chrismar.sh

web developer, movie lover and tea drinker

Is Instagram Worth A Billion Dollars?

April 13th, 2012

When Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars, the internet world sat up and paid attention. Analysts tried to see where the value of instagram was. In it’s userbase? Most Instagram users have a Facebook account. In it’s employees? Well, there’s only a dozen or so employees at Instagram, so that puts their value pretty high. In fact, Instagram doesn’t even have a revenue stream: it received a bunch of funding from venture capitalists but has no advertising or paid accounts.

So has Facebook acquired Instagram to kill off a rival? Not likely. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facbook wants to run Instagram independently and keep developing it.

Why Instagram is hot is that it connects users in ways that Facebook doesn’t. In the same way that Twitter doesn’t require you to know a user before you follow them, Instagram has a passive follwing model: you can follow anyone unless they explicitly block you. Facebook, on the other hand, has an active friending process: you request a friendship and the other user has to confirm it. it’s doubtless due to the quantity of information available on facebook, that people do not want to share with the whole world, but it’s an interesting distinction.

So, you have a network of followers and followees, each probably with a Facebook account but not necessarily connected on Facebook. Is this something Facebook is looking into – connecting users and brands without needing an active agreement from the user? Perhaps.

But the main reason instagram is so hot is to do with mobile. Facebook’s mobile site is pretty good, but there are complaints that their iOS and Android apps are clunky. Facebook has grown rather unwieldy, adding all sorts of new functionality, and while the desktop version of the site can grow to accommodate that, the mobile apps struggle to fit it all in. Perhaps a fragmentation of Facebook, using Instagram as the model, is on the cards.

Or perhaps Facebook just think Instagram is a business that will grow and grow and can be sold on again in 5 years time for $5 billion.

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My thoughts on iOS 5

October 18th, 2011

I own an iPhone and an iPad, so when Apple announced iOS 5, I was more than mildly interested. But now that it’s been released, there have been grumbles in some quarters about the performance of some apps, the lengthy upgrade process, and the general underwhelmingness of it all.

I know you’re desperate to know what I think too, so here goes.

I upgraded my phone on Thursday night, and left it there overnight for the download to finish. In the morning , it had finished downloading but, despite leaving it as long as I cold, still had not finished reinstalling all my apps, music and content.

I must add that my Internet connection is not the fastest, and the 700 odd megabyte download will have taken several hours.

Nonetheless, I was able to play with the iOS that day, and when I plugged my phone back n that night it sorted the problems out straightaway. So what’s new, what’s different, and what’s rubbish in iOS 5?

Overall look and feel

One feature of iOS 5 is that it is essentially the same as iOS 4.x. Apparently it will run faster, and as the new iPhone has the same faster chip as the iPad 2 that may well be the case. But other than adding a couple of new icons (video, reminders, newsstand) to my home screen it really doesn’t look any different.

The biggest difference is a new Music app that replaces the iPod app. It does exactly the same thing, although the interface has been smartened up on the iPad.

App speed

Undoubtedly some apps will run faster, but on the whole there’s no discernible difference. The (new and supposedly improved) Facebook app seems to open a lot more slowly than before, but I think that may be to do with the redesign of the app rather than the OS.

Many app developers have brought out iOS 5 compatible versions of their apps, but that may be more to do with new OS features like notifications instead of speed upgrades.

iCloud

One of the most eagerly anticipated upgrades was iCloud, an Apple-certified way to store calendars, contacts and mail in the cloud.

I’m using it for my calendars and contacts, and it’s great. It can sync contacts and calendars across all my devices, and it makes it easy to share my calendar with my wife. Unfortunately, is means I have no excuse for double booking myself!

There are other options out there – Gmail and Google calendars springs to mind, but iCloud is a very simple way to organise yourself.

Reminders

Linked to your calendars, reminders is a fairly useful app – its a place you can store all the things you need to do. There are undoubtedly apps out there that will do similar things, with even more functionality, but the tie-in with your iCloud calendar is a bonus.

Notifications

I’m a big fan of the notifications centre. It gives you granular control over how apps notify you – for each app you can choose to be notified by a pop up (that you need to dismiss), a new, very subtle popover at the top of the screen, that disappears after a couple of seconds, or not at all.

There is also a way to see all your notifications by swiping down from the top of the screen. This is a handy way to see all your texts, emails, Twitter mentions and Facebook messages in the same place. Much better than getting 20 popups each day.

The notification screen also appears on your lock screen, so it’s easier than ever to keep up to date. The lock screen also has a new camera feature: double click the home button and, in addition to the iPod controls, a camera icon appears next to the “swipe to unlock” message. Pressing this immediately opens the camera, and you can now use the volume up button to take a picture.

iMessage

Another great feature for me is iMessage. Another step towards iPhone users being able to communicate without the need for a call plan (after the excellent FaceTime), iMessage means that when you send a text to another iPhone user, it doesn’t use any of your text allowance, but sends using your data plan. There are a fair number of my friends and family who have iPhones, and texts to them all will now be free!

This has the added benefit of working over wireless as well as over the phone network, so even when I’m at home, where reception is patchy, I can send and receive texts from a huge group of people really easily. It’s a great feature, and I predict that soon iDevices will be able to call each other for free too, when the carriers have been beaten down.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s not a groundbreaking upgrade, but I don’t think that’s likely now. The OS is already pretty advanced, so any changes to it now will just be functional. Siri, which is available on the iPhone 4S, allows voice control of your phone to an unprecedented degree, but in the same way that the last big iOS upgrade allowed things like copy and paste, this upgrade simply enhances many of the features that were already available.

It’s the integration of services that makes it good. You can now tweet from within apps, you can sync your calendars seamlessly, you can message iPhone users for free. All of these things were possible before, using third-party apps, but their inclusion in the iOS core is a good, if not groundbreaking, addition to Apple’s fastest-growing OS.

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A tribute to Steve Jobs

October 7th, 2011

The day after Apple’s first Keynote speech without him for a long time, Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 55. He had been ill with cancer for some time, and had recently been cutting down the number of visitors he was receiving, and had passed day to day control of Apple to Tim Cook, ostensibly in command since the beginning of the year.

Tributes have been pouring in across the world, with even Google adding a tribute to their homepage, a high accolade from one of Apple’s biggest rivals.

It is his drive and vision that propelled Apple from the doldrums of the mid 90s through to its position today as one of the most valuable companies in the world. Apparently he could be very hard to work with, his demand for perfection causing more than a few clashes, but the products and legacy that he leaves behind is testament to his passion for Apple and his belief that in its core values.

The original iPod stunned the world, and has been getting better and better. It would have been easy to sit back on the success, but each generation of iPod has been startlingly new. He withdraw the iPod mini, even though it was selling well, relaunched the iPod shuffle, and saw the potential in the iPod touch.

He drew criticism n some quarters for the way in which he essentially told people what they wanted, but he was usually right – the unlicensed lapped up the changes to the iPod, drooled over each iteration of the iPhone, and gasped when the iPad was released.

It is his vision, and the people he surrounded himself with – the designers, the product developers, the marketing people – that caused app,e to grow and grow and grow, and the world salutes him for that.

Apple will be a different place without him, and it will be interesting to see what direction the company goes in without him at the helm.

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I turn 33 in a month’s time *cough* *cough*

September 17th, 2011

My birthday is on the 17th October, and, more of a reminder to me than a nudge to all you devoted blog readers out there, I’ve decided to write down the things I would like.

The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex

The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

My favourite film critic, Mark Kermode, in a rant about everything that’s wrong with cinema today.

I, Partridge

I, Partridge

The autobiography we’ve all been waiting for.

Twelve South iPhone case

Twelve South BookBook Leather Case

Combines an iPhone case a wallet, and a great-looking accessory. Nice.

Canon PowerShot SX210

Canon PowerShot SX210

We sort of need a new digital camera, and this looks pretty good.

Ping G15 5 wood

Ping G15 5 Wood

I borrowed a set of clubs a week ago, and played some great shots with the 5 wood. It’s the next addition to my bag.

And for those of you with extra deep pockets…

Legria M41

Canon Legria M41 camcorder

Our old mini-DV camcorder just broke, and with a new baby in the house it would be nice to have a new one. The M41 takes HD ready footage, combined with excellent low-light pictures and lots of extra features.

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Wasting time, wasting words

September 16th, 2011

One of the drawbacks of living in the countryside is the length of time it takes to get to work in the morning. I drive the 10 minutes to the station, then sit on the train to Leeds for 40 minutes, then walk for 10 minutes to the office.

I love working at Epiphany, it’s a great place to work with a forward-thinking approach to web development within it’s core SEO offering. But the journey can be a drag, and I often feel I waste two hours a day travelling.

Yet those two hours of travelling do serve a purpose. For starters, I’m reading a lot of books, listening to podcasts and I’ve also been known to do the crossword whilst travelling.

Far from being a waste of time, I’m starting to find productive things I can do on the train as well. Technology has made it easy for me to tweet (@chris5marsh if you’re interested), check Facebook, read and answer my emails, and generally keep up to date with what’s going on in the world.

As I write this first draft, I’m sitting in Leeds train station with a few minutes to kill before my train arrives. I’ll finish this off now, save it and when I get home do a little editing and spellchecking before publishing it.

Smartphones and tablets offer commuters the chance to use their commute to do something useful. On the other hand, there’s always Angry Birds…

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The Curse of Portmanteau Words

September 6th, 2011

Language changes. It evolves. New words are created, old words drop out of use, and technological innovations give new meanings to existing words. It’s unavoidable and, in some cases, encouraging that language isn’t static: it means our language is vibrant and this reflects the dynamism and creativity within its speakers.

However, there has been a flourishing of portmanteau words recently, that I really struggle to accept. I’m sure their usage won’t be decided by this blog post, but I thought I’d make my position clear!

A portmanteau word is one which has been made from two other words squished together. Often, this is a useful way of abbreviating an ungainly construction, or a way of defining a new concept by joining together two different meanings, but here are my five least favourite.

Bromance

A homosocial relationship between two men. A horrible word, which suggests a horrendous romantic comedy where two guys like each other, argue about a girl, then realise that actually their friendship is the most important thing in the world. Best avoided.

Jeggings

Are they leggings, or are they jeans? It might be my grumpiness increasing with my age, but I find both the item of clothing and the word itself slightly revolting.

Webinar

An online seminar. A grotesque word that serves no purpose. It saves seven characters, but has been known to cause nausea. It doesn’t help that it seems that most of the webinars out there are run by people who would be hard pushed to teach anything to anyone.

Chillax

Completely meaningless. Chill and relax mean essentially the same thing, so what good does combining them do? If the meaning is trying to make me calm down, it’s doing the exact opposite.

Guesstimate

My least favourite of all. Guess means to approximate with no real knowledge, estimate means to give an approximation based on some real-world knowledge. Putting them together means something along the lines of “To approximate based on facts but with no basis in fact”. Utter garbage.

What do you think? Are there portmanteau words hidden within this blog post that I’ve conveniently ignored? Am I being ridiculous? Let me know below or on twitter at @chris5marsh

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Another IE bug: this time, it’s opacity

August 2nd, 2011

We’re all aware of Internet Explorer 6′s lack of support for transparent PNGs, and the hacks and workarounds we use to get around the issue.

But there’s an annoying and, frankly, head-scratchingly stupid bug in IE7 that happens when you use the proprietary filter attribute in CSS.

To give opacity to an element, you can use the opacity attribute, and then a couple of fixes for IE. So your CSS looks like the following:

#element {
	opacity:.5;
	-ms-filter:"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)";
	filter:alpha(opacity=50);
}

However, using this code, IE7 doesn’t apply the opacity effect. Even though all the research I did suggested it would work, I had to squirrel around to find the solution: simply add a width or height attribute to the element, and the opacity effect will work.

Another one to add to the ever expanding list of IE bugs!

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The Fallout from the NotW Scandal

July 24th, 2011

The freedom of the press versus the private rights of members of the public is a pretty hot topic at the best of times, but the current scandal that’s caused the News of the World to close down is on another level altogether.

Journalism has for a long time been an investigative medium: it’s important for those in public life to be held to account especially those in a position of responsibility or government.

But when the press oversteps its boundaries in such a radical and obvious way, there really is no comeback. I’m sure that some newspapers use all sorts of underhand ways to get their stories, and for a sensationalist tabloid like NotW, which is primarily concerned with celebrity rather than those in public office, the reading public are happy for those who have thrust themselves into the limelight to be exposed.

Most writers, the author of this blog included, are not professional writers. The accessibility of the Internet to provide a platform for opinion and comment have made blogging a common pastime.

Yet there are still standards in blogs. Some blogs, for instance MacRumors, have become authoritative in their own right. Stephen Fry also is an influential social media user and blogger. The point is that if we have all become writers, it’s important to apply the same standards to blogs and websites as we do to newspapers and print media.

Let’s heartily join in in condemning the unbelievable depths that certain journalists at NotW stooped to, but at the same time let’s apply a similar level of integrity to our own writing: no sloppy research; no blatant falsehoods; and let’s not try to dress up opinion pieces as fact.

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Animating sprites using CSS

July 19th, 2011

One of the enhancements CSS3 has added to a web developer’s box is CSS animations. Webkit was first on board, with Firefox (with their new rapid release schedule) close behind.

It’s a good technique for subtle movements on pages, or animated hovers, and the great part of it is that you can add the code to your CSS without breaking older browsers – they simply show a static image.

N.B. Throughout my code examples, I have removed the -webkit and -moz vendor prefixes – you’ll need to add them to the beginning of all the animation and keyframes declarations.

To add CSS animations to your image, simply use the following code:

#animation-button {
	width:64px;
	height:64px;
	background:#c00;
	animation-duration:400ms;
	animation-iteration-count:infinite;
	animation-timing-function:linear;
	animation-name:animate02;
}
@keyframes animate02 {
 0%			{ background:#c00; }
 50%		{ background:#0c0; }
 100%		{ background:#c00; }
}

This will give you the following effect (you’ll have to look at it in the latest version of something like Chrome, Safari or Firefox):

However, when you combine this with sprites you can create some pretty cool effects. Usually CSS animations animates smoothly between properties, giving you the colour fading effect above. But the new versions of Webkit and Gecko (which power Chrome/Safari and Firefox respectively) have a new animation-timing-function value: step-start. This will jump between the individual keyframes you declare, essentially making keyframes frames.

So in an attempt to make an up-to-date version of an animated gif, take your sprite image, add it as a background image to an element, and then add the animation-timing-function to the CSS.

8 frame sprite of a lemming walking

#sprite {
	width:64px;
	height:64px;
	background:url(img/lemmings-walker-sprites.png) 0 0;
	animation-duration:400ms;
	animation-iteration-count:infinite;
	animation-timing-function:step-start;
	animation-name:animate01;
}
@-webkit-keyframes animate01 {
 0%			{ background-position:  0px 0; }
 12.5%		{ background-position:448px 0; }
 25%		{ background-position:384px 0; }
 37.5%		{ background-position:320px 0; }
 50%		{ background-position:256px 0; }
 62.5%		{ background-position:192px 0; }
 75%		{ background-position:128px 0; }
 87.5%		{ background-position: 64px 0; }
 100%		{ background-position:  0px 0; }
}

Voila! A CSS animated lemming. Using an additional animation to move it across the screen, you could have lemmings walking across your screen in no time!

What are your thoughts about using CSS for animations? Does it blur the boundary between style and behaviour? Should it really be left to Javascript? Let me know below!

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Posted in Web Development | 9 Comments »

Firefox 5 released 3 months after Firefox 4 – WTFF?

July 11th, 2011

Firefox 4 was a pretty big release for Mozilla – the user interface changed to put the tabs on top (very Chrome-like), Firefox Sync, WebGL, GPU acceleration, and lots more HTML5 and CSS3. So far, so good.

Firefox, for a long time my favourite browser, has been losing ground (in my mind at least) to Chrome, which launches in seconds rather than minutes, is easy to search and synchronises across the three computers I regularly use. Maybe it was the bloatedness of all the extensions, maybe familiarity had bred contempt, I don’t know, but Chrome was my new favourite browser.

Firefox 4 didn’t exactly change that, but it has made me more open to using Firefox. However, after the excitement leading up to a new version of Firefox, Mozilla announced that Firefox 5 would be coming out in June 2011, barely 3 months after the release of FF4.

Now browser version numbers can be tricky. Microsoft took 5 years to go from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. Now that’s a release cycle that could have been shorter. However, since then there have been new versions every couple of years, a decent length of time for the next version to be a proper update with new features.

Safari goes at a similar pace: announced in 2003, we’re now on version 5. Chrome leaves them all in the dust though – since its launch in September 2008, we’ve had 12 new versions, with 13 and 14 in the pipeline.

Google are working on a three-month release cycle, and this is the model Firefox have switched to. That’s all very well, but it means there will no longer be distinctive versions for web developers to support or drop support for. Google has an automatic update process, and you can be pretty sure that Firefox users are savvy enough to upgrade, but the worry is you may get users who are using a six month old version of the browser that doesn’t render your webpage right. And no developer can afford the time to test on 8 or 10 different versions of the same browser (we have enough of that with IE).

So what’s the answer? Well, we have to deal with it. FF and Chrome will release every three months, with new features and new capabilities. And as a web designer, I need to make sure that the sites I develop are simply well-coded. Robust code will use the available enhancements and fall back to simpler but still great-looking and functioning webpages.

Does the release of multiple versions of browsers worry you? What safeguards do you have in place to test browser compatibility?

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Posted in Web Development | 3 Comments »

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