Sunday, 22 June 2014
Ranting at Apple From Y2K
Found this while digging though paperwork. It's from February 2000.
It's odd timing. Apple's online 'services' have always been pretty poor - who remembers e-World (20 years old this week! - just me then...)?
I've just replaced some iThings, and it was a wonderful, seamless experience - back up a device, switch it off, plug in the new one, and boom - all up and running thanks to iCloud. But still... I've got a standard account (even though I pay an extra $35 per year for iTunes Match), so I can only back up 5Gb total from all my devices. That's pretty mean when OneDrive, DropBox, Google and who knows else will give you 10+Gb for free.
And the data on my iPhone is important; it's photos.
I've got back ups of back ups of servers, web sites, family finances, and whatever else on my server at home - but photos are different. No source control or incremental backups here, if that phones gone before it hits WiFi or gets home, it's game over.
Then... Finally, amongst last weeks WWDC announcements Apple stepped up their game. With the next versions of iOS and OSX, we'll get unlimited storage of images created on iThings. Whatever we create will get backed up, and stay backed up on Apples servers. OK, it's got privacy issues, but for once lets regard it as a great free service and not an invite to the NSA to look over our stuff. The Powers that Be can happily look over photos of my BBQs, I've nothing to hide. YMMV.
So, maybe my moan from 14 years ago gave someone a nudge to look into doing things better. Probably not, but it's reminded me of my dealings with one Steven P Jobs in the adventure I call "Steve Jobs, A Grumpy Email, and the Mac Than Can't Die".
MacUser Feb 2000
It's odd timing. Apple's online 'services' have always been pretty poor - who remembers e-World (20 years old this week! - just me then...)?
I've just replaced some iThings, and it was a wonderful, seamless experience - back up a device, switch it off, plug in the new one, and boom - all up and running thanks to iCloud. But still... I've got a standard account (even though I pay an extra $35 per year for iTunes Match), so I can only back up 5Gb total from all my devices. That's pretty mean when OneDrive, DropBox, Google and who knows else will give you 10+Gb for free.
And the data on my iPhone is important; it's photos.
I've got back ups of back ups of servers, web sites, family finances, and whatever else on my server at home - but photos are different. No source control or incremental backups here, if that phones gone before it hits WiFi or gets home, it's game over.
Then... Finally, amongst last weeks WWDC announcements Apple stepped up their game. With the next versions of iOS and OSX, we'll get unlimited storage of images created on iThings. Whatever we create will get backed up, and stay backed up on Apples servers. OK, it's got privacy issues, but for once lets regard it as a great free service and not an invite to the NSA to look over our stuff. The Powers that Be can happily look over photos of my BBQs, I've nothing to hide. YMMV.
So, maybe my moan from 14 years ago gave someone a nudge to look into doing things better. Probably not, but it's reminded me of my dealings with one Steven P Jobs in the adventure I call "Steve Jobs, A Grumpy Email, and the Mac Than Can't Die".
DJ Hero - Man, There Was Something Great Going on There.
I started working at FreeStyleGames the week after DJ Hero 2 launched; ready to mash up my web knowledge with their video game development skills - A pretty fascinating combination. Sadly, after a few months development the parent company, Activision, pulled the plug on the project and we had to shut down development.
We did some really interesting work, and maybe that'll get dusted off sometime, however, Activision's focus was put firmly on the then unknown Skylanders franchise. (And look how that tuned out!)
Anyway, here we are three or so years later, everyones moved on, and FreeStyleGames are still out there doing brilliant stuff.
Just a couple of weeks ago DJ Hero was voted one of the top 30 British Video games of all time - Good work fellas!
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/03/30-greatest-british-video-games
The Barclaycard Media Platform
The overall objective of this project was to allow all employees of Barclaycard to access the same content and have the same experience across different platforms and locations. Depending on IT policies in each office and county, some website (such as YouTube) are blocked, meaning that content specifically uploaded by Barclaycard to be viewed by colleagues in not available. Vital needed to create an operating system & location agnostic platform for content delivery.
Due to the secure nature of the project, resources such as Google Analytics we unavailable as they would be denied access by the firewall. Vital needed to create a solution to measure visitor trends and statistics.
Barclaycard have a very strong and specific brand identity. The platform had to obey the recently release branding guidelines for web content, a difficult objective due to the guidelines specific rejection of older browsers (IE 6) even though those browsers we still in use in some parts of the organisation.
Barclaycard are moving some colleagues over to iOS/iPad, which means that delivering video content (traditionally using Adobe Flash), needed to be re-though and adaptable.
The client also needed the ability to embed content from the platform into other media, such as the in-house magazine – The Globe, and the existing intranet. So a solution was required to allow the non-technical creatives to access this content.
The results on the launch day of the media sharing website were outstanding. Nearly 1,500 videos were viewed in less than 24 hours.
Unfortunately, due to the internal security policies I set up, the site is only accessible from within the Barclaycard network. However, here's some screen shots - I know, not the same, but what can you do?
Due to the secure nature of the project, resources such as Google Analytics we unavailable as they would be denied access by the firewall. Vital needed to create a solution to measure visitor trends and statistics.
Barclaycard have a very strong and specific brand identity. The platform had to obey the recently release branding guidelines for web content, a difficult objective due to the guidelines specific rejection of older browsers (IE 6) even though those browsers we still in use in some parts of the organisation.
Barclaycard are moving some colleagues over to iOS/iPad, which means that delivering video content (traditionally using Adobe Flash), needed to be re-though and adaptable.
The client also needed the ability to embed content from the platform into other media, such as the in-house magazine – The Globe, and the existing intranet. So a solution was required to allow the non-technical creatives to access this content.
The results on the launch day of the media sharing website were outstanding. Nearly 1,500 videos were viewed in less than 24 hours.
Unfortunately, due to the internal security policies I set up, the site is only accessible from within the Barclaycard network. However, here's some screen shots - I know, not the same, but what can you do?
The Rest of the Nokia Store
Following on from the last post about Kinect, here's another link to Nokia's channel. This one shows off pretty much all of the work we did for the Helsinki store.
Not only does it show the Kinect games, but also the digital photo frames,and a couple of websites we built and a few other cool pieces. Look out for the 3d Projection Mapping, which I personally think was awesome.
The microsite, which allowed shoppers to generate personalised graffiti art from their own photo’s received 30,000 unique visitors to the site and over 6,000 images were uploaded in the first 10 days!
Not only does it show the Kinect games, but also the digital photo frames,and a couple of websites we built and a few other cool pieces. Look out for the 3d Projection Mapping, which I personally think was awesome.
The microsite, which allowed shoppers to generate personalised graffiti art from their own photo’s received 30,000 unique visitors to the site and over 6,000 images were uploaded in the first 10 days!
The Nokia Microsoft Kinect Game
Here's a link to a short film on the Nokia Helsinki store's Youtube channel. It's a quick demonstration of one of the Kinect games I built for the re-launch.
Players could use the Kinect camera to take a photo of themselves, which the game would then mess around with to create a Graffiti stencil (think Banksy). The colours and backgrounds are user editable, and the final result can be uploaded to our server and accessed by a uniquely generated QR Code for sharing on Facebook, Twitter, whatever. Very cool.
Got nominated for a DADI award too!
Players could use the Kinect camera to take a photo of themselves, which the game would then mess around with to create a Graffiti stencil (think Banksy). The colours and backgrounds are user editable, and the final result can be uploaded to our server and accessed by a uniquely generated QR Code for sharing on Facebook, Twitter, whatever. Very cool.
Got nominated for a DADI award too!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)