After a brief intro the evening kicked off with Patrick Hamann giving us a fairly pain free (tech ‘lite’) introduction to the Touch framework and giving us his opinions on where he thought it fitted within the plethora of development tools available.

Firstly giving us a bit of a low down into the development stack and providing us with some incites into when using the Touch framework might be a consideration, he went on to provide some useful examples of apps that have successfully utilised the framework and touched upon the useful templating and leveraging of SASS that is inherent in the framework.

Slides for Patrick’s talk can be viewed here:

Following Patrick, Matt Spence from the University of Kent providing us with an interesting view of how their dev team were pushed to consider developing ‘something’ mobile for the university. Whilst he admitted this wasn’t the best approach to starting a project he went on to demonstrate how, with little development time available, his team were able to produce some rather useful student tools such as building locator (using maps), desktop availability (how many desktops are available in the various public spaces) and timetabling accessed via a student login. Matt demonstrated how the readily available university data can be made available as a useful mobile service for their students and how the rapid application development nature of Sencha Touch enabled them to get their mobile ‘something’ out to a testable market within a 4 week period. We look forward to seeing the results of the next 4 week sprint on the project.

Slides for Matt’s talk can be viewed here:

Rob Squires completed the trio of talks with a discussion primarily focussed on building cross-platform mobile apps using Sencha Touch 2.0 but also giving us a more technical ‘under the hood’ view of the framework. Rob showed us a re-usable technique he had developed utilising the MVC nature of the framework to tackle various challenges that building cross-platform apps can throw such as differences in UI/UX that mobile users come to expect with their particular flavour of devise and OS.

Slides for Rob’s talk can be viewed here:

We are pleased to announce that Rob has finally made it to the UV^d fold, unharmed from Christmas over-indulgence and raring to get cracking on several of our more pressing projects. Rob has come from IBM after successfully navigating their graduate programme and is fully versed in everything LAMP. Just for the record, he is the first of the UV^d crew to choose Ubuntu as his operating system of choice for his desktop (choice is good right?).

Rob has worked his way into the UV^d circle of trust this week and has earned himself a) Office keys and b) Black n’ Red hardback notebook. He almost shed tear at receiving the latter.

Gareth has hit the big time and we are just about hanging on by the coat tails. We are proud to announce he has made an appearance in Design Week (28^th October 2010) as one of their ‘Rising Stars’ within Interaction. You can read a full page all about our resident Lead Developer on page 22 (for anyone with a copy) or online if you are a subscriber.

Well done Gareth.

You can follow us on twitter http://www.twitter.com/uv_d and Gareth on http://www.twitter.com/gaffafoote

Due to our exceedingly long url and potential RSI of the fingers we thought we’d look into a secondary shorter url for UV^d. Naturally we wanted to get uvd.net or uvd.com but being a three letter top level domain it wasn’t going to come cheap.

Companies who in the past have gone through random combinations of letters and bulk bought the equivalent domain names whilst they were a bargain price are essentially in a process of domain name prospecting.

UPDATE: Kirsten has just informed me that this process is actually called Cybersquatting.

Below is the transcript from conversation between Patrick Hamann (PH) and an Anonymous Domain Name Prospector (ADNP):

ADNP:
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for contacting us about uvd.net.
The current asking price for uvd.net is $12888 USD.
As you may already be aware, the demand for and prices of domain names does vary. We periodically have discount promotions available on some of our names, feel free to email or call if you would like to inquire about possible discounts on this domain.

PH:
I'll give you a fiver

ADNP:
Hi Patrick,
What is a fiver?

- And this is where it all gets a bit Terry Tibbs, “Talk to me” -

PH:
Alright, you drive a hard bargain. I'll give you a tenner but thats my final offer.

ADNP:
How many zeros in a 'tenner'?

PH:
One

ADNP:
Let me know when you can add 5 more to that

PH:
How about this 10.00000 ?!

We’re so close; I can smell it! Our new site is careering dangerously towards completion. One element of the homepage is a frivolous physics environment which I was kindly allowed the time to make in Flash using the Box2DFlash physics engine.

The engine has been ported from Eric Catto’s powerful C++ physics engine (Box2D). It took a little time to adjust to some of the coding conventions that have also found their way from the C++ version but after that initial steep learning curve the engine is fantastic to work with.

I’ve released this today before the site launch so that people can play with it and inevitably find the bugs which I’ve lovingly engineered into it. Feel free to put it through its paces!

edit: This is now on our homepage

After 8 years hunkered down in the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, in what can only be described as ‘cosy’ surroundings we have moved to a bigger, brighter, fresher and more creative space! We haven’t moved far (physically) but things are far from the same in our nice new airy, windowed office. We even have a sofa. It’s been a long time coming but it was worth the wait – patience as they say is a virtue.

Our snail paced re-brand has evolved into a rather brisk ramble (we are nearly out of breath) and as you can see we have settled on a new logo. Actually we have almost completed the web layouts but that’s another story (why say it in one post when you can say it in two!).

The basic premise behind the logo / re-brand was that the original Ultraviolet Design brand no longer represented the type of work we do and how we wish to be seen to the wider audience; with the only recognisable industry word in our name emphasising ‘design’ we felt that our other attributes were being unfairly over-powered. For instance, whilst we do web design, the design element is only one function we have to perform in an overall process of many. To put it another way, to emphasise only one skill of the many skills we have seems a little short sighted!

As such, we have re-branded ourselves UV^d and the website will follow shortly. No, it really will! Watch this space.

It is almost comical how long we have had a holding page where our website used to be, a true laugh or cry moment. In my wisdom I decided that taking it down would incentivise us to design and develop our new site in a prompt fashion………incorrect. Despite this there has been a recent spark of activity in this drawn out redesign – the colour scheme. Probably not the largest chunk of work in the entire process, i grant you, but still essential.

During our meetings quite some time ago we discussed where our main skills lie and what kind of work we would like to procure in the future. We performed some pseudo-branding exercises to try to discover the desired words/images/emotions we wished to evoke and associate with Ultraviolet (Uv^d). Although this was not guided by a branding professional I believe it was beneficial and has helped us at this stage to gauge what is and isn’t appropriate for the site aesthetically.

Due to our strong background in technical areas of digital media production and the associations with the name Ultraviolet we decided to keep in mind a theme of science when creating a logo, site visuals and colour schemes. I believe that discounting the purple shade, the cool greys and blue are evocative of this. Another reason for deciding on this schema is that I believe effective use of shades of grey/black are (if used correctly) very effective in web design.

Either way I think it’s winning. Kudos to Patrick our designer. Next we have the layouts to look forward to…………