Dan Smart - Web Developer
Some useful findings from the UK Government mobile site for ‘Register to Vote’.
Summary:
- Designing mobile first makes it easier to design your main desktop site by reducing the amount of information down to the key elements
- Sometimes more clicks (e.g. through a multipage form) isn’t bad – it made their forms easier to understand, and easier for the user to track errors on.
- By removing the help completely, through their testing they discovered what users needed help on, rather than overcomplicating the display with help on areas that were obvious to the user.
- Rephrasing text is often a better way to manage copy, rather than adding additional text (which can overcomplicate the display again).
Posted in Blog, Mobile, Uncategorized, Usability | No Comments »
The Problem
One of the most annoying quirks for Eclipse when working with Android emulators (Android Virtual Devices – AVDs) is that sometimes once you’ve launched an AVD (which can take several minutes), it can lose connection with the emulator. This means that when you try to launch your app on the running emulator, it cannot find the app, and will not output any logs to Eclipse. Sometimes restarting Eclipse or the AVD helps, sometimes it doesn’t.
The Solution
To fix this, we can restart the Android Debugging Bridge (adb), which connects with the AVD, even whilst the AVD is running.
In the console, type:
adb kill-server
This will kill the adb server.
Then restart it:
adb start-server
Then try running your app again – it should find it then connect in Eclipse, and give you the logcat / console output.
Tags: adb, Android, app, Eclipse
Posted in Blog, Mobile, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Horrible issues facing developers for iOS7 Safari and Web apps (e.g. home screen apps cannot use alert, confirm, etc).
See them documented here: http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/safari-ios7-html5-problems-apis-review
Posted in Blog, Mobile, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
WordPress contains a useful tool that can help resolve many of the display issues that occur when pasting a Word document into a WordPress post/page.
On the second level of the WordPress editor toolbar (show by click on the end button ‘Show/Hide Kitchen Sink’ – or press Alt + Shift + Z), there is a button that is called ‘Paste from Word’.
If you click on this button, it will pop up a box that will allow you to paste in the contents of your Word document.
However, be aware that WordPress strips out a lot of the Word formatting (think paragraphs, bold, italic, bullets), but it will give you a starting point to import your document into Word.
Posted in Blog, Uncategorized, Wordpress | No Comments »
As time goes on, the number of mobile devices that are used to access the web just keeps on growing. It is showing no sign of slowing down.
With this, we are seeing more and more applications being developed for the now vast array of devices available to us, whether that’s on a mobile phone or a tablet – the list goes on!
Say you get that ‘big idea’ and you think that you can make an app for it, where do you start? The first thing you need to consider is what sort of app you would like it to be, a native application, or a web application (or both of course!). In this article I’ll be taking a look at the differences between the two and also their strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully it will help you choose the correct path on your app development journey with us.
Posted in Blog, Mobile, Uncategorized | No Comments »
If you want to change a WordPress site’s domain name (or base URL), which will often happen when you’re copying a site from staging to production, or from local to live, there are a number of steps to following, outlined at http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress.
However, here is a shortened summary of how I run this on non-multisite sites (multisite sites are a pain!):
Tags: Moving WordPress, Wordpress
Posted in Blog, Uncategorized, Wordpress | No Comments »