i-d media london

We’re not playing ‘who can blog about the iPad the most this week’ but I guess it’s topical right now.

Some neat insights form iA on iPad app design.

http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-for-ipad-reality-check/#more-4059

Mag+, which is Bonniers digital magazine venture, has a video of their thoughts behind their iPad app, quite interesting.

Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

http://magculture.com/blog/?p=6148

In a neat little presentation these guys do a good job on demoing for real what HTML5 can do. Some interesting things that could make a big difference to user experience, and then some that probably won’t. I couldn’t help but think back to the good old blink tag.

http://apirocks.com/html5/html5.html

We’re delighted to announce the launch of the Times Spelling Bee iPhone app – available here – http://bit.ly/bxsOMd. The app is based on the fun, interactive spelling games that can be found on the website we developed for Times Online [www.timesspellingbee.co.uk].

Screenshots taken from the game:

Ever since the birth of the object-oriented design paradigm in software development, there has been the issue of how to store object data within the constraints of a relational database. Object associations and relations do not match very nicely with standard relational models (tables, columns, rows), and a lot of time is spent trying to store and retrieve data to/from relational databases. Basically, it’s like trying to fit square blocks into round holes. It can be done eventually, but with lots of banging and swearing.

The accepted standard (until recently) would be to have some intermediate data access layer that would populate each field of an object with the column of data in a table. It would also take care of populating any associations of the object by querying the database on that object’s key, and populating the list. All of this would require a lot of scaffolding code to be written, as well as stored procedures, to store and retrieve this data, resulting in a lot more development time. This practice is also heavily error-prone, as stored procedures are not compiled code and are highly prone to errors. On top of that, adding say, a new field, would require the field to be added to the table, then to the stored procedure (or many stored procedures – usually 1 per CRUD operation!), then to the object, then to the scaffolding code that populates the object data.

Sounds like a nightmare? It is. That’s where object-relational modelling (ORM) frameworks come to the rescue. They attempt to bridge the gap between the object domain and relational data world by “hiding” a lot of the work that needs to be done in order to persist an object domain model to a relational database. One of these (and one of the most popular) is NHibernate. Originally it was written for Java but has since been ported to be used with .NET and has grown in features and popularity. It is also open source, which means it can be used without having to pay any licensing fees.

The basic steps required to use an ORM like NHibernate are: design and code your domain model, write a set of “mapping” files to tell NHibernate how your objects are mapped to the tables in the database, and that is pretty much it! The framework contains many functions to allow the storage and retrieval of the object data without having to write a single stored procedure or SQL query. It does this by generating the required SQL on-the-fly in the background, and it does quite efficiently as well. And don’t worry – it uses parameterised queries, so the code is not susceptible to SQL injection attacks.

If this sounds like a dream come true, well, it pretty much is. Don’t get me wrong – it has its own pitfalls, but generally, the time taken to get a basic data access layer up and running is pretty much halved. One of the most time-consuming tasks in this process is writing the mappings between the ORM and the database (usually a set of XML files), but this has also been alleviated via the introduction of Fluent NHibernate, which is a fluent extension of the mapping system. It allows type-safe compiled mapping to be written into the data access layer itself, and also includes a set of unit test extensions that can be used in units tests to ensure that the domain is correctly mapped to the database. “Fluent” relies heavily on lambda expressions for the mappings (introduced in .NET 3.0), so knowledge of these are essential. They’ve been around a while now, so if you’re not up with them, well, you better get cracking or you’ll be left behind!

More information about NHibernate and Fluent (and many other NHibernate libraries and extensions) can be found here: http://nhforge.org

Recently when working on a project when I notice my the text looks really poor on some Linux distros.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have necessarily cared but because of the growth of Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse as well as the fact that Linux is now pre-installed on many netbooks, I have decided it is something I will care about.

The reason for the font issues is because Linux does not necessarily have Arial or Helvetica pre-installed hence the users see system text instead. So I did a bit of research on Linux pre-installed equivalents and found FreeSans or San-Serif to be the most common equivalents installed. I now use “font-family:Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,FreeSans,sans-serif;” as my font stack. This seems to give the best results on every platform.

From http://mashable.com/ comes a nice little insight into how big brands are using twitter and more importantly the individuals in those corps who are doing the tweeting..

http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/

There’s a mix of product plugging, customer service and general announcements, but most seem to be developing strategies and are recognising that they have to converse rather than simply broadcast.

I came across an article on I love typography that shows how type designers Pierre & Damien from Pleaseletmedesign.com created their typeface iQ Font. With help from interactive artist Zachary Lieberman, race pilot Stef Vancampenhoudt and the little Toyota iQ.

It looks like a great way to design a typeface.

I love watching the car make the lower case E and upper case Q the driver makes it look so smooth and simple.

An interesting article on designing for social networking courtesy of Smashing Magazine.

Statistics from Nielsen Online have shown that “social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular kinds of online activities. 67% of the world online population are now visiting them and the time they’re spending on them is growing by three times the overall growth rate of the internet. Social networks are now visited more often than personal email is read. Some social networks have grown to such enormous proportions that they rival entire countries in terms of population…”

A very good and insightful read!

Your visual identity is arguably the most important aspect of selling yourself and what you have to sell. A shoddy identity, very few people will look twice. These very inspiring logo designs go to show that even if you haven’t heard of a particular brand, their identity should stick with you for a very long time.