This post attempts to document my journey to getting video to work on those lovely iDevices – ie by using html5. I am indebited to the work of others, and clearly am only presenting the basics. But it does work. My next steps will be things like adding a poster image, and perhaps giving the player a unique look!

Getting Started…

I have add html5 video to some of my clients sites now. Previously, they had only had flash – so weren’t viewable on iPads and other mobiles. Now I use the <video> tag to add support for html5, with a fallback to flash. Much of what I did was taken from video for everybody – thanks!

Here’s the complete code:

Read more…

I must say this is really getting exciting!

Andy, at the Christian Action Housing and the EN2 Krew keeps saying things like “Hey Mr Dude…”

Once I have got over being addressed in that manner, he goes onto form another statement usually along the lines of

“I’ve seen this funky thingy on this site – can you do it on the EN2 site homepage”

OR

“Could we add a widgety thing onto the Elevate site like this one”.

Actually, this is far from annoying. One of the pleasures of working with a range of clients is tht they push you out of your comfort zone. Then again, I don’t want to be doing the say thing site after site andway so keep ‘em coming.

So here are one or two of Andy’s latest requests. These are live, hoefully they wont get taken down before you press on them…

• a slide show – was created to be generic so it could easily be slotted into different sites
• funky pop up window that only appears on your first visit to the homepage
• images that transition in as you roll over panels – this is still in development, so its only showing one image – but the idea is there!
• images maps that link to lightboxes – this one is great – but sadly isn’t live  yet!

And I have also added a few more of my own, just for the fun of it! These last ones I don’t claim to have completely worked up from  scratch, I include them to give you (dear reader) examples of what I have been up to recently.

• Drop down menu – based on suckerfish (show me one that isn’t)
• Accordion menu
• Expanding menu
• Tabs
• Slide down logins

And here’s a  couple that I am working on that  you can’t see yet…

• images that stretch to fill the whole background
• images that stretch to fill the whole background and rotate round in a slide show (ugh! slide show backgrounds – but he likes it!)

Over the last 3 months  or so I have given some development time to get into jQuery properly. For me, this usually means “Buying the book” and getting about half way through. And then using what I have learnt, and  putting it onto some websites. Then comes the “Steep” bit of the learning curve – books are great, but they never tell you the nitty gritty that you need to know when you get stuck in.

I have now used jQuery in a few of our projects. And not just plugins too, but “Applications” that I have created myself. This includes stylish popup windows, images that “animate into view” as you roll over them and rotating slide shows. So, simple stuff, but good looking and fully compatable with those nasty Mac devices.

I’m impressed!

Recently I have begun to delve deeper into the world of jQuery. What I didn’t fully realise previously is that can do many of the jobs that we have previously used flash within our sites for!

So, slide shows, animation, flashy menus (pun intended) … all do-able using jQuery and then instantly available to those mac devices – iPad and iPhone etc that wont show flash.

Of course, there’s bound to be stuff that jQuery wont do. And users need to have javascript on. Having said that, for the few users who don’t have js on you can “gracefully degrade” so that pages wont fall apart.

You can check out some examples of jQuery in action on these sites:

Coin Street Community Builders (slide show on home page)

4eyes design – (portfolio, clients, services pages)

Like many people i have been following the recent “Developments” regarding Adobe Flash and Apple mobile platforms with considerable interest. Whilst the average user might say, “I don´t know what flash is” (as one friend of mine recently did) as sure as “Eggs is eggs” they will have used the Flash Player. Many times.

So what´s the issue?
For a long time web designers and developers have added flash elements into their sites – its great for interactivity. Videos, animations, sounds, movement, games – to name just a few of the huge range of uses. The Flash Player is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous add-ons to web browsers, I read recently that 90% of the world´s browsers have it installed.

Apple´s decision not to allow the Flash Player on the iPad (or on the iPhone either) has, in effect, censored great chunks of web content from its customers. Now anyone who uses the iPhone or the iPad has effectivly had a whole pile of web content hidden from them. If you visit a web site that has flash in it, and the site´s owners haven´t “Made provision” then those flash parts are just not there. That affects countless millions of websites.

Read more…