Technology: Microsoft Surface

Posted by Lewis Barclay : 2007-06-09

This looks really impressive!
Microsoft Surface is like a huge tablet PC, built into a table, that can recognise movement and certain objects that are placed on it!
I think I remember seeing the original video of this about four years ago where people were playing 'Pong', this has certainly moved on a serious amount.

This could really have some interesting possibilities, I look forward to seeing some exciting software developed for it!

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e-mail marketing: dotmailer

Posted by Lewis Barclay : 2007-06-04

Email marketing tools are ten a penny these days. I've used a few but this one stood out and has got better and better. I have recommended it to some of my clients and used it on several contracts. The feedback I have recieved from clients alone has been impressive.
It offers a full WYSIWYG editor, extensive reporting, spam filter checking, loads of built in templates and online help as well as a bundle of other features!

The great thing about dotmailer is that it's pricing model ensures that you don't break the bank! They are now offering a white labelling service so that you can have your own branded email marketing service based on their product and the pricing model for this looks very competitive also!

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Front-end design: Outline 2 Design

Posted by Lewis Barclay : 2007-06-03

A lot of these companies seem to be popping up at the moment, and it seems to back up my view that there is a lot of fragmentation occurring in the marketing / new media / web / digital market place.

The idea is simple, you create your PSD designs and they send you the CSS and XHTML a few days later. I'm not sure of the costs, but it seems like a sound idea and i imagine it works well for simple sites with little interaction or personalisation.
I'd be interested to know how companies like this work with more complex e-commerce requirements, or more personalised sites, I imagine this service could be invaluable.

Maybe integrating this service with a good back office / CMS system, that generates the XHTML / CSS components is the key!

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Development components: TinyMCE

Posted by Lewis Barclay : 2007-06-01

I've been building bespoke web based applications for nearly 8 years.
A constant requirement has been for users to be able to express themselves on the web without having a large amount of technical expertise, more recently the requirement has been for applications to provide a 'What You See Is What You Get' approach, the user only has to know how to use a word processor os something similar! Now with social networking sites and blog sites appearing all over the place, this has become probably the most repeated feature built in to popular community based websites.

I've used several different WYSIWG editors, commercial, opensource and shareware. TinyMCE has been the one that I have re-used the most.

TinyMCE is an open-source Javascript editor. It has bundles of features and is easily implementable by anyone with reasonable Javascript experience and some time to play with it!

It's used in blogging systems such as Drupal and I think it can be used with Wordpress (not having used wordpress, I wouldn't know).
I'm using it to write this, having integrated it into the CMS I use to publish this site.