Well I’ve just watched the press conference delivered by Steve jobs of apple and I have to hold my hands up and say fair doos Steve, you’ve hit the nail on the head!

The press coverage and internet hype this problem has stimulated is nothing short of unbelievable. If this was any other device than the iPhone (or at least another apple device) then this simply wouldn’t have happened.

Everyone want s to knock successful people off their pedestals and in the case everyone wanted to knock the brilliantly successful apple off there rightful top spot of the worlds best smartphone manufacturer.

Fair enough, I’m an apple enthusiast (I’m even blogging this on my iPad) but even I was persuaded by the media hype about the iPhone 4’s antenna problems to jump on the bandwagon and start criticising a device I hadn’t even held.

I have held one now though and I have to say it’s a cracking bit of kit. Ok it’s expensive, but you have to admire the design, you have to appreciate the usability and you have to love the build quality.

It’s a damn good device… Simple as that.

Apple press conference video

It was my 30th birthday which for me, wasn’t easy – I found the thought of leaving my twenties behind quite depressing.  So the morning of my birthday I wasn’t in the best of moods, that was until I opened my present from my most excellent girlfriend.

I  opened up the Buyagift.co.uk tin which had a ticket inside inviting me to Orchard-Studios in Cheshire for a pop-star singing experience where I had the chance to record several tracks and burn a load of CDs with my mug shot on the labels and cd cases.

I chose to sing “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones and “When You Were Young” by The Killers.  Two of my all time fave songs.  I’d had a blast at both of them on the good old Karaoke before but obviously hadn’t been given the chance to record in a proper studio… and more importantly with a little auto-tuning!

The staff at Orchard Studios were fantastic – really down-to-earth people that understood you may be a little nervous and never once made me feel I didn’t have the right to be recording in a professional studio.  If any of you ever read this – thank you!

The sound engineer was also a top bloke explaining everything that was going on.  He also never made me feel rushed and more importantly never looked frustrated at my attempts to be Brandon Flowers!  He had worked with some professionals in this studio and now he was listening to me!

Anyway, we recorded my chosen tracks – took some pics for the CDs and let the engineer work his magic on my voice!  We also recorded the whole thing so… here it is…

Buy a Gift Popstar Experience Orchard Studios, When you were Young from Neil Smith on Vimeo.

I can honestly say it was one of the best experiences if my life!  Although I was a little nervous to begin with, it was that excited kind of nervousness and the whold day was one I will never forget.

As I sit here enjoying my pork pie sandwich and watching a line up of hopefulls contend to be the uk eurovision entry, I cast my mind over the days events and think about what I’ve spent my hard-earned cash on.

Well, I purchased a second controller for my new wii, resident evil game, two snack sized pork pies and a loaf of bread.

in the uk?

What I didn’t buy is a brand new 190mm(w) x 243mm(h) x 13.4mm(d), touch screen, 16gb, wi-fi enabled, 1ghz A4 processor, 9.7 inch LED-backlit screen and 10hrs battery life device.  What I didn’t buy was the new apple ipad.

A couple of weeks ago I was going through one of my “I love apple” 15mins and was bigging up the fact they were launching this amazing new device globally at the same time.  Unfortunatly, that hasn’t happend.

Those lucky people in the US have been able to order today though, so if we’re lucky Steve Jobs is logging how many of his fellow countrymen have pre-ordered and therefore will be able to judge the demand that will be present in the UK and rest of the world.  Then when the ipads launched over here, apple will be able to meet demand and keep all its loyal followers happy… yeah right.

Almost certainly apple will limit supply, fire out a few thousand press releases about how the ipad sold out within a couple of hours and then say they’re working flat out trying to meet demand.

So, when is the UK public going to get its hands on the ipad?  Late April.
Yep… Late April.

You could buy one through using bundlebox who register a US postbox for you and have said they won’t charge duty.  Not bad.  But also be careful.  I’ve noticed a lot of blogs recommending this route and I’ve no idea how geared up they are.

If you can wait until the end of April, personnaly I would.

After all you’re only missing out on a non-flash-complient, non-multi-tasking, non-camera-owning, big ipod touch… and a revolutionary, lifestyle-changing, user interface experience you won’t find anywhere else.

Damn you apple for this love hate relationship.  If only you were marmite! I could make up my mind so much easier!

Well here I am waiting for a train at London st.pancras because I was trying to be the model employee and not pay too much for my train ticket home, instead opting for a super off peak ticket that means I can only hit the tracks after 7pm! Annoying as this is, it has meant I now have the time to test out this wordpress app on my iPhone for the first time.

It’s also timely, as I feel, for about the fifth time since I started ever blogging, that I should increase the frequency of my online efforts. This time it is the course I am attending that has poked at my blogging brain to once again spark it into life.

I’ve just completed the second week of a direct and interactive marketing course which is hosted by the idm in teddington. I started with an open mind, not quite sure how I would adapt to being in the classroom again after a good ten year stint out of any form of education. But it has proved quite enjoyable and I’ve certainly learned a lot (I’ve not just put that in to please who I work for either!).

One of the best aspects of the course is the fact they have guest speakers who vary in quality admittadly, but in the main are excellent.

This week we were given the pleasure of listening to one Drayton BIrd who quite literally lit the place up with examples of his quality copy-writing and his extremely colourful language. He was most certainly an inspiring character who had been there, done that and bought the flat cap.

He is most certainly the reason why I’ve decided to have another flirt with blogging although Im sure if he read this there would be a comment on the bottom saying don’t fu*cking bother!

I would certaiy recommend the course to anyone interested in improving their marketing skills. It covers all areas and does it bloody well. But beware, it is an intensive course… Very tiring, so be prepared for some stressful times and sleepless nights.

Anyway, i’ve been at this station now for 2 hours and the train (that I can legally catch) has come into sight… So I’m off.

Oh, and blogging on this wordpress app. Yeah, pretty good!

Flash

I have recently stumbled into a problem with a media section of a site I am working on where users can view video clips.  As is the norm now-days, I am using an flv that progressively downloads from my web server to the client.  The area is pretty much like a YouTube section of the site where the user picks or searches from a database of video clips, then upon choosing their clip views this on another page.

The problem reared its ugly head because unlike youtube, this site used a menu that drops down over the flash video.

This is easily curable using the wmode=transparent  parameter that allows elements to be displayed over the flash object.

<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”> – to be added to the OBJECT tag
wmode=”transparent” – to be added to the EMBED tag

However, my issue came with also wanting the user to be able to display the video in full screen.  At first I thought it was just a case of using a skin with the full screen option.  But upon reading further I found I also needed the  “allowfullscreen” parameter set to true.
Again, not a problem, once it was set it worked like a dream… until I set both wmode and allowfullscreen.  That’s when things fell over.

This is down to the software scaling which allowfullscreen uses to take over the users monitor.

I had a few options…

• Force users to upgrade their flash player as this problem is allegedly fixed in the very latest flash player – According to our stats this would impact on a lot of users, I always like to design to accommodate the highest percentage of users.
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/full_screen_mode.html
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/full_screen_mode_print.html
   

  Full Screen mode

• Change the menu – Menus should always be consistent across any website… so not an option
• Open a new kiosk style media player…

Although it wasn’t a perfect solution, opening up a new media player would allow the full screen and provide another opportunity to display more information related to the video to the user.  Therefore this is what I opted for.

The final obstacle was stopping the current video (if playing) when the user pops up the media player.
This is possible using javascript to communicate with the current flash movie and then popping up the media player in the same function.
I found http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/flashjscommand/  – very useful.

So, there we go.  For the time being that’s my solution.  Still not perfect though, so I will keep an eye on my stats to see when the majority of users have the latest flash player installed.