One of the answers may well be with how your emails are constructed. Making marketing email is often much trickier than building a webpage; there are so many mail clients out there that you really are against it to make your email look similar across the board. If you know what you’re doing this can be achieved relatively well, however; it would seem that a large quantity of companies simply don’t know what they’re doing, or at least, their developers don’t.

Let’s take our first example: Adobe. Adobe is a multi-billion dollar company that distributes popular media software such as Photoshop, and even webpage creation software called Dreamweaver. Would you therefore conclude that its array of competent professionals were experts at meticulously crafting emails that looked perfect everywhere? If you would, you’d be wrong. Take a look at these images:

Instantly we can see a problem. With images disabled the email is just a random collection of links, some of which are just ‘click here’ or ‘learn more’ (which is also a large accessibility issue – the last thing you want to hear as a disabled user when you ask your screen reader to read out the list of links is: ‘click here’, ‘click here’, ‘click here’, etc). With images enabled the email doesn’t get much better, it’s still completely unreadable. This email was rendered in Outlook 2003, still a popular email client for businesses across the world. A definite candidate for unsubscribing, if you can find the link.

Adobe isn’t alone in being a large client who doesn’t test their email properly, here we also have problems from TomTom and Nintendo in Outlook 2007:

Clearly there needs to be more quality control at large corporations when it comes to their online marketing.

There’s another way to confuse your user-base: using the text version of the email for the wrong thing. Traditionally when you send an HTML email you also send a text version so that people who either have HTML disabled on their email client or users whose client simply doesn’t support HTML see the same content but without the images. Unfortunately some email creators are all to happy to ignore text-only email viewers and direct people straight to an HTML page on the web to view their newsletter instead. Now, you may be thinking that that would be an acceptable solution, but; you’d be wrong.

Take a look at our next example add tell me what you see?

Now the problem is all too evident: some email clients such as Mail on iPhone and iPad, and the desktop alert in Outlook will use the textual version of the email to give a handy preview. Obviously as we can see from this example, it fails horribly when you use it the wrong way.

There is something worse though; sending out the wrong email. And not just the wrong email, but the text only version of the email to people who actually have HTML clients. And you’ve used your text-only version incorrectly, to tell people that they need an HTML compatible mail client to view the email. And then supply a link, a single link. Which is in fact, an unsubscribe link. This is without a doubt, the ultimate fail:

How many clients did they lose that day?

The reason of course, is because you’ve overflowed the stack, Apache has run out of memory and crashed.

The fix is simple; just add this to your Apache config:

<IfModule mpm_winnt_module>
ThreadStackSize 8388608
</IfModule>

Problem solved.

As part of my new setup I have a Blu-Ray drive – any self respecting videophile has one of these. This drive is a Samsung SH-B123L (which can also identify itself as a TSSTcorpDVDWBD) and has the newest available firmware (SB03 – December 2010) which was upgraded from the non-obvious site SamsungODD. In conjunction with Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra 3D Mark II I have watched about 20 Blu-Rays on this new system.

And so it came to pass that recently I received a copy of Despicable Me on Blu-Ray. Does it play? No. After a few seconds the Universal logo plays, as you’d expect. Then, a spinning loading Universal logo sits on the screen. The one time I left it on we got to 13 minutes before an advert played which thanked me for supporting the industry and paying for the film. Then the loading logo came back. Another 10 minutes and I gave up.

Clearly the problem here is the Blu-Ray drive. It can’t play the disc. But that problem is itself caused by Universal who have added a new type of DRM that the drive does not understand. As it stands I have purchased a £16 product that I cannot watch – let’s not forget that I could easily download this film through bittorrent – for free – and watch it with ease.

This is the problem with the media industry, forever penalising the very hands that feed it. Pirate copies of films simply don’t suffer from these problems and save five or more minutes of your life every time you watch a disc, because they don’t come with the pointless copyright warnings (pointless because if you’re going to copy it, you’re going to copy it).

I have sent emails to Universal (whose first reply told me my computer may not have enough memory – I think 24GB is quite enough), posted an entry in the Samsung section of Cnet and contacted eBuyer, the supplier of the drive in question.

Who should be billed for my wasted time here? Universal for using DRM that my drive cannot understand, Samsung for not updating their firmware fast enough or eBuyer for distributing a new drive that is already out of date?

I originally bought a TomTom One (V1) back in 2006 at a cost of £215 because my then girlfriend was pretty bad at map reading. The TomTom then was an excellent purchase that removed the possibility of many arguments. The feature list of the new TomTom GO 550 Live tempted me to buy a new one, four years on. This was purchased with a third-party dashboard bean bag mount from handtec for a little under £190. Let’s see what new features it has, over a TomTom One:

• HD Traffic
• Speed Cameras
• Fuel Prices
• Google Local Search
• Weather
• IQ Routes Technology
• 4.3″ Screen
• Hands-free phone support
• Voice command and control
• Advanced Lane Guidance
• Text-to-speech

Features

The first five features in the list above require a subscription to TomTom Live services at a cost of £99 annually. These services are currently provided for a year, free of charge with a new purchase of the TomTom GO 550 Live. The next few updates are improvements of the hardware and software. But are they useful?

A larger screen is always welcome.

Hands-free phone support? I don’t generally make or take calls in the car, so this feature isn’t useful for me.

Voice control again, isn’t too useful for me – it involves learning what commands are available and it’s much easier just to navigate the menus with a tap.

Text-to-speech is a good feature – rather than pre-recorded navigation the TomTom can now read out road names which, when you’re following lane guidance can be very helpful.

Because the “Advanced Lane Guidance” feature of this new TomTom is awful. It’s excellent at telling you what lane to be in, when it’s already very obvious. Think of a motorway with giant blue signs telling you which lane is which. The thing that would have made this really helpful, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was part of lane guidance, would be telling you what lane to be in when you’re in a large town on a road with three lanes, each of them going somewhere else and because it’s rush-hour lane changing is near impossible. Imagine my disappointment when I twice ended up going the wrong way, because I was in the wrong lane. Thanks TomTom. The included lane guidance isn’t always perfect either – Joining the M1 southbound at Junction 10 from Luton it will tell you to “Keep right, then go left on the roundabout, first exit”. But, if you keep right you cannot go left on the roundabout. Again, thanks TomTom.

IQ routes is essentially a dumbed down version of the Traffic service. The TomTom can assume for you, fairly accurately how much longer it will take to traverse a road at a given time on a given day – it knows a journey will take longer during rush hour. No complaints here.

Which leads us to the paid features, which to be fair are currently free for a year with the new TomTom.

Weather. Do I care? Not really – my iPhone has a much better app for telling me what the weather is going to be. But that’s not to say you won’t find it useful.

Google Local Search – again, for me not that useful. Generally, I already know where I want to go, and if I’m looking for somewhere specific I’ll probably check my iPhone first – because it’s a lot faster and more powerful than this TomTom unit. (Would you believe, four years on the GO 550 Live is only 20MHz faster than the original One? Although mapping features aren’t impossibly slow, they’re still slow. It would have been nice to have had a faster processor here).

Fuel Prices. This could be helpful if there are large price differences in your area, but passing several petrol stations listed the prices were all out of date, some by several pence. Not a feature to rely on then.

Speed Cameras are a nuisance. Most people believe this. Sure, I’d like to believe we’re all driving at the speed limit and, excluding country roads, towns along country roads and motorways, from what I’ve seen most people generally keep to it. But that doesn’t stop you seeing a speed camera and then furiously checking your speedo to make sure you’re not going to set the damn thing off. This distraction could potentially be more dangerous than not having a speed camera at all. So, is this feature helpful? Yes and no. Yes, because it clearly points out where the speed cameras are. No, because apart from being blindingly obvious (they’re large yellow boxes for goodness sake) you won’t set them off if you’re not speeding, which you shouldn’t be. But I guess it’s nice to be reminded that they’re there and if you do happen to be speeding, to slow down. I’d be interested to see the statistics for minor collisions at speed camera sites, where cautious drivers brake a little too much and the person behind, busily checking their speedo to make sure they’re not going to fast, shunts them in that time.

HD Traffic, a feature which could potentially be SO useful. The question comes though, is it? Well that depends. On largely busy routes with lots of people who potentially have TomTom’s connected to the service then probably. But, with smaller or less popular roads where reporting is often very delayed and the quantity of drivers with TomTom’s is far less, probably not. HD Traffic of course works from aggregated data from lots of other TomTom users. This means it won’t save you if you’re the first to get stuck in a traffic jam. At rush-hour, when traffic is very changeable I’ve found the reporting to be a little inconsistent. Do you leave your route to potentially save 15 minutes, or do you stay on because the jam the TomTom shows seems to have cleared? In the end, this feature is probably best for larger delays.

Adding to this, I had a problem with HD Traffic when I first used the device. Planning a route and asking the TomTom to minimise delays it would always say that a subscription was required and it may have expired, even though the information page clearly showed I had a years worth of free access left. An email sent to TomTom support on Tuesday the 27th about the issue remains unanswered today, five days later. I did however realise that by using the TomTom HOME software to access the TomTom that the service did actually work – and stayed working when I disconnected the cable until I powered the unit off. The service has started working on its own now however, several days after first turning the TomTom on. Which didn’t help on my way home for the first couple of days.

Now, you’d have hoped the quality of the maps may be slightly better. But there’s one roundabout on the A6 that’s been there for at least two years and it still isn’t on the map. When TomTom release new maps every quarter don’t think for one minute that those updates are for the most up to date road information because clearly, they’re not. I will say that average speed cameras placed on the M1 and A421 have been marked which is great. That said, even IQ Routes doesn’t seem to factor in the speed restriction and extra traffic because of this – clearly a frustrating thing when you’re trying to sell a device based on its traffic avoiding route planning.

Summary

Perhaps I’ve been spoilt. With an iPhone which is so fast and fluid, but the touch screen on the GO 550 Live is the same touch screen used four years earlier on the One. It works, but it’s slow and cumbersome. Given very similar technical specs of the original One and the GO 550 Live the only thing that could really sell the GO 550 Live are its new features – for me the only important ones were Advanced Lane Guidance and HD Traffic. Unfortunately, one of them falls well below expectation and the other is satisfactory at best. Was it worth updating from my four year old One? Probably not. A faster processor, better touch screen and full lane guidance within towns could have made this a definite yes.

If you’re wondering that the difference between the GO 550, 750 and 950 is, it’s a simple one: the 750 has more internal memory and maps of Europe, the 950 has some more internal memory and maps of America. If you’re not planning on shipping your car to these places to drive around you’re better off saving £20 and £70 respectively and going for the 550. Though, you may just be better off finding an original TomTom One on ebay and using that. Other versions of the One all use a slower processor which will no doubt make your mapping experience more frustrating than it already is.

Now, IE8 is a good rendering browser, it’s not too bad at all. It doesn’t however support any of the ‘new’ features of the web. Experimental things such as HTML5 and CSS3 simply don’t work. Is that such a bad thing? Well, yes. Because every other major browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) supports a good chunk of them and there’s a lot of things that we as developers want to use, but can’t.

Take my website for example – if you’re here in any version of IE you’ll see a very plain and very square design. Any other browser and you’ll likely see rounded corners, text shadow and box shadow – three small parts of CSS3 that really improve the visual appearance of a simple layout like this one.

Now, suddenly, Microsoft have realised they’re in a browser war once more – fall behind too much and people will walk away. Why is that troubling for Microsoft? Well, if you can convince people to use a new browser how much harder is it to convince them to use a new operating system the next time they buy? With increasing proportions of the smart-phone markets both Apple and Google are making people more aware of their products – and training them in their ability to use them. Google launches its own OS soon, how many PC users will be swayed to a computer with Google OS or for the richer of you, OSX?

Back on topic – IE9, slated for release in 2011. Another IE – great I think, as a developer. Another browser to support, bug fix and nannify.

But

I did something silly the other day. I downloaded the IE9 platform preview (version 3) and stood back in awe. Not only does it perform well in the Acid 3 test (83/100 compared to 20/100 for IE8) which although doesn’t beat Chrome’s and Safari’s 100/100 perfect score – is a vast improvement, but it also does something magical (in the words of Steve Jobs). Take a look at the screen shots below. On the left we have Chrome, on the right we have the IE9 preview.

That’s right. Google Chrome was by far the fastest JavaScript running Browser for PC and on a par with Safari. Not anymore. The new IE9 sports a new feature – background compiling of JavaScript. This fancy feature punches Chrome in the mouth and sprints away fast. A staggering 22 times faster in the fish test and immeasurably (but at least 60 times) faster in the asteroid test leaves you blown away.

This is a feature I’m definitely looking forward to!

One thing I will note though, Chrome still loaded and rendered pages faster than this IE9 preview.

The procedure entry point JSValueMakeFromJSONString could not be located in the dynamic link library JavaScriptCore.dll

Thanks for that, Apple. I guess the Windows release wasn’t tested very well. Hopefully they’ll release an update to fix this issue soon. And knowing Steve, someone will lose their job and then be shot and run-over in a series of unfortunate events.

Update

To solve this issue do the following:

• Uninstall Safari
• Uninstall Apple Application Support
• Delete the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Safari
• Delete the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support
• Reinstall Safari

You *must* delete those folders because the installer is ‘clever’ and won’t overwrite existing files. The Uninstaller on the other hand is rubbish and leaves most of the files on your disk (hence an uninstall and reinstall without deleting the folders won’t work).

• 720p 30fps Video
• 5MP Camera
• Backside Illuminated Sensor
• Gyroscope
• Accelerometer
• Compass
• Proximity Sensor
• Quad-band HSDPA/HSUPA 7.2Mbps down, 4.8Mbps up
• Battery – 40% more talk time, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, 10 hours of video, 40 hours of music, 300 hours of standby
• microSIM
• 3.5 inch IPS display
• 960 x 640 pixel “Retina Display”
• 326 dpi
• 800:1 contrast ratio
• 24% thinner than the 3GS
• iOS 4 (new name for iPhone OS)
• Picture in Picture Video Conferencing (FaceTime)
• Black or White
• $199 16GB, $299 32GB
• On sale June 24th (July / August for some other parts of the world)

3GS and 3G users will be able to upgrade to iOS 4 on the 21st of June.

Organic

A long time ago I first realised I suffered from this problem (of being narked by marketers who promoted nonsensical terms) when they came about with the fantastically useless word on food products ‘organic’. Well, you don’t say? The only other type of substance that’s not organic that I’m aware of is metallic, and that’s definitely not edible in quantities large enough to see. Simply put, anything that’s organic is or was once alive and composed of organs or organelles. So essentially, everything you eat is organic. Why couldn’t they find some better term to use? Insecticide free? Not quite the same ring to it as may be, but nevertheless a lot more accurate.

Then there was this other fantastically annoying term which luckily, is now dying out.

Credit Crunch

My goodness. What does it even mean? Some kind of breakfast serial that counts towards an educational module? I don’t know. How about: ‘recession’? They used it? Good. Why bother making up sensationalistic nonsensical terms then!

Anyway, this brings me rather roughly to…

HD

Yes. HD. Do you know what it means? I don’t. ‘High-definition’ can mean almost anything, depending on where you are at the time. It can relate to sound, video and even physical things. Within the past six years or so, the term has been stolen for use in the video media industry. But even then, HD can mean any number of possible things. Essentially, a company or entity decides that the products they’re currently selling are ‘Standard Definition’. This then gives them the right to name anything successively ‘High Definition’. So, where TV is concerned SD is that of a DVD – 720 x 576 pixels. If that’s standard definition, what’s VHS? Anyway this means HD is anything above that, and there are a LOT of possible flavours: 720i, 720p, 1080i, 1080p. These being 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080 pixels respectively. Now, most HD TV broadcasts are merely 720i, the lowest possible version oh ‘High Definition’. Blu-ray on the other hand is the ‘full’ 1080p.

Then you come to buying a television. Now, most people know they ‘have to have’ a ‘High Definition’ television these days, but most are also unaware of the difference. This allows manufacturers to be unscrupulous; they’ve coined the term ‘HD Ready’ which makes you THINK you can use it to watch HD television. And you’d be right. But you may as well buy DVDs and not Blu-ray if the ‘HD Ready’ TV you buy is only 1280 x 720i. And I can tell you, there’s a very visible difference between 1080p and 720i (on a display that can handle 1080p of course).

Is all this choice good for consumers? No. It’s good for manufacturers who are trying to get the most money out of you for the least amount of cost and that’s called business. Business doesn’t like consumers, only shareholders.

Where was I? Ah yes. This HD stuff is all rubbish anyway – I was playing games on my PC back in 1998 that were a resolution of at least 1024 x 768 – High enough to be classed today as ‘High Definition’, and higher resolution than DVD which had only come out the previous year. What will the next generation of HD be called, ‘Ultra High Definition’? And after that? Super high? It’s like the 80s again. Super.

What resolution is a cinema film? HD? Why yes, yes it is! That’s why they’ve been getting ansi lately and trying to ‘invent’ (bring back) things like 3D. Admittedly, 3D these days is all about polarisation and not different colours so it looks much better. But where’s next for film? Clearly, we’re heading towards something like the holodeck straight out of Star Trek.

Buzzwords

So there you have it. A buzzword is a word said to make you think “Cool, I must have it!” and yet it is completely meaningless (or effectively useless because it doesn’t mean much). Contrast this with the term ‘Jargon’ which the news media have been banging on about for ages regarding Computers. A lot of this ‘Jargon’ however are actual words with proper meanings – Gigabyte, RAM etc. Would you describe any other profession as being full of jargon? It’s not that the meaning of the word is incorrect, just that they use it like it’s some sort of terrible thing. Every profession needs and has its own set of terminologies.

Rant over.

There’s a section for people looking to hire my skills and a little place I’m going to be putting code snippets – will this be useful to you?

So, let me know what you think of her.

I hope to be adding the portfolio within the next week – stay tuned!

Current US Prices:

Wi-fi
16GB $499
32GB $599
64GB $699

Wi-fi + 3G
16GB $629
32GB $729
64GB $829

The current USD to GBP exchange rate is 0.656943897, so by adding this and 17.5% VAT we get:

Wi-fi
16GB £385
32GB £462
64GB £539

Wi-fi + 3G
16GB £485
32GB £562
64GB £640

Now, we all know that nobody from America does direct translations of price, because we can be milked more can’t we? So, let’s round them up to nicer sales figures:

Wi-fi
16GB £399
32GB £479
64GB £549

Wi-fi + 3G
16GB £499
32GB £579
64GB £649

Expect these to be the lowest likely prices you’ll pay.