http://fishrod.co.uk Fishrod Interactive Feed en-us Symphony (build 2.2.1) http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/idiot-proof-qr-codes-the-qr-code-part-2/ Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:01 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/idiot-proof-qr-codes-the-qr-code-part-2/ Reason for Use A QR code should form part of the functionality of an overall idea or concept rather than the other way round, i.e. trying to make an idea or concept fit into a QR code. Do not use a QR code just for the sake of using one, as this is when companies start just placing codes around at random and the consumer has no idea why it is there. It should be useful to the consumer as well as generating talk about the company. For example Tesco’s idea talked about in part 1 where they set up virtual stores in metro stations, shows an innovative way of using the QR code as people can use the codes to do their shopping. Another idea is by three students in their joint senior project in Urban Planning. In their project they used QR codes to provide guests with more information at city gardens. As a visitor arrives they are able to download a QR Reader and have someone show them how to use it. The students clearly thought about how to effectively use a QR code and implement it in a way that benefits the visitors and the centres. One more example of this is Project Paperclip, shown in the video below. They set up a photographic exhibition and next to each photo is a QR code, this links to an app where photographer Nuno Serrão “was also responsible for co-creating the interactive ambient soundscapes that accompany” the photographs. Source: http://www.discloseprojectpaperclip.com/ Design A QR code should form part of a design concept, as just using squares with dots can look boring. Using different colours or logos as part of the design would make the QR code stand apart from others. It also helps the consumer identify which brand the code belongs to. This is something which would prove very useful for the future, as the more people start to use QR codes the less information needs to be given with them, this may mean one day being able to just put up a QR code with a brand name/logo on a poster and people utilise it. However, you do not want to customise the QR code to the point where it is not clear to the consumer that it is a QR code or it does not work. For example, the QR code below by Corkbin has incorporated the logo and some colour into the code, without taking away from the obviousness that it is a QR code.   Source: http://9.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/630QR-Code2.jpg Whereas the next QR code by Louis Vuitton may be distinguishable as a QR code (just) but the silly cartoons on it has nothing to do with the company. This would mean a lot of people would not trust it as actually from that brand name.   Source: http://contentdeveloper.com/images/louis-vuitton-qr-code.jpg You could also integrate the QR code into a bigger design, much like Disney has done in the image below.   Source: http://www.sportsnewmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/qrcode_disney.jpg Placement/Accessibility As we saw in part one some QR codes have been placed in some very unusual places. We would suggest putting them somewhere where they are accessible, i.e. not across a train platform, or on a billboard on a busy motorway. Somewhere like a train station is good, as long as there is signal there so that the link can be used, otherwise it is a waste of money and time putting that code in place. QR codes must also be placed where it is obvious what they are and how to use them. For example, if put on the back of some packaging on its own it may be viewed as a barcode, but if accompanied by some explanation of where the link leads people are more likely to realise what it is and then scan it. For example, the image below shows a code with the Facebook ‘Like’ logo above it, there is no explanation however of what you are going to be liking, the company or that particular bottle of wine? And there is no way of knowing if they are even related or not.   Source: http://instagr.am/p/H4t565k6Zx/ Business App Many businesses are using QR codes as a link to be able to download the company’s app for either Apple or Android, for example Corkbin’s QR code above will take you to a mobile friendly page with a link on it to your chosen app store where you can download the brand’s app to your phone/tablet. Here at Fishrod, Gavin came up with a very simple and logical idea of how QR codes should be used. Instead of using a random QR reader to scan the code, each company should have their own app to download. It is within this app where the user can find a built in QR reader to use in conjunction with the company’s promotional QR codes. This will assist the ease of using the codes for the consumer, as it would eliminate how many people wonder what to do with the code, and so it could mean the code could do so much more for the business. For example, I have on my phone an app for a certain beauty product brand, within this app is videos on how to do your own make-up or nails. They could use QR codes to take you to a link to download more videos to your app, this would mean that the consumer is able to keep utilising the app long after downloading. The QR codes could be free as part of an advertising campaign (‘Get this Look’ – where you get a video on how to do your make up like the model in the poster) or free with different products (you buy some nail varnish and so get a ‘How To’ video for nail designs). End Product It is quite obvious that QR codes are scanned by smart phones, and should therefore lead to mobile friendly content rather than a dead end. It is shocking, however, to find that so many do not do this, and many people get left with an error code or an inaccessible webpage. If the link isn’t directing the user to a mobile app download page then the next alternative is that it is taking them to a webpage. If your company does not already have a mobile friendly web page then you need to take a few steps back and get that sorted first before trying to integrate a QR code into your marketing plans. Simply Put… I will end with a very simple overview of how to effectively use a QR code for your business. 1. The reason behind using the QR code must be viable, and not just using a QR code for the sake of it. 2. They must be designed in a way that makes them stand out from other QR codes. 3. Placement of the QR code is very important. Key points to remember are: Internet access, accessibility (dangerous or not) and if a user will notice it or not. 4. An app for the company/brand/business should be used in conjunction with the QR code for ease of use. 5. The QR code MUST lead somewhere that is mobile friendly, or part of an app.   But what are your thoughts on this? Do you think we are right or wrong? Or do you think there is not right or wrong way to use QR codes? Please comment below. http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/the-good-the-bad-and-the-truly-outrageous-the-qr-code/ Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:32 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/the-good-the-bad-and-the-truly-outrageous-the-qr-code/ “Can I ask what a QR code is?” is the reaction I got from my father after telling him I was going to be writing a blog on Quick Response (QR) codes explaining how they should be used (if at all!). What I suddenly realised is that this is the general reaction to QR codes, that they look almost alien to the untrained eye. And so decided that maybe they should be explained first before suggesting how they should be used. Source: youtube.com The video shows examples of the aforementioned QR code, the way I described it to my father is “a square boxy thing filled with lots of little blocks”. And he instantly knew that he had seen them before but had no idea what to do with it. If you are one of the millions of people who have a smart phone, then you are able to download a QR reader app, using this you can scan the square box (a bit like you would a products’ barcode) and then it should take you to a link, for example a web page or an app in the app store. Surely this is much easier than typing in a web address or even typing the name of the app in the search bar? Well yes, for those who know what they are, what to do with it and have a QR reader app, they are very simple and effective when used correctly. But those, like my father, who don’t know about them, would just turn the page of the newspaper completely oblivious to what that code could do for them. Now say every one knows how to use a QR code, and has a reader on their phone, how should the code be used to its best advantage? The Good There have been some outstanding examples of how they can and should be used. For example Tesco set up ‘virtual stores’ in subways and metro stations in Korea.   Source: mashable.com According to mashable.com the public are able to “browse life-like images of supermarket shelves with their smartphones and scan the QR codes on products to add them to their shopping carts, all whilst waiting for the metro. Their purchases would then be delivered to them at home, with no need to carry heavy bags.” Another extremely innovative way of using them (which isn’t business related) is in a CV. Many people do video CV’s, especially those in media related jobs, Victor Petit, a French student, shows us how to make your CV stand out. Source: http://vimeo.com/21228618 The Bad However, even though some companies have had some truly inspirational ideas for QR codes, some companies have come up with completely outrageous ways of how to use them. For example this QR code placed on the back of a lorry – try scanning that one whilst you’re driving! Source: wtfqrcodes.com Most people have seen QR codes in train stations. The great thing about these ones is their placement. Source: wtfqrcodes.com The Outrageous As just mentioned, train stations are prominent places for QR codes, which makes sense due to the traffic of people going through them on a daily basis. However, placement again is key to success… Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/07/qr-codes-tumblr-advertising And even when they haven’t been placed underground where there is no signal or Wi-Fi, or where a train could hit you while you try to access them, they are still in some very interesting places. Source: wtfqrcodes.com Source: socialwayne.com In the end… Source: in10sity.net It seems that QR codes do have the potential to be fantastic; it is just the way in which they are used and presented needs to have a bit of a revamp. We have seen in the media lots of innovative ways people have been using them, including at museums and art galleries where users are taken to a link or an app which provides them with more information on whatever they are looking at. As well as for shopping as shown above by Tesco, this is an idea that we think could change the way people shop in the future. As well as this they can be used to show movie trailers, for example rental shops companies could put them onto DVD covers, so while you browse you can also see the trailer for the film. Or they could be in bus stops on movie posters for the same reason. For example, check out the Iron Man poster to the left, it looks like it's actually part of the poster artwork rather than an alien item, it's unobtrusive and interesting and something that can spark curiosity to passers by. So we have established that even though the QR code can be used in a huge amount of fulfilling ways, it hasn’t been to the point that everyone is using them in their marketing campaigns, yet.   Check back for part 2 where we will talk more about how we think QR codes should be used. http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/what-will-apple-really-be-announcing-on-wednesday-7th-march/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:14 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/what-will-apple-really-be-announcing-on-wednesday-7th-march/ It has been a long belief over here at Fishrod Interactive that Apple are working on new concepts to make our working life easier and much more integrated, this concept is better known as ubiquitous computing. Whilst Microsoft have Xbox, Windows Phone and Windows 8 integration coming sometime soon Apple seem to have been dormant on the subject aside from the subtle additions to iOS such as AirPlay Mirroring and the still to be fully unified iCloud platform. In our eyes, Apple are either sitting, waiting and watching the industry to see where the wind blows, or they're getting ready to release something BIG! This is our prediction. SmartTV's are "sort of" the way forward. Apps are stored on the TV and you interact with them using a crude remote control or if you're lucky your Android phone or tablet. Having experienced this on a friends 3D Samsung TV... I can tell you that the experience is far from pleasant. Aside from cringing whilst watching him set up the internet with the TV and then attempt to sign into twitter with his remote control... I couldn't take any more and promptly left! The problem isn't just what you use to interact with it, it's the fact that these apps live and breath on the TV, which at times makes them very slow on cheaper models, or even worse, may give you a massive headache whilst you frustratingly navigate through the many confusing icons onscreen. Simply watching the video above hurts my head! In an attempt to think like Apple... it doesn't make sense to have installable apps on the Apple TV as some people have predicted Apple will do in the very near future... why? It's quite simple, as an iOS and Mobile Web development company, it's already a pain trying to design and develop for so many displays with so many variations in pixel density and size. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just develop for iOS (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch) and make use of AirPlay Mirroring to add functionality when a second screen is attached through AirPlay mirroring? iOS would handle the scalling, and Apple TV would stream video and audio to the TV. Your apps will live on your mobile device and not your TV, when you get home and want to play Fruit Ninja on your 50" TV, it's as simple as tapping a button. If you're watching Netflix downstairs and want to watch it in bed, it's as simple as taking your iPad/iPhone upstairs. What would be even nicer is if iWork when connected to a TV through AirPlay mirroring would make use of the full iPad/iPhone's screen as a keyboard and stream the main display to the TV. Just to re-inforce our prediction, OS X Mountain Lion can now natively stream your display and content using AirPlay and AirPlay mirroring. It's important to remember that all of these technologies exist already and are in the hands of the consumer... but nobody seems to really be using it, why is that? Just to put the nail in the coffin, CultOfMac have also just released an article which states that AppleTV's are running low on stock. Up until now AppleTV has been a hobby horse for Apple, we believe that Apple are working on further integration between iOS, OS X, Apple TV and iCloud. Let's watch this space and see what happens. We'll leave you with this final thought, below is Microsoft's vision of the future, the funny thing is that it's actually not too far away! What would you like to see come of not just tomorrow's announcement but for technology to achieve before the end of 2012? http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/improving-local-development-with-virtualisation/ Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:43 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/improving-local-development-with-virtualisation/ History Over the years we have moved away from the standard PHP websites that require nothing more than a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). We now build web applications that have specific requirements. For instance our recent projects with British Sky Broadcasting required FFMPEG and ImageMagick to run. We bagan to encounter problems with developers running different development environments and versions of programs that our applications depended on. We toyed with PHPRack, and found it to be invaluable with ensuring that the environment that developers worked in are consistant. This brought about several questions... Why are we installing things like FFMPEG and ImageMagick on our local machines? What happens when another project requires a different version of a dependancy? Why are we wasting half a day setting up local environments? VirtualBox For us the solution was quite obvious. We usually offer our clients two levels of hosting. VPS Dedicated The solution lied within Virtualisation (VPS). With virtualisation we can set up bespoke environments within minutes and clone them so that they can be used on other similar projects by all developers. We can ensure that the application is self contained within it's environment. What's more, we can also ensure that the environment that developers work within to test their code is exactly the same or similar to what's on the production environment. The process of creating and distributing development environments through VirtualBox was the best option for us. It meant that there were no big licence fees as VirtualBox is free and open source. This solution works perfectly for us. For every project there is a wiki and for every project wiki there is a VirtualBox image for developers to download. We wanted to make the process of downloading and setting up Virtual Machines slicker and faster, ideally we wanted to use a single command to download and set everything up. The solution came in the form of Vagrant. Vagrant allows you to set up a virtual machine in VirtualBox, package it, and create configuration files that make setting up port forwarding and running scripts on the virtual machine as part of the setup process a doddle. Not only this, but vagrant will allow you to create configuration files as part of your project, so it's simply a case of running "vagrant up" once you have checked out your project to setup the development environment. http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/we-are-recruiting/ Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:01 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/we-are-recruiting/ Fishrod Interactive are looking to expand their technical team and are currently recruiting junior developers to join us on both a permanent and contract basis.As a junior developer you are required to assist the Tech Lead on Installation, Web and Mobile projects. These essential skills are required to fulfil this role: A great understanding of XHTML (4 & 5) and CSS (2 & 3) A basic understanding of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) Knowledge of JavaScript or a language related to ECMAScript such as ActionScript The ability to refractor and optimise your code The ability to work independantly And the following are desirable skills: A basic understanding of Objective-C or a subset of Objective-C such as C/C++ Understanding of the MVC design pattern Knowledge of the Zend Framework A basic understanding of TDD principles and how to Unit Test in PHP, JavaScript and Objective-C If you are interested in this role please get in touch at hello@fishrod-interactive.co.ukNO AGENCIES http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/steve-jobs-tribute/ Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:54 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/steve-jobs-tribute/ I haven’t looked back since, and 5 years later our office is littered with sexy aluminium iMac’s, Mac Pro’s, Mac Book Pro’s, iPad’s and iPhone’s. We chose Apple not because of its status or it’s cult following, but because everything just works! Using mac you soon find yourself working to those same principles, that everything you create should be a pleasure for the end user, should evoke emotion and inspire people to create themselves. Some might call it micro management or being anal retentive but boy did Steve Jobs make sure that every product produced by Apple was awe inspiring and beautiful. Steve Jobs brought the word beautiful to technology, and that alone is a pretty epic achievement! Steve Jobs, you’ll be missed; you have inspired a generation of geeks and made a lot of regular people fall in love with their gadgets. I hope Apple continue to follow in your footsteps. Gavin Williams - Technical Director   I awoke this morning to news of the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs, a man who has had a massive, if indirect, affect on my life. Ten years ago a relative returned from New York with a device that completely blew my 12-year-old self away. That device was the original iPod, and as a kid who until then was used to lugging around a Walkman and a stack of CD’s the thought of having access to that much music so easily was incredible. Several years later and I had one of my own, which served as a gateway into a range of Apple products.  Apple continues to be an integral part of my daily life, making my use technology easier and more enjoyable for work and leisure. My experience with Apple is by no means exclusive, and this can largely be attributed to one man. Much has been made of the company’s staggering growth over the last decade to great financial success. However, to simply acknowledge Steve Jobs’ legacy as an increase in profit would not do his vision or impact on the tech industry, and indeed wider popular culture justice. Under his watch Apple completely changed the consumer electronics landscape and the way we all consume media. The world lost a true creative genius today, whose influence will be sorely missed far beyond the confines Apple. Ben Sanchez - Brand Manager       http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/future-of-mobile/ Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:30 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/future-of-mobile/ The beauty of this game engine is that anything created can by played on the majority of web browsers, including iOS, and we’ve been addicted to his Biolab Disaster game since seeing him demo it. X.Commerce also gave a couple of talks throughout the day and got us all thinking about how the future of technology will be powered through buying and selling. Their platform brings together merchants and developers in an attempt to provide better end to end retail experiences; utilising the existing technologies of Paypal, Ebay and Magneto. Another company dealing with money represented at the conference was Dwolla. CEO Ben Milne explained that Dwolla is an entirely new system for making payments, selling itself on its simplicity and lack of charges for merchants or sellers compared to those that can be incurred when using traditional card services. Dwolla has also launched a proximity based mobile app which could transform the way we make payments offline as well. Although this service is currently unavailable outside of the US it promises to be the next big thing in sending and receiving money. A common theme throughout the day was HTML5 and how it can be utilised in app development. We were shown PhoneGap and how easy it is to quickly and effectively make a cross platform app, alongside a very nifty tool that removes the need to debug on the device itself. HTML5 is moving on in leaps and bounds, and the debate as to whether it is 'better' that developing applications natively continues to be a hot topic. We've brought a lot of ideas back from Future of Mobile and are excited about implementing them. http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/london-launch-party/ Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:26 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/london-launch-party/ This gave us a chance to meet some of our new neighbours in the offices, as well as showcase some of our work. Our new location places Fishrod in the thick of the UK’s development community as we continue to build our portfolio of clients and work. http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/24-hour-iphone-app/ Wed, 03 Aug 2011 23:40 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/24-hour-iphone-app/ We're a big fan of 20% days, as they allow developers to relax and focus on learning new concepts and ideas that they may not necessarily explore on client projects. The beauty of this is the fact that work produced on these days will often be fed back into pitches and solutions for clients. One of the challenges we found with taking on work placement students has been finding the time to both teach them new concepts but to also have them work on client work. We introduced 20% days as a way to allow them to explore new interests such as iOS development or Node.JS and gave them the tools and the knowledge to produce a simple project. This also gave us time to find out what they really wanted to learn and develop. When given a simple concept it’s always easy to deviate from it and add exciting features, this is called scope creep. This is understandable, however we found that by teaching them the concept of iterative design and development, they could put these extra features aside for a later release and focus on the task at hand using the available time. This meant that they could really focus on producing a polished app both in design and development that they could be proud of. Our other big challenge was teaching them how to code in a completely different language. We experimented with various learning techniques such as leaving them to learn independently as a team and jumping in only when we were asked for help. We also devised a laptop test, where we would teach our students how to code using a simple project with a laptop until it had 5 minutes of battery left. We would then tell the students that they had 5 minutes to finish the app before the laptop’s battery ran out. This freaked our students out but it put them in a pressured situation where they really had to think for them selves and use the knowledge we had given to them. The end result of this is a simple, yet polished iOS app made within 24 hours by work placement students who had previously no knowledge of iOS Development or iOS Design. Make sure you download it now from the App Store. Please don’t shake it more than 5 times! http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/automate-everything-with-continuous-integration/ Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:17 +0100 http://fishrod.co.uk/blog/automate-everything-with-continuous-integration/ The Guts of a Good Continuous Integration Setup Continuous Integration is most useful when you have several developers on a single project working on the same piece of code, and you need to automatically merge all of their changes as they happen, test and deploy it to some kind of staging environment. Build Tools (ANT/Phing) A build tool will allow you to do those very tedious tasks that need to be run before any kind of deployment to a local/staging/production server. It could be anything from running MySQL Delta's to make sure your database is in sync with a production/staging database, to replacing environment variables in your PHP source files. Build tools are most common in languages that need to be compiled, such as Java and Objective-C/C. From a PHP point of view, you don't need to compile PHP like you have to with a Java or Objective-C based project. A build for PHP will allow you to do things such as: Minify and optimise your client side assets (CSS/JS/Images) automatically using YUI Compressor or ImageOptim, so you don't have to do it server side Compile your SASS/LESS CSS based files Run your PHPUnit, QUnit and QMock tests Run your Selenium browser based acceptance tests Deploy everything to a dev/staging environment if all of the above pass with flying colours! Basically, anything that can be run from the command line, can be run from ANT. We have chosen ANT as our build tool. This is simply because it comes pre-installed with Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server and it plays well with Zend Studio. Phing is perfectly adequate and, is in-fact, a much better choice for PHP projects, as it's written in PHP so you can create your own extensions/plugins quite easily. Testing (Selenium, QUnit, PHPUnit, QMock) Testing is critical when building large scale applications. Unit testing allows you to test individual blocks of code whilst selenium will allow you to automatically poke and prod at your website in a browser and verify the results to your hearts content. Once you write your tests, you can then execute them when you change your code to ensure that everything still meets the business requirements and expectations. SCM (SVN/Git/Mercurial and the rest) SCM is the preferred choice when working on your own or extremely large development teams. SCM allows you to checkout your own copy of a project and commit the changes you make at will. You can work without having to worry about overwriting some one else's files, or more importantly, wait for files to become available for editing. Having experience with SVN and Git, we've quickly adopted Git's simplicity over SVN's complexity when dealing with things such as submodules, branching, merging and tagging (we'll go in depth with these concepts in another post). The gist is that an SCM solution allows you to work as a group on a project, and commit your code at will without worrying about overwriting other developers data. It also allows you to keep track of changes, rollback when things go wrong and branch off and merge back when doing experimental stuff with your codebase. It also helps when playing the blame game when things go wrong! More on that next :D Continuous Integration Server (Bamboo, Hudson and Cruise Control) At the heart of every continuous integration setup is a continuous integration server. A continuous integration server will constantly monitor commits to your preferred SCM and run what's called a build for every commit that caused a change in code. Having played with Husdon, Cruise Control and Bamboo; we settled for Bamboo. We made our choice based on: The number of extensions and plugins that were available for each tool How easy each new project was to set up How well they played with our existing tools such as JIRA, Confluence and our LDAP server Cost of ownership (price) Although Bamboo is the most expensive (with the others being free), we would spend less man hours setting up new projects using the GUI and far less time integrating it with Git, JIRA, Confluence and our Jabber server (yes Bamboo does talk to us) as it comes with support and easy setup out of the box. Continuous integration servers will alert you when a build fails. This can either be done via email, or more elaborately, by electrocuting the person who broke the build. Yes that's right, continuous integration servers can point out who broke the build, what tests failed, and what the last commit message and code was and perform whatever you like, automatically to them. What's the point of it all? Putting the jokes aside, continuous integration is your first and last line of defence against accidental changes to your codebase that may break your application in production. We have restricted any developers from accessing our FTP servers directly and encourage them to commit early and commit often. This prevents last minute changes to files, and ensures that developers put real thought into their code before they commit it. There's nothing more embarrassing than showing up on the screen of shame for the day! SCM also allows developers to branch off and add features to projects without affecting anybody else. Once a feature is complete, he/she can re-integrate it into the master branch so that it's ready for the next deployment. We can also safely make changes with the confidence that once it passes through our continuous integration workflow, everything should be working as expected. We can now spend less time manually testing things that should be automated to avoid human error and more time on producing added value to projects for our clients.