good summary of Web App Design Mistakes

I liked the summary of application design guidelines/mistakes

Lets hope this is not the future of OOH

We have already seen some of this in public places like stations and  conventions - <sigh>

 

PRN, Walmart and HDTV

Press release from our cousins over at PRN regarding the HDTV support within the Walmart network which talks about a HDTV remote management system.



Economist makes some observations about why out of home media networks succeed and points to the PRN / Walmart partnership as an example of a winning combination.

@Media 2007, UK Media Conference slides & audio

A collection of the slides, audio podcasts and other media items from the UK based media conference @Media 2007

http://learningtheworld.eu/2007/atmedia-2007-slides/

Thanks to Martin for this collection of great free resources

Windows and Video Codecs

Used this to some extent recently and its always an annoying problem - which codecs do i need to play the media (specifically video) I have or recieve

This helps

http://www.jockersoft.com/english/codecinstaller_download.php

HTML v5.0

If your using a framework (abstracting HTML away from the dev) or hand coding it does seem that it pays to know your HTML and that HTML is not going away any time soon.

Since the arrival of the 'div' tag I have been advocating using them and not Tables - not everyone shared my opinion and it seems there is plenty of table work out there and for good reason in many cases.

HTML 5.0 - what does it do for us and how? I may not get to t all in one go but plan to break out some of the changes that might be of interest or have impact.

HTML v4.0 vs v5.0 Differences

Functional testing for Web Applications

WatiN
http://watintestrecord.sourceforge.net/WatiN - C# automated IE only automated testing (inspired by Watir)
(Have not used this but it looks way to interesting to not take a deeper dive for a dot net dev shop)
http://blogs.conchango.com/richardgriffin/archive/2006/10/18/WATiN-web-recorder_2B002B00_-prototype.aspx
the tool - http://watin.sourceforge.net/index.html
the recorder - http://watintestrecord.sourceforge.net/

Customization can be done in c# and vb.net which makes this very powerful - we will have to take a look and maybe post some results back here soon.

WatiR - Ruby based automated testing tool
(I have used this and although you dont have to learn ruby if you want to customize - which is only needed if you get deep - its very very good and easy to use)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watir
the tool - http://wtr.rubyforge.org/
the recorder - http://www.openqa.org/watir-recorder/documentation.action
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/NewReleaseOfWatirMakerNowWatirRecorder.aspx

Functional testing in web apps has up until recently been done well only well by full featured mature testing products which are of course come with appropriateprice tags, seem to have a perception of a steep learning curve and I always think the biggest issues of all is the team, department or organizational commitment required (that decision alone cripples developers or leads doing it unless they have some strengths in that area).

Functional testing is always done - whether you want to do it or not, do this formally or not - don't be mistaken that its skipped - its done by the team in informal manual ways - before or after the build in production breaks. If not then its done by your users and translates into - well we all know what. ALso in many cases I have experienced people in the periphery of the team (you name it someone that offers will be allowed to do this) - 'let me hit it till I break something' and then send you 10meg screen shots of a screen that is no one can repeat or even the user can describe how they got there. That includes 10 meg screen shots of the field validation for required fields which they think should not be there and the 'hey cant we do some ajax on this whole page so it looks cool' comments.

At some point in smaller tight teams that end up being successful building a large web app but never really commit to learning the big tools or hiring dedicated testers its just too painful to not think about getting help - a tool - an automated tool - scripts - DIY testing harnesses - dev testing tools used against UI - custom code - triggers and monitoring systems - your wife in her break between putting the baby for a nap and making dinner for you while you natter at the coffee machine waiting for her to excel spreadsheet the results back to
you.

MS Silverlight and learning

Have not had a chance to review these tutorials as yet but they looked polished - not sure if they have been building this content up for a while but there seems to be plenty there to get over the initial learning curve.

http://silverlight.net/Learn/learnvideos.aspx

Looking at Netflix online film last night and it looks like they rolled out the fullscreen version of the Silverlight player - whatever it was it played the video immed. and great quality too.

MIX07
we have been workign our way slowly through this content from the Mix07 sessions from a few weeks/months back now - also good intros to all the WPF releases in real business context.

Sessions at Mix07

FFMpeg

The FFMpeg video audio converter project has a tutorial posted here if your interested in learning more about it.

FFMpeg Overview

Collections

I am always sending out emails about information links, events, code, tips and just noticed that over the last year it would have been useful put in one place.

The work of developing and delivering solutions within the Digital Signage or Out Of Home media industry.

I work for Convergent and division of Technicolor and although his is personal and related to general industry news that would be public knowledge I suspect I will need to get some approval - so we will wait and see.