Four Shapes web design

Apple released it’s SDK yesterday, including a full development implementation of the iPhone platform, with mobile safari using exactly the same rendering engine (not a webkit wrapper of a local safari install).

We tested it on the iPlayer development site, but as Aspen uses a different user agent to the iPhone (Mozilla/5.0 (Aspen Simulator; U; Aspen 1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Mobile/5A147p Safari/5525.7) we had to alter a few browser checks server-side to accommodate the simulator;

Checkout the movie preview of the iPhone and BBC iPlayer in action; http://codepress.co.uk/screencasts/iphone-simulator.mov

NB: There is currently a problem with quicktime implementation (no visuals, only sound).

UPDATE: The Aspen Simulator is bundled in the iPhone SDK; http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

BBC iPlayer quitely introduced streaming content today, allowing mac users to catch-up on the last 30 days of TV programmes. The service is expected to be heavily marketed during the Christmas period ^[1]. With around 400 hours of TV shows from the last 7 days, it aims to revolutionise the way UK users watch Television.

The best bit; it’s free and easily accessible to those who live in the UK. Some previews below;

Streaming content

A TV show being streamed directly from the site;

Fullscreen streaming

In fullscreen mode. Requires Adobe flash 9

Downloading TV shows to the ‘Download Manager’

Stores programmes for upto 30 days

A TV show playing in the console

Higher quality than streaming

BBC iPlayer

Last week marked the launch of Ben Sherman’s four global sites.

Working with Cimex Media, I developed the highly browser compatible HTML & CSS throughout the site.

It marks a coming of age for many international brands, who are beginning to take accessibility, modern technologies and social networking as a serious part of their business models.

I Won This Car, a new online competition giving visitors the chance to Win a car by sending a text message (£1.50), was launched earlier this month.

Our job was to brand, design, implement and host the site - Providing total support for a company who are new to the web.

Being independent, they need total control over their content. To achieve this the site is built on-top of the powerful yet simple RadiantCMS. So whenever something needs changing, they won’t be calling up at 5am in the morning (Sleep doesn’t exist in their vocabulary!).

To help with brand exposure we’ve also produced a printed advertisement. It will appear in the Evo Car magazine next month.