We've got a new opening. We're now also looking for senior web developers. Check out the requirements.
In addition to that we're still looking for Concept Designers, Game Developers, Game Designers, Flex Programmers and Project Managers.
Just wanted to post a quickie to say how much I love FireBug. It has made my day about a million times. Big thanks to John Barton (and anyone else involved). You've made programming JavaScript 1000 times more enjoyable.
And since I've created some Flash apps for them I can finally say that I've done some work for Google. Sort of at least;)
I've been optimizing the performance of one of our larger site productions the last week and took quite good care at making page elements cache correctly using expiry dates for each element type individually and gzipping any content that would benefit from it. Well, today was time to test the performance of the front-page on multiple browsers. The site is really very complex. Initially we load 130kb of (unzipped) JavaScript and make 2200 method or function calls before anything is rendered. I tested the overall performance with and without a primed cache and must say Safari's performance blew me away. For instance, IE7 takes 300 milliseconds to run the initialization procedures of the JavaScript classes. Safari: 28 milliseconds. What? Ten times faster? Even Firefox, which I to this day thought to have the best JavaScript engine of all browsers, takes 89 milliseconds. Initial page load times on Safari seemed to be a little better than on Firefox, although lacking extensions like Firebug, I was not able to test that scientifically. But what most impressed me was page load times with a primed cache. The site is designed so that all static elements like CSS or images have expiration dates, so essentially all that needs to be loaded when navigating back to the front-page would be the dynamically generated HTML. And looking at the server logs I confirmed that none of the browsers actually requested or revalidated any of the static elements. Still Firefox and IE take about one second to render the page. Safari: Instant. Really, you have to experience it to believe it. I've never experienced anything like it on any browser before. You hit the link and boom - its there. No delay whatsoever (well, ok, maybe the 28 milliseconds which it executes the JS in). And the best part? I'm running Safari on Windows Vista on my MacBook Pro. Yep, hell has frozen over. Our company is looking for a senior web developer (Helsinki, Finland). Candidates should have at least 5 years of experience using ... jada-jada-jada ... you know the drill. Seniority. Superb markup- and programming skills. Great projects to work on. Fantastic people. Drop me a mail at tuomas.artman(at)valve.fi if you're interested. Huh, don't know where the count goes, but Amazon has once again released product details a little too early, thanks a bunch;) Their CS3 product page contains pricing, screenshots and most important features. One thing which caught my eye was the inclusion of Acrobat Connect (a.k.a. Breeze) in every package. Surely this can't be the real deal, but some sort of launcher application where you still need to purchase a separate account? UpdateDidn't notice it earlier, but the site also says that CS3 will ship April 20th, far earlier than has been speculated.I'm trying to search for images based on color. In theory this is somewhat simple: When images are uploaded to the service, I create a histogram of rgb values from the image. When the user then commences a search with a certain colour I go though all histograms, look up the value for r, g and b and look to see if it is greater than the threshold. Now, how the heck do I translate this into a MySQL structure? I certainly don't want to have an own column for all values of r,g, and b (768 columns, huh), but a BLOB is not (quickly) searchable. Has anyone tried anything like this (storing somewhat large amounts of data, that is still searchable in MySQL) before? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Their idea is simple: They want to give meaning to each and every picture with people posing. In effect, they want to recognize each person of each photo on the web, and having seen their presentation at SIME a few months ago, I must say, they really might succeed. A number of services have tried this before, but in my mind they were not really successful because of the labour the user would have to go through in order to tag each person. Polar Rose uses unique face recognition algorithms and the collective intelligence of our users to tag all pictures on the web. The only problem they are going to face is that their technology relies on a browser plugin (probably because they want to harness the collective data processing power as well, otherwise they could and would have built their front-end with JavaScript or as simple extensions), which they will have a hard time to get out to all users. But very interesting indeed, be sure to sign up to their beta on the pages.
WidSets is basically widgets for your mobile phone, in a Web2.0 manner. It's a clever service that lets you configure a set of widgets on the web, then automatically transfer them to your mobile phone. Currently most of the widgets are RSS-based, so you can enjoy the most important news and blogs on the road. Go try it out and tell me what you think! In addition to my previous post I did find something nice on the Windows Live site - the search. Ok, the scrolling should be smooth in order for it to be usable, but I really liked the idea how you got rid of search result paging. What happens when you start scrolling down (with that awful slider) is that the site goes out and uses AJAX to read in more results. So you can scroll till you drop, and never need to click a next-page button ever again. And oh, the image search result page is a beauty! Nicely done, now make it faster! Well, Microsoft just release live.com. I really don't know how to describe it. A personalizable page which combines news, search, feeds, mail, gadgets (widgets) and a lot of more stuff you really don't need under a single roof, all with Ajax. I played around with it but really found nothing of interest. Ok, it's in beta, Microsoft has been in a dead hurry to catch up with Google and its really quite an interesting platform. But how about some relevant content? Google does not know how to create a good UI. Huh. Now I've said it. And I'm probably going to be bashed for saying this out loud. The thing is that Google is trying too hard to keep their applications UI's looking like Google.com. Of course, when you've gained a huge user-base not only because of superior search algorithms, but also because of the simplistic design of page delivering those results, you're probably tempted to use the same design drivers - simplicity and text-based interfaces - also for other applications. Somehow we've not noticed the bad usability and user interface designs of Googles recent applications (gmail, desktop, talk and pages), maybe because we're so excited about all that AJAX-stuff going behind the scenes, or maybe because we were just too happy for someone to throw 2.6 gigs (and counting...) of free space for mail at us... But hey, Google desktop and talk are PC applications, and not a freakin' search page. So make them look and feel like one, will ya? And you know - even in web applications - icons are quite useful Wow. You gotta love (or terribly fear) Google. They bought Urchin a while ago and now rolled it into this absolutely wonderful free service. I tried out Urchin a while ago and found it totally brilliant, much better than any other statistics-service such as Red Sheriff. The 499$ / month / domain price-tag was a little high, but I thought I would definitely recommend it to any of our clients that did not have any other stats-service already. And now Google is giving it away for free. Limited to 5 million hits per month (uh, that's fair enough), but if you have ad-words on yer site, that limit is also gone. Go check it out! And now that you've read this, Google Analytics will tell me which city you came from and will actually draw a dot on that cool Flash-based map of theirs. One other observation I made while going through all of our statistics for our websites, is the absense of old browsers. No-one has not been targeting Netscape 4 for the past few years, but even a year ago statistics did show - depending on the target group of course - that old browsers accounted for 1-5 % of all traffic to the sites we've built. But now in most cases there really is no precense at all from old browsers. In most campaigns we get about 50.000 visits, and it's great look at the stats and find only a very small number of users using old browsers (usually less than 10 hits came from NS4 or IE4, and half of that came from our internal tests). We even had one campaign with 25.000 unique visitors, and not a single old browser, wohoo! So if a clients still asks to develop for NS4, I have some great material to convince them to rethink their view. No, I'm not going to argue whether Sparkle will kill Flash or not, I think everything that can be said has been said already. But I must say that I find it odd that so many are afraid of... err... progress. I mean, why are you guys afraid of something better than Flash to come out, instead of freakishly excited? I use the tools that make most sense, and if Sparkle (or whatever else...) works better than Flash to get a certain job done, I'm very happy to jump to that solution. Don't see it as a threat, but as a possibility. Macromedia revealed Studio 8 today, but it's going to ship in mid-September. Err - Hello Nokia! Just before the holidays Nokia put a Flash splash-screen onto their main site, Nokia.com. I figured they would have removed it in the next few months, since in my humble opinion it's just an obvious hindrance. One rollover and two clicks to get me to the real front-page is just too much. Anyhow, I bought a Motorola V3 from Bangkok. I always wanted to try something different since I've been using Nokia's mobiles my whole life and the design of the V3 was appealing. And I'm glad that I tried it out. Now I can go back to my S60-powered phone and am a lot happier with it (with all the little flaws it still has), since the interface of the V3 was just really sad. Just noticed today that a few banners we produced had not been tested sufficiently... The thing was this: We produced a banner with a video ad. Now in Finland, none of the mainstream sites accept that any video-banners be streamed from their servers (in fear of bandwidth congestion), so we had to create a banner that essentially says "Click me to play the video" and after user interaction would start streaming the flv from one of our servers. As it turned out, the banner had a *slight* flaw and would actually start downloading the video instantly (but not display it). Well, what happens when a banner on three major sites download a video from our servers the instant it appears? A whopping 178 Gigabytes of traffic over just two days! Luckily our server at Magenta Sites didn't even cough (thanks guys for the great service!). Last night twenty or so of us went to the Grand One-gala to see how we managed to compete against other agencies in Finland's biggest digital media competition. Well, we really did great! Out of a total of 36 nominations, 11 were our works. In the end we won three of the nine categories, and received a total of five honours. Read all about it here. Way to go! We'll finnaly see Photoshop and Flash working hand in hand. No doubt that GoLive and Fireworks are the first products to be axed from the new lineup. VillageLife is a new kind of service that lets you send money to development aid online. Not only it lets you do that easily by credit card or online bank payment, but it also lets you first see where help is needed, then choose what kind of aid you want to give (buy a hospital, hire a nurse, or perhaps send some mosquito nets to a village in Africa?) and then watch the aid go through - all this on the computer screen. It's almost like a game, really, except in this game you use real money and then your money is channelled to real people, who really need your help in order to help themselves, in real life. The service is developed for The Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission by Valve, and with over a hundred years of experience, The Finnish Mission makes sure your help really goes through to those who need it. So far VillageLife is available only in Finnish and Swedish, but perhaps in the future this service can be used globally. Sulake, developers of the Habbo-hotel community (shockwave is still alive!) have yet again secured a round of investements, this time 23.5$ from Benchmark Capital (and co-investors). It's been very interesting to follow Aapo's and Sampo's (founders, Sulake) venture into the digital hotel business. They started of with a small but neat visual chat application called Mobiles Disco back in -99 (or was it -98?), which I found very interesting. I had been working with both Aapo and Sampo back in the old days and they also tried to hire me as their third employee in 2000, but I decided to head for Razorfish Helsinki instead. Five years later they have 160 employees in 12 countries and three million unique users visiting their virtual hotels every month. How can one cope with such growth? And with the new round of investement it's unlikely that things will slow down. I'm quite sure we can expect lots of new virtual hotels in the most remote corners of the world as well as great new multiplayer concepts in the near future from them. |
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Rooooar!
One of the most interesting companies of the next year must be 
On a strange day (06/06/06), 
