October 29th, 2010 by Jason MacDonald
Back in January we posted about the coming slew of tablets that were slated to hit the market. Now, heading into the holiday season, nearly 11 months later, it’s interesting to see where things stand. Just looking at my favorite source of tablet news, Goodreader.com, there are pages of announcements and reviews of new devices in the last week alone.
When I wrote the original article back in January, the iPad was still just a rumor, lumped in with a bunch of other “in development” products. Now, in just the first two quarters of the year, the iPad has generated nearly $5 billion in new revenue for Apple. This number is continuing to grow as Apple rolls out the device to a broader global market this week and US-based AT&T and Verizon start selling it in the US. Read more on State of the Tablet Market – 11 Months Later…
Tags: Android, Apple, Blackberry Playbook, HP, iPad, Microsoft, Samsung Galaxy Tab, tablet
Posted in General, Trends and Technology | 1 Comment »
October 21st, 2010 by Laurent Brigaut
With the changes to the iPhone developer agreement a few weeks back, the Adobe Packager for iPhone gained new life. The packager, which is a feature of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 software and the Adobe AIR SDK, offers a way to use existing Flash code to create native applications for the iPhone and iPad. We’ve been working on native iPhone and iPad development for some time now, so we were curious as to how this application could be used to port over some of our existing Flex-developed client applications. We took a sampling of applications we’ve built over the past few months, some simple and some more complex, and used the Adobe Packager for iPhone to convert them. What we discovered is that there are some significant limitations with this tool. Read more on Testing Out the Adobe Packager for iPhone…
Tags: Adobe, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Apple, iPad, iPhone, Silverlight
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | 2 Comments »
October 15th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
We’ve just scheduled two new webinars for the month of November. The first session, “20 Tips for an Effective Website Revamp” provides organizations embarking on a site redesign with an end-to-end guide through the common trouble points. It brings forth 20 key tips that every organization must keep in mind, including details such as how to plan your project, analyze key requirements and user needs, and choose the best technology. We’ll also look at how to optimize your site so it can be easily found by search engines, which performance indicators are important to monitor, and how to promote your new site to your stakeholders.
Read more on Two Upcoming Webinars – Register Now…
Tags: INM, Integration New Media, magazine archive, webinar, website design, website revamp
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
October 8th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Canadian Society of Association Executives National Conference and Tradeshow in Quebec City. At INM, we’ve worked with associations now for a number of years, providing a variety of services, including online and CD-based membership directories, Interactive publishing solutions, abstract management solutions for large meetings, and recently, design and development for website revamps. However, we haven’t really spent time with this audience disucssing broadly the challenges that this market is facing. Associations are unique organizations, funded primarily through membership revenue and sponsorships. In this recession economy, both of these sources are frequently cut from budgets. Read more on The Challenges Facing Associations Today…
Tags: Associations, CSAE, Mobile, social media, web design
Posted in Trends and Technology | No Comments »
September 30th, 2010 by Vahe Kassardjian
Earlier this month I attended an interesting conference called BIF-6, hosted by the Business Innovation Factory. This was the sixth installment of this event, held in beautiful Providence, Rhode Island. The organizer, Saul Kaplan, and his team did an excellent job pulling this event together in a very appropriate matter – comfortable enough, but not overly extravagant.
Each speaker had 15 minutes to tell a story related to innovation. Some speakers used support images, but PowerPoint slides were strictly forbidden. In general, the speakers were excellent. Some of them took certain liberties in extending personal experiences into doubtful generalizations, but most stayed within the limits of recounting their stories or connecting them with established knowledge. Read more on Innovation Stories at BIF-6…
Tags: BIF-6, Business Innovation Factory, innovation
Posted in General, Trends and Technology | No Comments »
September 23rd, 2010 by Raluca Ene
Earlier this week our friends at Yu Centrik and the UXalliance hosted UX Masterclass, a one-day international conference on user experience design, here in Montreal. The two groups did a great job of presenting a more advanced take on usability topics than you typically see in a one-day event. They recruited over 25 expert speakers from across the globe and provided local UX teams with the opportunity to meet with some of the leading minds in the UX space.
What was interesting about the conference was that it looked beyond the traditional content around user experience and provided an opportunity to dig into the processes and approaches for resigning the interactions of the future. Presentations went beyond the “expert instinct” and looked more at focusing on the client’s end-to-end user experience. This involves mapping all of the relevant touch points with a client from the first engagement to the last, not just looking at the experience within a specific application. This moves the UX effort out to the entire company, including marketing, customer support, administration, management, designers and developers. It also involves looking at user experience design that’s multiplatform, supports multiple entry points and accommodates a global audience. Read more on UX Masterclass Presents Future View of User Experience…
Tags: Forrester, Usability, user experience, UX, UX Masterclass, UXAlliance, Yu Centrik
Posted in General, Rich Internet Applications | No Comments »
September 16th, 2010 by Vahe Kassardjian
A move by Apple this week to ease up on its restrictions for the creation of mobile applications for the Apple App Store is a step forward toward universal rich internet applications (RIAs). Back in April 2010, Apple tried to restrict how companies could code and build their applications. The company’s justification was that the restrictions were in place to protect quality and ensure security. However, it really just closed the door for many companies who were unable or unwilling to build technology using native development.
With Apple loosening up their restrictions, businesses can now create applications with a variety of technologies and tools and port them over to an Apple-friendly format. Abode is a step ahead in this race, as they had already rolled out the Packager for iPhone with CS5 to applications to an Apple format. As of today, Flash content in a browser is still restricted. Read more on A Step Closer to Universal RIAs…
Tags: Apple, HTML5, iOS, RIAs, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | 1 Comment »
September 9th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
Two weeks ago I posted about the battle of the web browsers and what this meant for businesses. Even with the evolution of the browsers and the added functionalities they deliver, they are becoming irrelevant in the grand scope of the web. Years ago your experience on the web was dictated by the browser you choose. They all had different features and supported different options. Now, the web browser is virtually invisible. Users want access to the information they are seeking and they want the tool they are using to do so to just make this happen, without getting in the way.
The cover of the September issue of Wired boldly states “The Web is Dead”. This is a strong statement and one I don’t necessarily agree with. Yes, the face of the web is different and the ways that people are seeking information are different, but the fundamental concept of the web is still alive and kicking. People are still using the web to access information, but what’s changed is how the information is delivered. The days of funneling users through a web browser to your homepage are numbered, but users are still accessing information online. They’re just coming in through different doors, like web applications (iPad applications, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds and more). Read more on The Web is Not Dead, but it is Changing…
Tags: BackWeb, Facebook, iPad, Pointcast, RSS, Twitter, web applications, wired, YouTube
Posted in General, Trends and Technology | 1 Comment »
September 2nd, 2010 by Raluca Ene
Earlier this month I attended Usability Week 2010 in Toronto. This week-long event was put on by the Nielsen Norman Group and it featured a series of full-day tutorials led by usability experts on a variety of subjects, ranging from information architecture through to user testing.
The tutorial I attended focused on the role the human mind plays in defining the principles of usability. It did a great job of presenting details about how humans process information and the impact that this has in predicting peoples’ reactions and making effective design decisions leading to intuitive interfaces. Read more on The Psychology of User Experience: Usability Week 2010…
Tags: UI, usability week, user experience, user interface, UX
Posted in General | No Comments »
August 26th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
It’s been an active couple of weeks in terms of web browser news with a plethora of sneak peeks and leaked screenshots. Everyone’s trying to one-up each other in the battle of the browsers.
It started with the beta release of Mozilla’s Firefox 4 browser, which adds support touch events within the browser on Windows 7 machines. They’ve also added a few other changes like moving the tabs option to the top of the browser and enhancing the JavaScript support to beef up performance of all those slick HTML5 web app demos that are making the rounds.
Next was the Chrome 6 Beta. Many of the changes on this version can be considered cosmetic – mainly streamlined tabs and buttons. The major feature is the addition of a new auto-fill feature with integrated synch. This allows all instances of Chrome to share form data and use it to auto-fill forms. Read more on Battle of the Web Browsers Heats Up…
Tags: Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE9, Microsoft, Mozilla, web browsers
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | 1 Comment »
Back in January we posted about the coming slew of tablets that were slated to hit the market. Now, heading into the holiday season, nearly 11 months later, it’s interesting to see where things stand. Just looking at my favorite source of tablet news, Goodreader.com, there are pages of announcements and reviews of new devices in the last week alone.
