excellent. Usability is something we should all do more of, but tend not to because of the perceived time it takes. Dan explained how they mocked up sites with a static PNG graphic as the background, then skeleton HTML & CSS to map out buttons on the page. Users were told it wasn’t finished, so only certain buttons worked, which kept expectations in check, and the format made updates and tweaks near immediate, ready for the next test subject. Not rocket science, and something you may think was a bit “ghetto” if you ran a usability session this way, but proved that the big boys have to Blue Peter their way through a job too!

Time for the tour de force that is Andy Clarke, with his Hard Boiled Webdesign. I’d seen malarkey’s talk before at Speak The Web in Leeds, but damn, I was quite happy to see it again. Andy is at ease under the spotlight, and knows what he’s talking about, which makes compelling viewing. The talk urged front end developers to start using the CSS3 progressive fanciness now, because if we didn’t, these cool things like border radius and animation would not make it into a browser spec. The W3C is holding everyone back, browsers include and work on things that devs start to use regularly, which then in turn become ratified into the spec. Excellent working examples, rallying of the troops and generally inspirational. I possibly enjoyed it more the second time round as I was ready to pay attention at the right times!

More refreshments, then time for a musical interlude from Sancho Plan. An interesting mix of live music triggering animations in a live on-screen virtual world. My ears were enjoying the music, whilst the brain was working out how to do what they’re doing. My route, use Director to catch MIDI triggers from the instruments to fire off animation sequences for sprites on the stage. If you understood that, that was the gig. Good, not offensive in anyway, but not my music of choice.

One last speech, by a usability company called What Users Do, which was interesting, but not as engrossing or hands on as Dan Rubin. This was followed by one last Sancho Plan performance, plenty of thank you’s from the organisers, and directions to the after party.

The after party was at Sea, over the other side of the Tyne, and the beer was free. All night. And there was free pizza. From Pizza Hut. Someone had our number and knew exactly what we liked! Everyone got together and exchanged views on how the day had been, high points, low points (if any) and got a chance to say hello to anyone you’d missed during the day.

I also gave a mate of mine who collects Sega Mega Drive games a ring and dragged him down for a beer. I’d talked to Ian online, swapped games and knowledge and envied his game collection, so it was great to meet him in person and to talk about more than just games too.

The after party was well attended, but people started to drift out and leave after the pizza, and we moved onto the Quayside for a swift pint with a few of the speakers. Colly, incidentally, is more than happy to chat with most people, about design and football (Notts County in particular) which was ace. The stragglers carried on the chatter and said good byes, we hopped a taxi and headed back to Phil’s, and I do remember getting to sleep shortly after 1.30am. Quite sensible.

So, to summarise. DIBI was excellent. The venue was class, easy to get to (though the walk with a hangover up all those steps would have me believe otherwise), the speakers were excellent. The crowd was fantastic, and you may have realised from some of this write up, the people you meet at conferences are just as important, if not more so, than the people you go and see. The conference itself was so professionally ran, so much so that it belied the fact it was the first DIBI. The team have ran many conferences before, and it moved smoothly.

Tickets are onsale for DIBI 2011 in June, and I’ll be there.

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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.

The two briefs were the Nokia Interactive Design and the BBC Digital Design brief. These student briefs had been sponsored by both Nokia and BBC, and had two people from the respective companies along with our six other jurors plus a D&AD Jury Manager for the day.

I can’t say I wasn’t nervous. A few questions and doubts were running through my head, but while getting a coffee before the opening speech, a few of the professional award jurors were more than happy to chat and assure me that it’d be a fun day.

The first ‘cull’ of the Interactive Design brief was hard work. We had to do this without discussion, and approved pieces make it through to the next round where we’d choose “in-book”. Not talking meant that I was in doubt as to whether I was picking the right kind of work, so I viewed every piece before making a mark on my clipboard, and adhered to the three principles of D&AD judging. The Idea, the Craft and On-brief.

We went for a coffee, and came back to see successful cull-dodgers back on the walls. How relieved was I to see nearly all the works I’d circled yes to? Yeah, very! This put me at ease, and now discussions could be begin, which was great. As the jurors all warmed to each other and the task at hand, the whole job started to go by quickly, and we all investigated why each piece should be up there.

To cut a long story short, this is where we confirmed in-book, then went on to decide Firsts, Seconds and Commendations. If you didn’t agree with the choices, you could explain your thoughts, or be persuaded by others.

The jurors were all in strong agreement for all the accolades awarded, and I have to say our bunch were great people and knowledgeable professionals.

The work itself came in many forms, excellent ideas with average execution, super-glossy production hiding incomplete work, polished, peculiar, amusing, endearing, piss-taking and best of all, it came from all corners of the globe. The Student Awards is important, as these creatives will be working their way into agencies everywhere, and it’s good to see hard work and creativity awarded. Very honoured to have been involved!

For more info, follow the weeks awards on the D&AD blog.

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