Pierre Rigal

Writ­ing and send­ing post­cards is a tra­di­tion­al vaca­tion rit­u­al and, thanks to the won­ders of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, can cost you no more than a lit­tle time and ener­gy.

Don’t be forced to choose among cheesy print post­cards at your vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion — use your own iPhone pho­tos with one of these fab­u­lous, free apps that cre­ates elec­tron­ic post­cards you can email.

While your dear old grand­ma may still pre­fer a card of the paper vari­ety, next time you’re on a trip away from home, why not drop a line to your friends, fam­i­ly and col­leagues using one of these apps?

1. SodaSnap

SodaS­nap offers a sim­ple app inter­face that match­es the sim­plic­i­ty of the final prod­uct. To get start­ed, choose an image. You can either select a photo from your iPhone's cam­era roll, snap a pic of your sur­round­ings, or use your loca­tion.

Using your loca­tion brings up the maps app from which you can screen­grab. This doesn't make the most com­pelling pic­ture post­card, but it may be a use­ful tool for meet­ings and invi­ta­tions.

Once you're happy with your image, you can add text and hit the "Share" but­ton. The way the app is designed, it's pret­ty much what you see is what you get, so you'll have a good idea of what the recip­i­ent will see in the inbox. As well as email, there are options to share to Twit­ter and Face­book.

2. Photocards

The Pho­to­cards app allows you to snap a pic or grab one from your cam­era roll. When you've sized the photo to fit the frame, you can choose a back­ground.

The avail­able back­grounds dis­play clas­sic stock pho­tog­ra­phy — the sky, green­ery, sand, land­scapes, etc. — but the pleas­ant sur­prise is that the images are actu­al­ly decent qual­i­ty. The not-so-pleasant sur­prise is that you have to pay for some of them.

With your back­ground and pic­ture in place, it's just a mat­ter of pen­ning a few lines before email­ing your cre­ation.

3. Montager

Mon­tager is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent because it acts as more of a pho­tog­ra­phy tool. How­ev­er, we real­ly like that it lets you get cre­ative …

L’expérience utilisateur (ou UX pour User eXperience en anglais) est un des sujets qui me nourrit depuis plusieurs mois dans ma veille quotidienne. Le sujet peut paraître aussi vaste que flou. Mais quand on prend le terme dans son sens premier, on pourait, selon moi, le résumer ainsi : tout ce qui contribue à créer pour l’internaute une véritable experience lors de sa visite d’un site Internet. Ergonomie, design, nuance de couleurs, navigation, discours éditorial, cohérence, rapidité, intuitivité, ré-assurance, etc. Je vais certainement vous en parler de plus en plus souvent tant le sujet attise ma curiosité.

Je souhaitais ainsi partager avec vous aujourd’hui la très bonne présentation « The Ten Commandments Of User Experience » présentée lors du SXSW Interactive de 2010 par Nick Finck et Raina Van Cleave. Cette conférence en anglais résume bien ce qui pourrait constituer les 10 piliers de l’UX :

1. L’Utilisateur a toujours raison (The User is always Right) : se remettre en perspective par rapport à ce que l’Utilisateur, le vrai, adopte comme usage ; être capable de changer son propre prisme de perception d’une interface.
2. Comprendre l’Utilisateur (Understand the User) : tout doit partir de l’Utilisateur final, de ces attentes, du contexte dans lequel il est et dans lequel on le demande de se projeter.
3. Eviter les solutions toutes faites (Avoid Solutioneering) : chaque cas est et doit être unique ; analyser une situation, la comprendre et ensuite y répondre avec une solution conçue pour.
4. La forme découle du fond (Form follows Function) : l’interface doit être le moyen, l’objet qui permet de comprendre le message ; une ergonomie doit être pensée en fonction du besoin, du vrai besoin.
5. Le contenu est roi (Content is King) : avant de penser ou de remettre en cause une interface, il est essentiel de penser avant tout au contenu.
6. Innover et ne pas imiter (Innovate, do not Imitate) : innover fait parti de l’ADN du UX, créer pour se différencier.
7. Une interface accessible par tous et pour tout (Access is for Everyone) : ne jamais oublier la pluralité des utilisateurs, de leur devices et de leurs comportements.
8. Imaginer avant de créer (Plan before you Design) : une bonne réflexion en amont de tout projet est essentielle.
9. Comprendre l’objectif (Understand the Goal) : garder en tête la finalité, le but ; comprendre les enjeux pour mieux les servir.
10. Apprendre de ses erreurs (Learn from Failure) : on apprend en marchant… n’hésitez pas à courir !

Besoin de représenter des données sur une échelle de temps et de les diffuser online ? Tiki-Toki est l’outil qu’il vous faut ! 100% en ligne (et pas en Flash, merci), ce service permet de créer des timelines diffusables sur votre propre site. Vous pouvez y définir l’arrière-plan, y intégrer du texte, des images ou des vidéos. Plusieurs types de comptes sont disponibles (gratuits et payants) et je vous encourage vraiment à voir des exemples en live du résultat sur leur site même, sur une démo en full-screen ou encore sur le site du 1er ministre anglais.

J’ai vraiment été séduit par le résultat final et la facilité de mise en oeuvre. Voici un service web de niche mais qui a le mérite de faire (très) bien ce qu’il propose.

Shared by Pierre
Wow...

Face­book’s 750 mil­lion users can reveal their soon-to-be bun­dles of joy by updat­ing the “Friends and Fam­i­ly” sec­tion of their pro­files to include an “Expected:Child.” Par­ents can also choose to add a photo, the name of the unborn child and a due date.

Once added, the unborn child is list­ed along­side fam­i­ly mem­bers on the user’s pro­file, and a noti­fi­ca­tion is post­ed on the user’s Face­book wall.

The sta­tus option seems to have been qui­et­ly rolled out to users last Wednes­day, accord­ing to the British Daily Mail. At release, “a glitch in the sys­tem meant prac­ti­cal jok­ers could enter their friends’ names as expect­ed children,” the paper reports. “This has now been fixed.”

The Mail also sug­gests the option is meant to appease expec­tant par­ents who would oth­er­wise cre­ate pro­files for their unborn child — and break Face­book’s terms of ser­vice.

“We’re always test­ing new features,” a Face­book spokesper­son tells Mash­able. “Ear­li­er this year, Face­book start­ed pro­vid­ing the option to add an ‘Expect­ed: Child’ as a way for users to more accu­rate­ly express their identity.”

While some parents-to-be will delight in the abil­i­ty to share the good news with their Face­book friends, no doubt oth­ers will balk at the idea. The Mary Sue Blog points out that the Face­book fam­i­ly mem­ber addi­tion could be a poten­tial­ly awk­ward one should the preg­nan­cy not go as planned.

[via Laugh­ing Squid]

Image cour­tesy of Flickr, sal­im­fadh­ley

More About: face­book, preg­nan­cy, social media, sta­tus update

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The easiest way to get people to use a service is to save them money. That fact has been the catalyst for the tremendous growth of Daily Deals group buying companies like Living Social and Groupon over the last couple of years. Will it continue to be hot the way that other aspects of social networking have or will it die as quickly as tie dye?

That’s the question that the folks over at GPlus tackled with the infographic below. In it, they take a look at these and other sites, comparing how large they’ve grown both online and through physical presence and try to determine what the future holds for this type of service. It’s a great idea, but will it last? Will it collapse under its own weight?

If it does, people will look at Groupon as having made one of the biggest business mistakes in history by not accepting Google’s $6 billion offer last year. Time will tell.

Embedding Google’s +1 button is pretty easy and straightforward. All it takes is to include 2 code snippets in your web page. One goes in the header of the page, and the other one goes to wherever where you want the +1 button to render. To do so all you need is to follow the official Google guideline outlined here.

With that in mind, let’s build us Magento extension, preferably the non-obtrusive one.

We will call our extension “GPlusOne” and place it under the “Inchoo” namespace. Let’s start by creating the /app/etc/modules/Inchoo_GPlusOne.xml file with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<config>
    <modules>
        <Inchoo_GPlusOne>
            <active>true</active>
            <codePool>community</codePool>
        </Inchoo_GPlusOne>
    </modules>
</config>

Now we need to create second file, app/code/community/Inchoo/GPlusOne/etc/config.xml with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<config>
    <modules>
        <Inchoo_GPlusOne>
            <version>1.0.0.0</version>
        </Inchoo_GPlusOne>
    </modules>
    <global>
        <blocks>
            <inchoo_gplusone>
                <class>Inchoo_GPlusOne_Block</class>
            </inchoo_gplusone>
        </blocks>
    </global>

    <frontend>
        <layout>
            <updates>
                <inchoo_gplusone>
                    <file>inchoo/gplusone.xml</file>
                </inchoo_gplusone>
            </updates>
        </layout>
    </frontend>
</config>

As you can see we are declaring a new layout file here, called gplusone.xml which we will place under the app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/inchoo/gplusone.xml, with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<layout version="1.0.0">
    <catalog_product_view>
        <reference name="head">
            <block type="core/template" name="inchoo_gplusone_head" template="inchoo/gplusone_head.phtml" />
        </reference>
        <reference name="alert.urls">
            <block type="inchoo_gplusone/PlusButton" name="inchoo_gplusone" />
        </reference>
    </catalog_product_view>
</layout>

Carefully observing the gplusone.xml layout update shows that my layout is to “kick in” only on the product view page. Since embedding the Google +1 Button reguires two scripts to be loaded on page, I’m splitting them into two view files, app/design/frontend/default/default/template/inchoo/gplusone_head.phtml and app/design/frontend/default/default/template/inchoo/gplusone_button.phtml.

File app/design/frontend/default/default/template/inchoo/gplusone_head.phtml is loaded into the head area of HTML via ‘reference name=”head”‘ layout update, having the following content:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

While file app/design/frontend/default/default/template/inchoo/gplusone_button.phtml is loaded into the content area of the page, more specifically “alert.urls” block via ‘reference name=”alert.urls”. For more detailed understanding one should study the app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/catalog.xml file and its ‘‘ section. Content of gplusone_button.phtml is as follows:

<g:plusone <?php if($size = $this->getSize()) { echo ' size="'.$size.'"'; } ?>></g:plusone>

Which bring’s us to the final file needed to get this running, app/code/community/Inchoo/GPlusOne/Block/PlusButton.php with the following content:

<?php

class Inchoo_GPlusOne_Block_PlusButton extends Mage_Core_Block_Template
{
    /**
     * Constructor. Set template.
     */
    protected function _construct()
    {
        parent::_construct();
        $this->setTemplate('inchoo/gplusone_button.phtml');
    }

    public function getSize()
    {
        //Here we can implement the code to read the config values for sizes
        return '';
    }
}

If you look at the gplusone_button.phtml file you will see it has a call towards getSize() method from Inchoo_GPlusOne_Block_PlusButton class. At the moment, this method does nothing. It’s merely here for possible extension of this simple module. Given that Google +1 button supports various sizes (“small”, “medium”, “tall”, or no size definition for standard size) you can easily add some extra logic to this extension to have it read some config values that could be set from Magento admin.

The point of this article was not to give you a full blown extension ready to be used in instance, rather to show you the amount of effort needed to implement something as simple as Google +1 button in Magento the right way (not to say that this is the best possible way).

And here is the screenshot of the final result.

Hope someone finds it useful.

Cheers.

What’s your EQ? Our friends at Invesp Consulting have produced an infographic charting the history of ecommerce to the present with groovy graphics and juicy stats.

Infographic by – Conversion Optimization Company Invesp

Now you’re ready for Internet Marketing Jeopardy, or at least impressing your friends at parties. Have a great weekend everyone!

Remember this DIY camera? You can send it an email and it will promptly send back a picture of your space from its perch. Cool idea, right? But it takes a lot of electrical and coding know-how to get it set up. If you want something a little easier (and with streaming video) to keep an eye on your space, check out this Google+ hack.

The world of mobile app development is quickly becoming a crowded and complicated space, especially for those outside of the development niche.

“Which development platform should I use?” “Do I go native or Web-based?” “Which devices should I plan for?” “Can I build my mobile website by hand or should I use a pre-built package?”

The questions are endless.

As a designer, my job is to help my clients answer these questions. I try to stay in the category of “knowing enough to be dangerous,” and I keep tabs on the latest mobile development trends, one being the growing popularity of mobile Web apps.

What Is A Mobile Web App?

A mobile Web app is an app that you access via a mobile browser (such as iPhone’s Safari). It is not a static mobile website. It is designed to work like a native app, but it is not accessible via the App Store or Android Marketplace. You pull it up right from the browser.

Why Create a Mobile Web App Instead of a Native App?

Deciding whether a native or Web-based app is best for your client comes down to the audience they are trying to reach. Mobile Web apps are a good fit if:

• Your audience is searching for you primarily from a mobile Web browser;
• Users are on a multitude of devices (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, etc.);
• The development team has more skill in HTML, CSS and JavaScript than Objective C, Java, etc.

How To Design A Mobile Web App

Those of you who have designed iOS native apps are used to fixed-width and -height images that are positioned and aligned in the Interface Builder (or using code). Designing mobile Web apps is different: you’re designing for the browser again, just as you would for a typical website.

What does this mean? It means you can take advantage of a lot of cool CSS design tricks. In many cases, you can design an entire interface using CSS instead of images.

Technology Analysis: jQTouch or Sencha Touch?

To help you determine which development platform best fits your project, I’ve done some research on two Web technologies that focus on mobile Web apps: jQTouch and Sencha Touch.

jQTouch is powered by jQuery, a highly popular JavaScript library, and is geared to Web designers and novice Web app developers. jQTouch progressively enhances HTML and CSS so that less capable phones are still able to browse content. The primary method of creating functionality in jQTouch is with HTML and CSS or with jQuery-style event callbacks.

Sencha Touch, on the other hand, is geared more to software developers and has a pure Javascript API for building powerful apps. It is powered by a custom core that is optimized for mobile, which inherently makes the core level in Sencha Touch lighter and better optimized than that in jQTouch. It offers a wider array of features and components and is better suited to mobile developers who are creating apps with advanced layouts, functionality and interfaces.

For myself, I wanted an interface that looked and felt like a native app as much as possible. I decided to go with the Sencha Touch development platform because of its ability to handle advanced layouts and interfaces.

Ultimately, you have to do your own research and answer these questions:

1. What kind of functionality does the app need?
2. What technology supports that functionality?
3. How do the costs of these technologies compare?
4. What can I afford?
5. Do I know of high-quality developers of this technology?

Once you have this data, you can make an informed decision on the technology platform for your project.

Where Does This Leave Us Non-Coding Designers?

If you fall squarely in the category of designer, don’t worry. You can still design the interface in Photoshop, as I did in the example below. I leave the CSS beauty to the experts, letting them translate my images into code that looks exactly like my design.

Example Project: The Roookies App

Now, I’ll cover a practical example of how to create a mobile Web app using Sencha Touch. I teamed up with Sencha’s CTO, James Pearce, to design an app called Roookies. Roookies helps Dribbble newbies gain exposure on the network by featuring only rookie artwork.

I designed the Roookies app as I would a native application, using a 640 × 960 iOS design template found on Tapptics. This gives my developer a reference when they create the CSS code that will mimic my images. And for any images that cannot be duplicated via CSS, my developer will slice out and insert transparent PNGs.

Coding the Roookies App

Now I’ll demonstrate how to use CSS, Sass and Compass to style and theme mobile Web applications built with HTML5 and the Sencha Touch JavaScript framework.

An Introduction to Sass and Compass

Sass is an extension of CSS that adds new syntax to allow for things like variables, mixins, nesting, and math and color functions. This makes it much simpler to create CSS that is easy to maintain and that doesn’t repeat itself.

For example, in Sass we can write the following:

$blue: #3bbfce;
$margin: 16px;

.content-navigation {
border-color: $blue;
color: darken($blue, 9%);
}

.border {
padding: $margin / 2;
margin: $margin / 2;
border-color: $blue;
}

When we compile it to CSS, the output will look like this:

.content-navigation {
border-color: #3bbfce;
color: #2b9eab;
}

.border {
padding: 8px;
margin: 8px;
border-color: #3bbfce;
}

This is extremely powerful, because it means we can potentially change color schemes, layouts and more with one set of simple parameters — and assuming that the Sass has been structured well, those changes will cascade throughout all of the resulting CSS. (You can do much more than this, and you should check out the Sass website for more information on how the language works.)

Compass is an extension to Sass, and it provides a whole set of CSS3 mixins and an extension system. It’s particularly useful for handling cross-browser CSS prefixes. Take this:

$boxheight: 10em;
.mybox {
@include border-radius($boxheight/4);
}

This will compile to the following CSS:

.mybox {
-webkit-border-radius: 2.5em;
-moz-border-radius: 2.5em;
-o-border-radius: 2.5em;
-ms-border-radius: 2.5em;
-khtml-border-radius: 2.5em;
border-radius: 2.5em;
}

You can learn more about what Compass brings to the styling process on its website.

Using Sass And Compass With Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch is an HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript framework that allows you to develop mobile Web apps that look and feel native on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry touch devices.

Because the framework uses Web technology to create apps that run in the browser, these apps can easily be themed using tried and trusted CSS. And because Sencha Touch uses Sass and Compass, we can use these techniques to also create beautiful and elegant themes for mobile applications that were built this way.

For this article, we’ve built a simple Sencha Touch app called Roookies. It uses a JSON API to create a gallery of shots by first-time users of Dribbble, a popular design showcase service. (While we won’t get into how the app was built, you can read a sister article about how it works.)

To follow along here, we recommend you grab a copy of the app’s source code, because it also includes the theming components you’ll need. It’s hosted on GitHub, so you can either fork that repository or simply download it as a ZIP file. An unthemed version of the app is also hosted online; you can try it out with a touch device or a WebKit-based desktop browser.

Before you do any theming on this app, you’ll need to install Compass (which has Sass built in). The command line tool itself is Ruby-based, which means that Ruby is a dependency. If you’re a Mac user, Ruby is already installed on your operating system, and the easiest way to install Compass is as a Gem from the command line:

> sudo gem install compass --pre

(We use the --pre flag to ensure that the latest and greatest version of Compass is installed. Sencha Touch requires version 0.11 or later.)

If you are on Windows or a system that doesn’t have Ruby already installed, then you’ll need to install Ruby and Gem first, using something like RubyInstaller for Windows.

How Sencha Touch Uses Sass

Each component of the Sencha Touch user interface library has its own Sass file, which you can easily take and edit. But sometimes, the easiest changes can be made by altering certain important Sass variables (as we did in the examples above) to make changes globally across the application’s theme.

In the Roookies application, you’ll find a folder named theming. In it, create a new Sass file named mytheme.scss. The .scss extension is the convention for Sass files. In this file you can link to the parts of the Sencha Touch theming system that are used in the Roookies application:

@import 'sencha-touch/default/all';
@include sencha-panel;
@include sencha-buttons;
@include sencha-sheet;
@include sencha-tabs;
@include sencha-toolbar;
@include sencha-list;
@include sencha-layout;
@include sencha-loading-spinner;

The first line links to all of Sencha Touch’s sub-theming files, and the subsequent lines call mixins for the UI elements used in our application. Mixins are really just functions: they basically insert blocks of CSS into your document.

Most of these mixins use a set of global variables to alter the appearance of different parts of the user interface. For example, the $base-color variable modifies the overall color of the application. Set the following variable before the @includes so that they all use this new value, a tasteful green:

$base-color: #709e3f;

@import 'sencha-touch/default/all';
@include sencha-panel;
@include sencha-buttons;
…

When you save that file, you will be good to compile the CSS. In the same directory, run Compass on the command line, like so:

> compass compile mytheme.scss

If all goes well, Compass should output the mytheme.css file in the same directory. As with all websites and apps, you’ll need to reference this new CSS file in the application itself. You can do this either by adding a magic query string to the Roookies application URL (something like http://myserver.com/roookies?style=theming/mytheme.css) or, more traditionally, by hardcoding the reference into index.html:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="theming/mytheme.css"/>

(If you do hardcode the theme like this, you should remove the script block in index.html, which is responsible for supporting the query-string theme-switching technique.)

If all goes well, the theme should now appear with the new color, both in the toolbar and in a lighter shade for selections of the list itself:

(The fact that the color of the list selection is derived from, but not exactly the same as, the base is another clever Sass trick. Color functions such as darken and saturate allow you to formulaically link color values.)

Sencha Touch has a full list of the variables that can be altered to change the look and theme of an app.

Embedding Regular CSS

If all this talk of Sass and Compass is confusing, the good news is that even an .scss file can contain regular old CSS, too. So, in addition to your variables, mixins and functions, you can just start doing static styling to finesse the theme.

Let’s say we want to frame the images in the list. In the Roookies app, all of the images have the HTML class attribute shot-image, so we can easily style them as normal:

img.shot-image {
display:block;
padding: 8px;
margin: 0px auto;
border: 1px solid #666;
-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 4px rgba(#333, .5);
background:#eee;
clear:both;
width:304px;
}

Also, the container in which each image is placed is a div with the class shot, and we can easily adjust its padding so that our framed image still fits well within the list’s width:

.shot {
padding: 8px 0!important;
}

One useful way to find out the classes of elements in a mobile Web application is to use the inspector tool in a WebKit-based browser such as Chrome. Right-click on an element to inspect it and see how it looks in the browser’s DOM:

Add these to the bottom of the .scss file and compile again. The app’s images should now have more subtle styling, making the gallery look slightly smarter:

Embedding Images In CSS

One consideration when building mobile Web apps is the number of requests that the browser needs to make to the server to display a page. And it’s often the case that CSS points to external files, such as images, in the theme. One thing that is very easy to do with Compass, though, is to embed images in the CSS itself, using base64 encoding inside a “Data URL.” These are URLs that start with data and that allow you to specify binary resources inline. This means that the entire theme is encapsulated in one file, and the device has to make only one request to the server to receive all of the parts.

The inline image function is an easy way to do this. In our theming environment, it pulls in images from the images sub-directory. So, the wood.jpg image in that directory can be embedded in the CSS as the background of the gallery, like so:

.shot {
background:inline-image("wood.jpg", "image/jpg");
}

In the resulting CSS, it appears like this:

.shot{
background:url('data:"image/jpg";base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJR…');
}

This gives the app a tasteful wooden background:

Font Support

Many current mobile browsers support Web fonts, and there’s nothing like a custom typeface to distinguish your mobile application. One of the easiest ways to put a Web font on a website or application is with Google’s WebFont service, which requires you to declare an extra CSS rule by linking to your chosen font in the index.html file:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Pacifico'
rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

You can also use the CSS @import rule to pull this into the .scss file itself:

@import "http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Pacifico";

Both of these techniques create an @font-face rule that allows you to use font-family:'Pacifico' anywhere in your CSS.

Below, we’ve applied a style to the user interface — in this case, the text in the toolbar, which uses the class x-toolbar-title:

.x-toolbar-title {
font-family: 'Pacifico';
}

The result is as follows. A little quirkiness in the title bar and a distinctive look and feel to our application.

Conclusion

Of course, we’ve just scratched the surface here. There are many more powerful (and dramatic) ways to style and theme a mobile Web application. We’ve continued this process to create a fully featured theme for the Roookies app, and you can see the results for yourself, including the styled image meta data and the styled details page when you click on an icon under the images. You can also see the complete .scss file that was used to create this theme; it’s distributed as part of the GitHub project.

Have you created a mobile Web app with an extraordinary design aesthetic? Let us know in the comments section below!

Mobile Web App Resources

• “Will Mobile Web Apps Eventually Replace Native Apps?”
• “Mobile Web vs. Native App: Give It a Rest”
• “Mobile Web vs. Native App”
• “How Mobile Web Will Prevail Over Native App”
• “Web App Masters: Native or Web-Based Mobile Apps?”

(kw)

© Jen Gordon for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Les weekend à rallonge comme celui-ci du 14 juillet, on en profite parfois pour partir bronzer quelques jours au Cap d’Agde en bonne compagnie. La première chose à faire est de s’enduire...

Blogoergosum est un blog dédié aux nouvelles technologies, création, design et marketing

Our friends at iStrat­e­gy­Labs have cooked up this juicy info­graph­ic about what the aver­age col­lege stu­dent “Likes” on Faec­book. While they’re all like­ly fueled by ener­gy drinks, pizza, gad­gets, and par­ty­ing — which brands do they actu­al­ly pre­fer? iStrat­e­gy­Labs dug into what the 4 mil­lion+ col­lege stu­dents on Face­book “Like” across var­i­ous cat­e­gories. As brands pour more and more money into social ads — this pro­vides a snap­shot of what’s work­ing and what’s not. Cheers to Coro­na and Chipo­tle for tak­ing the lead!

Click the image to enlarge:

(All num­bers shown express the total users you can tar­get using Face­book Social Ads – not the num­ber of likes of a brand page.)

Shared by Pierre
Y'a des grands malades avec les legos... Je suis fan :)

Fernando of Sheepo’s Garage built this Porsche 911 (997) Turbo Cabriolet PDK

The car maintains all proportions of the real 911 and comprises a pretty impressive set of materials: 3500 parts and more than 6 meters of wires, 3 PF controllers, 3 IR PF Receivers, 2 RC motors, 1 PF XL motor, 5 PF M motors, 3 PF lights, 2 Lithium batteries, 1 PF switch,  3 PF wires 50c, 3 PF wires 20cm. The doors all lock and the windshield is at the correct 22-degree angle, to boot.

And, if you’d like to build your own Porsche 911 (997), Sheepo has downloadable instructions for the chassis and axles.

[sheepo.es]

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L'avènement de Facebook a fait du social shopping l'une des grandes tendances e-commerce de l'année, poussant certains e-marchands à y commercialiser leur catalogue. Voici une sélection de solutions ou d'applications de création de F-boutique. Sélection

This spoof public service announcement brings together some of the most geeky-epic dreams male nerds around the world have ever had. First, it features “Slave Leia”, an icon in the cosplay universe representing everything hot about intergalactic princesses everywhere. Then, it features them in scifi events where women dress as other desirable characters such as Lara Croft and The Baroness.

Finally, it features Kaley Cuoco, perhaps the epitome of “hot girl loves geeks” due to her role in The Big Bang Theory. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reader Mike Schropp sent in some pics of the CPU folding farm he built, complete with custom Lego case. As cool as having a Lego case is, though, the real purpose of the build is even better:

Around the time I began my planning I beginning to be involved in Grid Computing. I liked being able to use one of my geek hobbies in a way to help try and benefit others. Grid Computing allows for using your home computer (through the addition of a small free downloadable program) to use its CPU and or GPU for the purpose of processing data in the form of research problems, equations, and more. Normally, it takes a supercomputer days, weeks, or months to works its way through some of this research. Grid Computing leverages the power of hundreds of thousands of computers whose users donate their processing time to make this happen.

Since I was going to be building a new computer anyway it seemed like the perfect time to maximize my build for Grid Computing (Crunching).

Schropp details the process of his folding farm build, complete with parts specs and a photo gallery, to the finished product you see above. In keeping with the original plan, the custom case houses three systems, composed of the following parts list:

3X Sandy Bridge 2600k CPUs
3x Thermaltake Frio Cpu Coolers
3X Asus P8P67 Micro atx motherboards
1x Antec 1200 HCP Power Supply
2x Corsair SSD (System 1/Workstation)
1x Mushkin SSD (System 2/Touchscreen)
1x WD HD (System 3/Folding Only)
3X DDR3 for each system
8x Aerocool 140mm Case Fans
1x Metric Crapload of Lego Bricks (Technically it was about 2,000pcs)

According to Schropp, the decision to build the case of Lego came when no available cases fit his vision for the project. And while planning and execution of building a sturdy case that doesn’t buckle under the weight of the systems components or fall apart was a complicated one, the finished build is a thing of beauty–clean, functional, and strong. And most importantly, it’s a contribution to medical research and humanitarian projects, which makes it a machine worth infinitely more than the sum of its parts.

Check out the entire process on Total Geekdom. Way to go, Mike, and thanks for sharing!

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Shared by Pierre
Bonne idée :)

MyFlick­books is a Swiss com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed to con­vert­ing 15 sec­ond videos shot on your iOS device into “high-quality” paper flick­books. For about $20 you can have you flick­book sent any­where in the world. While I find my money would be bet­ter spent on things like beer and gas, if you are truly a flick­book lover (as so many of us are these days) you may find this to your lik­ing.

If you don’t have an iOS device you can just pop over to the actu­al web­site and upload a video file from almost any source. It is then processed by MyFlick­book’s Swiss flick­book elves, print­ed on rich, corinthi­an paper, and bound into a wee lit­tle book that you may then flip at your leisure. Why you would want to do this is beyond the scope of this argu­ment, but MyFlick­book would like to encour­age you to con­sid­er it as a low-cost, low-effort gift for a loved one who may not be worth the expense or effort of a real present.

You can down­load the app here.

Like so many digital-to-print plays on the iPhone (Posta­gram and Life­cards come to mind), I think the cen­tral prob­lem with these apps is the dis­con­nect between shoot­ing the video and then buy­ing the arti­fact. Just as we always walk by the Build-A-Bear-Workshop think­ing “Now there’s some­where I should take the kids,” the same goes for mak­ing a lit­tle flick­book: the impe­tus is there, but we all need that push.

The shoot­ing inter­face is fair­ly clean and well-organized but I’d worry that unless your mis­sion was to pro­duce a flick­book for a very impor­tant event (a good­bye wave from friends, your wife giv­ing birth, your first trash can fire) you’d prob­a­bly just take some video and call it a day. Buy­ing a flick­book is one extra, dif­fi­cult step, espe­cial­ly one that costs 20 smack­ers. Heck, for $3.99 you can buy a small photo book through iPho­to and painstak­ing­ly build your own flick­book. Not the same thing, to be sure, but per­haps MyFlick­book is aim­ing a bit too high?

But there is hope. As Bill Cosby would say, “This is the flick flick for the books of the flick­books for flick­book fans” or, to put it more con­cise­ly, “Behold, the pale rider! Flick­book fans arise from your slum­ber and accept your birthright for MyFlick­book is nigh!”

A job list­ing for iPhone Sales Staff in the UK sug­gests that the new iPhone might launch on August 16th this year, 9to5Mac reports.

While the job isn’t for an Apple Store, it is a posi­tion that Apple them­selves are adver­tis­ing through recruiter Gekko. It’s like­ly that the posi­tion is for an Apple brand­ed sec­tion with­in a larg­er depart­ment store, which are gen­er­al­ly oper­at­ed by Apple them­selves.

The posi­tion adver­tised doesn’t last for long, with employ­ment last­ing from the 16th of August until the 29th of Octo­ber.

The time frame sug­gests that the tem­po­rary staff mem­ber will be brought onboard to deal with the huge demand that an iPhone launch brings.

Second article sur le thème de la migration oscommerce vers magento, je vais aborder ici la gestion des commandes.

Magento propose un back office très puissant et très souple : la boutique est entièrement paramétrable. Cependant cela ne doit pas vous dédouaner d’y apporter une attention particulière lors de votre projet de migration… En effet sa modularité et son aspect « je peux tout faire avec » risque de vous donner un sentiment de confiance un peu trop prononcé. Vous y accorderez alors moins d’importance que ce que vous auriez fait avec tout autre outil : Erreur !

Une petite démonstration pour prouver ce que je dis : chaque jour votre service client valide 300 commandes* sur votre boutique en 4 heures (validation le matin pour expé dans la journée), vous savez qu’il vous faut entre 1’30 et 2min par commande, vous avez donc besoin de 2 personnes pour faire le travail. Imaginez maintenant qu’après votre migration magento, ce n’est plus 2min qu’il vous faut pour valider une commande mais 3… Et bien le premier jour, ça va râler en service client (normal !), le deuxième jour pareil, le 3ème jour ce sont les premières réclamations ($) pour délais de traitement, le 4ème vous lancez des développements ($$) pour améliorer l’interface de validation et le 5ème vous embauchez une nouvelle personne ($$$) pour palier aux différents problèmes…

… Alors, comment faire pour ne pas rater la migration magento d’un point de vue gestion de commandes ?

Continuer la lecture : Migration magento : gestion des commandes

Le temps, depuis mon arrivée chez Market Editions (mon entreprise actuelle) je l’ai passé (entre autre) à bosser sur la mise en place d’une plateforme ecommerce multi-boutique (multi-lingue et multi-devises) sous Magento pour venir remplacer nos différentes solutions Oscommerce. La réflexion sur ce projet a commencée il y a 2 ans environ avec le choix de la plateforme, et depuis, avec une équipe de choc et quelques bons partenaires, nous avons sorti notre première refonte (mariages-cards.com) il y a presque 1 an, suivie par 3 de nos autre sites (baby-cards.nl, baby-cards.de et foto-cards.com). La migration de l’ensemble de nos sites n’est pas encore terminée (encore 2 sites doivent basculer et nous devons aussi gérer avec les sorties comme nos tout derniers planet-cards.co.uk et planet-cards.es), je vous parle donc d’un projet toujours en cours mais sur lequel je commence à avoir assez de recul pour commencer un petit retour d’expérience personnel.

Lorsqu’on parle de migration ou de refonte, la première chose qui vient très très vite à l’esprit est : « Chouette ! Je vais te leur caler un design tout neuf à la pixelperfect, une ergonomie avec un taux de transfo à 2 chiffres avant la virgule, je vais te leur coller du web2, de l’ajax, de l’html5 et tout ce qui va bien en ce moment, et bien sûr je vais te leur conjuguer Twitter et Facebook à tous les temps… attention ça va déchirer ! »

[...] Petit moment de nostalgie ^^ [...]

Allez, on redescends sur la planète web1 et on se raccroche au wagon IE6 !

C’est certain, l’ergnomie, le design, les technos… tout cela est important mais c’est loin (très loin même) d’être la partie la plus importante et la plus difficile d’un tel projet…

Continuer la lecture : Migration Oscommerce vers Magento : que faire de mes données clients, commandes, etc ?

Wireframes, zoning, mockups : voila trois termes pour exposer une même notion : la maquette d’interface. Utilisée tout d’abord dans la création de logiciels lourd en amont de la phase de développement, cette technique est maintenant largement utilisée dans la conception de sites Internet. Il existe même aujourd’hui une grande diversité d’outils pour réaliser ces maquettes, d’ailleurs chacun possède ses habitudes et donc ses préférences. Personnellement j’ai longtemps travaillé avec Photoshop avant de découvrir un autre logiciel que j’affectionne tout particulièrement et que je vous présenterais en fin d’article… (suspens !)

Continuer la lecture : Wireframes, zoning, mockups

Chose promise, chose due : je me remet donc à écrire et je change un peu de sujet ! Pour commencer je vais aborder une notion que j’ai découverte en début d’année (dernière !) et que j’ai eu l’occasion d’appliquer dans le cadre d’un projet : le mind mapping (et pour rendre à césar ce qui est à césar, c’est le geek de laminutedugeek le premier à m’avoir parlé de cela.)

Tout projet commence par une agitation intellectuelle (la cogitation ?). Que ce soit seul ou en groupe cette phase est en général la plus propice à l’éclosion d’idées. On passe alors rapidement d’une idée à l’autre, en pesant le pour et le contre, on s’échappe dans une direction puis on revient dans une autre au détour d’une nouvelle idée.

Bref on s’en va dans tous les sens et le pire c’est que la plupart des points abordés dans cette phase sont importants même s’ils n’ont fait l’objet que d’une simple allusion. Il est ainsi courant qu’au cours d’une réunion de mise en place d’un projet les participants se laissent aller à des idées certes non utiles pour le départ du projet mais probablement redoutables pour la suite. Dommage donc de passer à côté sous prétexte que ce n’est pas le sujet du jour…

Continuer la lecture : Mind mapping ou comment matérialiser des idées

Bonjour et bonne année

Cela fait plus d’un an que ce blog reste sans articles… Pénurie d’encre ? perte de motivation ? manque de temps ? que s’est-il donc passé pour que je laisse tomber ce lieu de partage… Un tas de choses, c’est vrai.

Continuer la lecture : Un an plus tard…

Les articles se font rares sur mon blog ces derniers temps, non pas que j’ai perdu la motivation (au contraire…) mais justement, le temps passé à développer n’est malheureusement pas du temps passé à écrire ! Et puis… il faut bien apprendre avant de partager non ?

Ce n’est pas vrai non plus, je ne passe pas mon temps à développer (loin de là), j’ai aussi un nouveau boulot très prenant et enfin une vie sociale sur un réseau privée (et pas l’inverse).

L’objet de l’article d’aujourd’hui est l’utilisation de l’api GoogleMaps avec Rails à travers le plugin Ym4r. Comme un bon exemple vaut toujours mieux qu’un long discours, je vais reprendre mon application de gestion de CD et nous allons l’améliorer encore afin de positionner nos CD sur une carte GoogleMaps.

Ok, ok, c’est parfaitement inutile de positionner un CD sur une carte mais c’est pas grave, l’objectif encore une fois est de jouer avec cette API et non de faire une « killer application ». Ces détails réglés lançons-nous maintenant dans notre application.

Continuer la lecture : RubyOnRails et l’api GoogleMaps

Voici un petit billet sur une technique de classification très populaire dans la mouvance web2 : les tags ! Je ne vais pas faire ici leur apologie ni retracer leur « récente » histoire (à ce sujet je lance une petite question : quel a été le premier site à faire usage des tags ? J’ai cherché 2 minutes sans succès !)… Une chose est sûre, les tags sont apparus pour créer une classification alternative à celle des classiques catégories que l’ont retrouve sur une grande majorité de sites. Leur utilisation permet souvent de créer une navigation transversale sur un site et offre donc au lecteur plusieurs suites possibles à la lecture d’une information…

Partant de ce constat, j’ai décidé d’introduire un système de « tags » dans mon dernier projet. Voici donc comment récupérer, installer et utiliser un plugin permettant de mettre en oeuvre très rapidement et très efficacement un tel système sur une application existante.

Continuer la lecture : Nuage de tag avec Ruby On Rails : acts_as_taggable