eenie, meenie, mynie, mo...

uchoo decisions are more accurate

James — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 19:32:27 +0000

Well we knew it all along didn’t we? Making decisions the uchoo way is more accurate than doing it the long winded way! We’ve now got some research done by the guys at University College London to prove it. In their tests, when the subjects made rapid fire decisions it resulted in about a 25% increase in accuracy (95% Vs 70%). I suppose we better get posting those dilemmas then

Linkorama: BBC News article

Beta 1 live!

James — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 05:18:15 +0000

Today’s a pretty big day; it’s my Granny’s (85th?) birthday, England lost the Ashes 5-0 and uchoo.com went live. I’ve called it ‘Beta 1′ because there are so many things to change/add but the basic functionality should work (fingers crossed!). From here I’ll keep adding to the site (lots of Ajax stuff that’s half finished) and fixing the inevitable slew of bugs.

Play nicely, I’m off for a Guiness…

The Killer development tool

James — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:15:11 +0000

I’ve been using Firebug for a couple of days now and it has really increased my productivity. If you’re trying to develop and debug Ajax apps or just get a bit picky about the quality of your dev, you really should download it now.

Post dilemmas on your own site!

James — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 07:16:24 +0000

This is something I’ve wanted to do from the outset – uchoo Remote (in the spirit of all things Web2.0 obviously that should be uchooRemote(TM) but that’s another story!). I’ve solved the problem with the help of Flash, and some external and in-line Javascript. Its currently a really simple (?!) bit of Flash (i.e. no nice animations yet but I’ve added ‘prettying it up’ to the development plan so expect something sweet in the near future. In brief features are:

Track results based on placement
Valid XHTML
Configurable size – enlarges when rolled over
Multiple dilemmas on a single page

Requires site visitors to have:

Flash 8+ player
Javascript enabled browser
A modern browser

To achieve this I’ve created an XML interface which I’ll document so that people can include dilemmas on their site/app in whatever format they like.

Flash ExternalInterface gotcha

James — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 07:06:13 +0000

If you are using the Flash externalInterface class to communicate with the containing web page, there is a little snippet that may cause you lots of grief. When you embed the swf using Dreamweaver it inserts both the id and name parameters in the object tag. If you leave it ‘as is’ the externalInterface won’t work with the example javascript. Just take out the name= parameter and leave the id= one and all should be well.

.htaccess ‘fun’!

James — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:01:57 +0000

I’ve just spent a good few hours trying to sort out the .htaccess file to allow clean URLs. If you’re using .htaccess and a Mac here are my top tips:

Make sure you use tinkertool so that you can see the file in Finder
Whatever text editor you use make sure you save the file as ‘plain text’ (TextEdit does have this option although I know most people use something else)
FTP the file to the server as binary

If you copied and pasted any code from the web delete the end of rows and enter new return characters (i.e. rewrap the lines to make sure there are no dodgy characters in there).

I finally solved the problems I was having by editing the file directly on the server. Grrr!

The return of an old friend

James — Thu, 25 May 2006 17:26:14 +0000

It’s been a while but it feels good. I’ve just got back in touch with an old friend.
Flash is back! Introduced to it when it was Future Splash (remember that?!) and after a couple of years off, I’m now living the dream again in version 8. I’ve even remembered some keyboard shortcuts which is nice.

For anyone wondering ‘why the reunion?’; well how about, layout control, cross browser consistency, bandwidth efficiency and stability? Oh and with all my ‘old skool’ shortcuts, development speed too! Bring it on…

Hello world!

James — Wed, 24 May 2006 05:16:42 +0000

I’m just in the process of configuring the server and moving all the content from its ‘Alpha’ home ready for some Beta testing. For those of you that have been eagerly waiting for the big red button to be pushed and the site to go live, I’m still aiming to have something available for the end of this month (mind you the first skifield opens this weekend (early!) so chances are there won’t be too much coding done then!).