A quick case study on how we created a rich HTML5 experience for Tribal DDB and BC Hydro

Tribal DDB came to us with a challenge: could we build the microsite they were imagining in Flash with only HTML5 & CSS3. We needed to be able to deliver something that would not only meet the requirements, but deliver the level of polish associated with a world-class creative firm like  Tribal DDB. To make things even more challenging, the deadline was in a matter of weeks and would require browser support all the way back to IE6. Yikes.

The microsite planned was a parallax scrolling design, where some elements scroll faster than others to create the illusion of motion. Parallax websites are a fairly new and rare phenomenon, so there were few resources available to help with the odd behaviour CSS exhibits when you stretch it to the limits. We were also commissioned to build an iPad app that would allow BC Hydro to take this content with them offline, and use it for their events and street-teams.

Our team started working on the foundation of the site long before the design was finalized to help accelerate delivery. It’s not an ideal way to handle front-end development, but we’re big believers in doing what it takes to get to the finish line. We built the iPad component as a mobile web application, housed inside an Objective C wrapper. That allowed us to develop the iPad component with the speed and manageability of a web project, but the offline capabilities of a native app. It also makes it easier for the client to repurpose the app for other platforms or devices in the future.

We worked very closely with Tribal DDB throughout the project, using Basecamp to keep on top of the many iterations of the design and staging site. Of course online tools only take you so far. When deadlines approached, the  Tribal DDB team set up shop in our office to provide real-time design feedback.

We’re really proud of the finished result. Take a look through the site and you’ll see the result of a lot of time, love, and dedication. Many thanks to the Tribal DDB team who worked tirelessly to tweak and perfect the design and copy you see on the page, and the Thirdi team who put in the countless hours required to bring it to life.

Go visit the site and see for yourself, or take a look at the screenshots below.

One of the frustrations of building software in an agency, as opposed to a startup, is that as soon as a project is over we are forced to rush on to the next. This happens for years, and there is very little time to look back on old work.

This is too bad. We’re big advocates of open-source software, but this forward looking approach doesn’t reconcile well with creating open source projects. So, we now sit on a pile of totally useful code snippets, techniques, and fully completed web applications that could be open sourced, but aren’t. It’s a bit of work to make the code generic enough to be used by others, and to document it thoroughly. So, Mark Deepwell and I have started a program of coming in early to go through our old work and find projects to release on Github and bring them back from the dead. These are snippets of projects that fizzled, or ones where we have approval from the client to open source components.

This week, we open-sourced our first project. It’s a web application for watermarking documents Matt and Stan built back in the summer 2008. Katie Perry was topping the charts singing about kissing a girl, everyone was trying to do their best “Joker” impressions after seeing The Dark Knight, and Americans were catching Obamania. Anyways, watermarking large numbers of documents was a total pain then, and is a total pain now. TV & Film production houses need to have a unique watermark on each copy of a script to hunt down leaks. Schools use watermarks to prevent copies of past tests leaking out into the schoolyard. Photographers might need to watermark hundreds of images for attribution. Even big organizations do this stuff by hand.

Scryptic was our attempt to make some of these problems easier to solve. Now, Scryptic is in your hands. If you think you can use it, awesome! It’s GPL licensed, so go nuts. If you think you can improve it, better still. This project never saw the light of day, so you will be the first real users. That means there are probably bugs, and missing features that should really be there. It was designed by developers, which probably also says something. Truth told, if it were a paying client’s project, we wouldn’t release it as is. But it gets the job done. And if you are experiencing the pain of having to watermark hundreds of documents at a time, it can really help.

Feel free to drop us a line if you have any questions. We can’t commit to re-starting our development on Scryptic, but we’re happy to help point you in the right direction if you’d like to.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend over here. We’re still moving full tilt ahead, but now we’re taking an occasional look behind us to see how we can recycle our work into something useful.

One of the biggest challenges our clients face is trying to decide what work belongs in-house and what they should outsource. Every option has pros and cons, and I find myself weighing them out with clients nearly every week. I thought I would put my thoughts in a blog post so I can stop repeating myself.

When companies set out on a big online project – building a piece of software crucial to their business – they are faced with a huge range of options. There are overseas contractors earning less per hour than the guy who tears your ticket at the movie theater. On the other end of the spectrum, there are world-class interactive agencies with architecturally significant offices, hip employees, and Ritz Carlton-like service.  Somewhere in the middle, there is the option of building up your own in-house team.

Each of these three options has draws. $12/hour software development sounds too good to pass up. “Even if they are 1/5 as efficient as a local team, that would still work out to a reasonable $60/hour” you tell yourself. On the other hand, after a glass of their premium, green tea infused, mineral water, a good interactive agency will leave you convinced that they are the only people in the world capable of handling your unique challenges. An in-house team offers control, and cost savings, which are hard to find in an agency relationship. It’s a tough choice, but an important one.

So, I’ve put together this brief guide that explains the pros and cons of each approach, and which types of projects are well-suited to each.

Contractors

Pros

• Many contractors are truly great developers, but they’re charging half as much than they would at an agency
• The relationship will be a little more casual and flexible. I know a contractor who was paid in hundreds of pounds of nuts and seeds. Things also get done outside of the typical 9-5 work hours too, which might be nice if you’re a night owl.
• Contractors spend less time defining the project, since it isn’t billable time for them. If the contractor underestimates the workload on a fixed-price contract, you save.
• Contractors sometimes will put in crazily cheap bids for projects if they are broke, or desperately want to add your name to their portfolio.

Cons

• It’s hard to tell which contractors are great, and which ones aren’t. Portfolios don’t necessarily speak for themselves. It is never clear how much of the finished project the contractor was responsible for, if the project was delivered on time, and how reliably it worked after delivery. If you don’t work in the software field, multiply this problem by 5.
• The relationship can turn sour quickly. I know a lot of people who have been burned by contractors who simply got a better offer and abandoned the project. You’ve seen The Social Network, right? Studies have found between 50-60% failure rates for contract software projects. You have to be comfortable with that risk.
• Contractors spend less time defining the project with you up front. You might not get exactly what you want, the timeframe could change drastically, or a better solution to your problem might be ignored. Contractors are typically focused on execution, and not strategy.
• Contractors stop being contractors and might not be around for ongoing support.

Perfect for

• Projects where you know exactly what you want
• Projects with a flexible timeframe, where you can afford to walk away if it doesn’t work out
• Boring, repetitive, or otherwise uncreative work
• Projects where you don’t need ongoing support
• Projects with a limited budget
• Companies that have lots of in-house project management resources to keep everything on track.

**Note: I’ve lumped local contractors and overseas ones together. The pros and cons apply to both, the one important distinction being that local contractors typically require a bit less hand-holding and will have a higher probability of finishing the job.

Agencies

Pros

• An agency’s reputation is well known. You can find out who the good ones are.
• Agencies have access to the best talent. It’s hard for anyone to find the best of the best, nevermind convince them to work for you. Agencies use their reputation to assemble a killer team, and provide a variety of creative outlets to keep them happy.
• Agencies have dedicated project managers. That means you have a friendly voice to talk to on the phone. Software developers, as a group, are not the greatest communicators in the world; often viewing talking to clients as a distraction from their real work. In large projects, with multiple teams collaborating, this can be a big problem. Good project management is often the difference between a large project finishing or falling apart mid-development.
• Agencies have the most to lose, in terms of reputation. That means they are less likely to let a project go sideways or deliver a sub-par product.
• They’re cool. They have offices that would be at home in Wallpaper magazine and blogs that people actually read. They have interesting hobbies and go to hip parties.

Cons

• Agencies have the highest hourly rates…by far
• Agencies will work much harder to manage you, the client. A successful agency knows how to hit budgets and deadlines. There will be formal signoff forms, hard deadlines for making project changes, and lengthy documents. If you’re against this kind of red tape and handling, be warned.
• Agencies are often more concerned about portfolio building than your bottom-line. Expect to be sold on the newest, sexiest, most creative solutions – even if they aren’t the most practical for your needs.
• You never want to be a big agency’s smallest client. You likely won’t get the level of expertise you are paying for. The guys who won the awards on the wall got them by working with the most important clients.
• Most agencies are focused heavily on design. If your project is tech-heavy, be sure you have an agency that can handle it (or get them to partner with us).

Perfect For

• A project that needs help being defined and scoped
• A project with lots of stakeholders who need to be kept happy, and in sync. Good agencies are good communicators.
• A project with inflexible deadlines or a tight schedule
• A project that needs to be really really awesome

In-House Team

Pros

• If your needs are big enough, and can keep a team busy year-round, it is the cheapest option
• You have complete control over how well the team performs
• The team is more in-tune with your internal business concerns and your product
• It is very stable. You really have to mess up to get your entire team to quit at once.

Cons

• Hiring is always hard. Hiring programmers (especially when you are not a complete techie) is even harder. The difference between what an average programmer gets done in a day and what an experienced, passionate, programmer completes can be 5X+, so hiring well is very important.
• Big problems need a team of specialists. For a non-technical person it is easy to assume that all computer problems require the same skillset, just in the same way that I assume all medical problems do. It turns out my vet isn’t quite the laser eye surgeon I thought he was, and your in-house IT guy probably isn’t also a brilliant designer, software developer, and copywriter either.

Perfect For

• Companies where technology is at the core of your business, and your main differentiator in the market.
• Projects that will need to be managed and expanded by an internal team over a long time horizon
• Internal tools that don’t need to be sexy or innovative

There is no one-sized-fits-all solution for technology problems. That’s why Thirdi works with companies in all three of these situations. We can help you hire an in-house team of technical wizards if that is what you need, and offer bursts of programming support for big projects. We offer monthly retainers packages that take out some of the hassles of managing contractors. And we are always happy to lend some technical muscle to your design agency of choice on a big project.

Of course, sometimes Thirdi just isn’t the right fit. We’re built for big, hairy, ambitious, projects. That’s maybe 5% of the jobs out there. We’re not afraid to tell clients that they’d be better served with an all-in-one agency or a contract designer if that’s what solves their problem best.

Choosing your technology provider is an important part of running a modern business, and we take it seriously. Get in touch if you want to talk about your options with us.

Google, the world’s most popular search engine, has announced they want to be the world’s most popular car engine by inventing software and technology for automated cars.  Using “video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to see other traffic” the automated Google car drove its maiden voyage from the Google Campus in Mountain View, California to Santa Monica then on to the Hollywood Boulevard.  Navigation was handled by the Google data centers (using Google Maps?), and the technology was built by engineers from the DARPA Challenges, the US Government’s series of autonomous vehicle races.

The way driving technology is moving, soon we’ll be able to drive over virtual children with our robot cars from the comfort of our living room!  Ah, the twenty first century!

The Paypal app for iOS has added a new feature that allows a Paypal user to deposit checks using the iPhone camera.  Now, you can add funds to your Paypal account by taking a photo of the front and back of the signed check, and you can instantly start spending your hard earned dollars online (after a six day waiting period, of course).  Combine this with a receipt management tool like JustTheBill, and you’re one step closer to throwing away your wallet!

Now, if I could only get an ATM machine app, I’d never need to step into another bank again!

Super Mario Bros, the two-player masterpiece for the original Nintendo game system turn 25 years old today.  20th century video games are a far cry from the advanced graphics and processing power of today’s system, but all the fancy images in the world just can’t beat the simple playability of a classic game.  From the insipidly catchy songs to the lessons of disappointment when we learn that “the princess is in another castle”, Super Mario Bros has been engrained in the culture and the psyche of an entire generation.  Even the staff of Thirdi has been known to take a short break from developing innovative receipt management software and web applications to bust out a little Mario Galaxy for Nintendo Wii.

So, all of us here at Thirdi say to our questionably politically correct Italian friend: “Happy Birthday, Mario”!

Like Superman, it arrived faster than a speeding algorithm..  Google Instant, a fancy new search option from Google that used the power of ESP to predict what a user was searching for, then delivered those results immediately.  At first, we were awed and amazed.  No more wasting valuable time and energy pressing the cumbersome “ENTER” key and waiting a fraction of a second waiting for a page to load.  Finally, a new product that could proudly sit next to such hits like Google Buzz and Google Wave…  but just like Buzz and Wave, in an instant, it was gone… well, almost.

Why did Google Instant disappear for many users?  Could it have been that it had the potential to instantly serve results from malicious pages or could it be that too many people are using Opera?  We cannot be certain, but the most likely suspect could be the inherent failing in Google Instant itself:

Users don’t want Google to predict their searches, they want Google to understand their searches.  If Google Instant spent more effort on improving the algorithm to better semantically disseminate the nature of a search query, instead of guessing what the next letter is going to be in a search, then Google Instant would be an impressive product..  much like the doddering, old Google regular…

In a surprising and very “un-Steve Jobsy” move, Apple has released its restrictions on allowing 3rd party development tools in the iTunes App Store, as stated in a press release last Thursday.  These released restrictions also include the previously useless Flash CS5 Packager for iPhone.  This is great news for Flash developers who were desperately wanting to port their applications that work in literally every other mobile device, but previously couldn’t because of Job’s hate-on for Adobe.

This still doesn’t help us users who want to access Flash applications and website content through the mobile Safari browser, but its a start.

Apple has finally released the iOS 4.1 software upgrade which is reported to fix the performance issues on the iPhone 3G and 3GS.  Also, Apple’s social network Ping has been added to the iTunes mobile application, so now you can connect with your friends all while getting fREE C!ali$ and finding russian brides!

Now can all us 3G and 3GS users can finally use our phones again?  We here at Thirdi will be testing the new operating system on our phones diligently..  except for Matt, who went back to the Blackberry ages ago.

In an attempt to muscle into the social media world, Apple released its new “Ping”, a social music network.  Yet, in a testament to Apple’s recent trend of rushing out new products without proper QA, the site is reported to be “drowning in spam“.  Apparently, the lax account accreditation and zero URL filtering has allowed the site to be overrun with malware links only a few days after Ping’s release to its potential 160 million users.

After the abysmal errors and issues that came with the iPhone 4 release, and the iOS 4.0 software, the last thing Apple needs right now is to be lazy when it comes to quality assurance (as any good software company would tell you…).

Does this mean that I can start sending my AdultFriendFinder affiliate email campaigns to sjobs@apple.com?