Note from the author: apologies if this post sounds like a Microsoft marketing campaign, but I am really excited about this technology!
Let’s say you have a website and you want to give your visitors the experience edge.
The media experience can be improved by using Microsoft Silverlight on your website. Some of the features include:
- Vector graphics with light, degrade and other effects
- Overlaying your HTML with Silverlight content
- React to keyboard input
- Video overlay
- Real-time data
- AJAX
Some impressive examples can be found on the Silverlight website. Here’s a few from the top of my head:
- Single coloured backgrounds? Forget about them! Create amazing forms, patterns, shades and colour rich backgrounds
- Animation effects, including menu transition, drag and drop, zoom, pop-ups, animated drop down, 3D wheel and “page turning”
- Better user experience patterns
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 18.03.08 – 33 comments
It's filed in the Design, Development, Marketing, User experience box
I’m a big fan of YUI (the JavaScript framework from Yahoo!, not the pint-sized popstar from Japan - no offence, Yui), and have been using it fairly extensively on the soon-to-be-relaunched goedhuis.com.
The main reasons for the love of this particular JavaScript framework are the vast array of well-documented and robust features you get for free, all of which are backed up with clear and helpful real-world examples on the main YUI site. It’s a great resource and has been a joy to work with on this project, a credit to the talented engineers at Yahoo.
Rarely is anything that simple though, and there have been a few challenges along the way on this project. I’d like to share some of these in future posts, but one problem I came up against recently was getting sIFR to play nice with the YUI TabView component.
FYI, the TabView component renders ‘navigable tabbed content’ in a format that is accessible for all users of the web, and Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR for short, is a rather snazzy method for rendering dynamic, accessible, rich typography in a web page, using a clever mix of Flash and JavaScript.
The particular issue I hit was with the sIFR-rendered Flash movies not displaying correctly, or even at all, when switching between tabs.
Fortunately, our friend TabView exposes a healthy dose of events that we can subscribe to, the ‘activeTabChange’ event being our knight in shining armour here.
Warning: non-technically savvy readers may wish to look away now…
Read more…
Steve wrote this on 26.02.08 – 11 comments
It's filed in the Development, Web technology box
An interactive and design led website for parents and children to use together for learning and play
The Nixon McInnes team are incredibly excited to launch today an impressive addition to our website portfolio in the children’s TV channel site Jim Jam.
Jim Jam is a cable TV channel which has launched in its first territory, Italy, with plans to roll-out across Europe. Hence why the site is in Italian!
The team has designed and built two sites for Jim Jam. The first site was a password protected press site made live in advance of the main channel and site launch to promote and manage media contact. This static HTML microsite was developed to tight deadlines to allow press release and media pack downloads.
The second and main site option is a bespoke design led site with interactive games created using Flash animation. The activities, colour and general vibrancy of the site makes it a welcome opportunity to demonstrate the creative design strength at Nixon McInnes.
The main site details the TV channel schedule which the client is able to populate using an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) plug-in. The home page can also be updated to highlight changing channel promotions or seasonal themes.
View the Jim Jam site here.
Why not try your hand at the games – more fun than that report you should be writing!
Jo wrote this on 07.12.06 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Internet, NixonMcInnes, Our sites box
Today the new website that our strategic partner 48 Fitzroy (who are also based in Sussex) commissioned us to design went live:
http://www.48fitzroy.co.uk/
The website is very different from many in our portfolio, being the first that we have ever produced solely in Macromedia Flash, the well-known ‘animation’ software package. As a technology-neutral web agency, that’s a really important and positive step for us.
Using Flash as a technology for website design has some real strengths.
Our colleagues at 48 Fitzroy - being superb designers - like the very specific controls that Flash gives them over the look of the website that appears on the user’s screen.
The guys at 48 Fitzroy also had a clear vision for the animated ‘transition’ between screens: you can see that the website picks out key words from client testimonials as you navigate around the website.
As with all technologies Flash does have some fairly major weaknesses too. But we won’t take the sheen off today’s good news by dwelling on those just now!
So check out 48 Fitzroy - they do some great design and branding work.
Will McInnes wrote this on 24.01.06 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Design, NixonMcInnes, Our sites box
