It was revealed that my 24 inch machine had a faulty hard drive and needed replacing at the price of £180. I asked if it was an easy job to do manually but the genius advised against it. After seeing my face drop he decided to speak to his manager and returned to say that Apple would put up the costs of the repair. My heart dropped and I was overcome with relief, “BUT” he said “we are can offer a replacement machine – but it has to be the 27 inch model. Is that ok?”

I think I must have been staring at him for about 10 seconds before I spoke. Danielle says she could see a tear in my eye.  I am married and have a daughter, I have not cried in over 20 years and certainly not in my adult life – but this came real close.

Apple have always had a reputation for good customer service but this is insane. they have exceeded my expectations more than I could have imagined and have left me with such a positive experience with the brand and company.

This is how it should be done, the customers satisfaction and end experience should always come first. Not every company can afford to give out a £1,399 machine but there are other steps that can be taken to ensure customer satisfaction. I’m sure I well be spending a lot more money and business with Apple in the coming years.

• Having to upgrade continually and manage client upgrades
• A lot of bloat and unused features
• A lack of understanding
• Thinking that PHP is abit messy

I recently went on a ASP.NET course through Learning Tree and i was very inspired with the framework used and how the code is separated from the presentational views. I wasn’t impressed with working in an IDE though and running a Mac at home never really gave me much opportunity as a hobbyist to explore ASP.NET much further.

Ruby Ruby Ruby

The programming language Ruby has been around many years but has recently been ignited by Rails (also written in Ruby) which has made it possible to simplify the creation of web applications.

The brains behind 37 signals came up with the framework Rails as they where developing Basecamp. I was really inspired after reading they’re book, Getting Real and they’re vision on the processes and development of web applications, and this really shows through in Rails. I strongly recommend you give it a read – it may change the way you work in future.

Since then I have installed Rails on my Mac, (Ruby should already be installed on Snow Leopard) and followed a few tutorials. So far I am very impressed with how far you can go with very little code, very much like jQuery’s write less do more mantra.

If you have been thinking of starting out with Rails but haven’t yet made the leap then I strongly recommend you do. There are many sites and screen casts out there to help you get started. I am still progressing in learning the framework and the language but I already have plans to build a web app to address a few of my problems and to ease my workflow. I am planning on documenting my progress as I get on, both with Rails and my proposed web app.

A few starting points

• Rails for Zombies
• Learning Rails (sampler chapters)
• Lynda.com training
  

Expand your skills

Recently, I wanted to expand my skill set and purchased the excellent book: JQuery: Novice to Ninja. I would have to recommend this book to any jQuery newbie. The book is well written and entertaining but assumes that you are fluent with CSS and HTML.

For layouts

Upon reading the first few chapters, I instantly got a strong understanding and how I could apply jQuery to my own work. For example, before i used jQuery on this site I had to create 2 queries to the blogroll. The first query would display the first blog, the main/ latest blog item, and the other query which was offset by 1, to display the rest of the blog. I’m not a WordPress expert and I’m sure someone could have pointed me to a better solution at the time – but the layout was very hacky and I was never really happy with this. It also created problems with WordPress’ pagination as I was getting errors.

My jQuery solution to fix this was to:

• First remove the 2 queries to the blogroll and just have 1.
• Then target the first list element in my blogroll using .first as my jQuery selector
• Add a CSS class (addClass) to the selected list element
• Then style the class to make it display as a featured blog item in my blog.

The results

It is important to make sure the layout still degrades well if the user has JavaScript turned off, and as I am just adding a class to my list item the layout would just remove the featured blog item and display it as a regular block.

There are many more uses of jQuery rather than just the nifty animated effects that are common place on the web and until CSS3 is more widely adopted, I will continue to use jQuery to help with fixes and bugs.

In most professions, you are either a creative; such as an artist, writer or musician or a skilled person; such as a doctor, accountant or even a builder. But as a web designer, I get the luxury to exercise both parts of my brain in my day to day job, the creative right hemisphere, used for designing and flair and the logical left hemisphere, used for coding and problem solving. But which bit do you enjoy most?

Freelancers usually see coding as an easier way of making money. Clients usually don’t have an opinion in code but would have strong opinions in the design, causing the designer to go through several iterations.

If you work in an environment dominated by developers however, they are less likely to have an opinion on design but require clean semantic code.

Occasionally I like nothing better than to stick my headphones in and turn off Outlook and get stuck straight into problem solving, logical coding and finding new bits of JavaScript and playing with new technologies such as CCS3 and HTML5. But I like the balance in my job and the option to flex my creativity and design skills is refreshing.

Firstly one of my biggest surprises was the latest update to iTunes. Prior to this release, me and Danielle encountered bugs in our iPhones where the phones would not sync up properly. While Danielle’s phone was not syncing to her Windows 7 laptop at all, mine just had a problem with syncing to iPhoto on my Mac. I did some research on this and it appears the problem is caused when people start emailing you pictures and you save them into your camera roll. Anyway, these problems are now solved and I love iTunes once again!

Another great addition is the ability to email photos at 4 different presets. Previously, when you emailed a photo, your phone would automatically squeeze and reduce your photo size before sending it to your email recipient. Now you get to choose to email the photo as either “small”,” medium”, “large” and most importantly “original size”. I get alot of photos sent to me from other iPhones and as a web/ graphic designer I would prefer the photos to be as large as possible as every pixel detail is vital, especially when taken from a 3 mega pixel camera.

The much welcomed folders works brilliantly. Simply drag an icon on top of another  to create a folder. I instantly dragged all my crap apps and created a folder called misc. All of my music related stuff such as Last.fm, iPod and XFM app into a new folder called “Music” and placed this in the dock. Simple. Beautiful. Elegant.

Multitasking, although a much criticised method is genius. I have used smartphones in the past such as the Palm Pre, Symbian running on Nokia’s and even Android, and the most notable thing about having full multitasking is that you notice significant performance issues when more than two apps are open at the same time. Not so with iOS 4. Not to mention strain on battery life too. Not all apps support multitasking but it’s just a matter of time before all the developers update their apps. Here is a small list that have got it right so far:

• Twitter
• WordPress
• Facebook
• Flight Control

Now we just need Last.fm and Skype to get into gear too and I’ll have no complaints. Despite a few quirks with fast app switching, I definitely prefer this method of multitasking than a full multitasking option. Smartphones and mobile batteries are just not cut out to handle this yet.

Other notable improvements include quicker shutter speed on the camera. A digital zoom is also included using an on-screen slider bar. Strange decision not to use pinch to zoom though.

Unified inbox is also great for emails. This works just as good as I expected but was pleasantly surprised to see my emails group in conversations like Gmail’s.

There has also been a slight interface change in the iPod application. When going into an album you are now presented with the album artwork and running times of the album and individual songs. Nothing great but good inclusion.

There is also a new accessibility option to inverse your blacks to whites and vice versa in; settings > general > accessibility. This can make photos look like negatives but the hard of sight will probably appreciate this.

These are just a few of the things I have noticed and I am genuinely impressed with this update. Should see me through to the next 6 months when my contract is up. If you find any extra functions that I haven’t covered please leave a comment.

The reason? Well, Apple obviously thinks that modern day articles are difficult to read with so much screen noise littered around the page such as ads, sidebars, icons, animations (we all know what Apple thinks of Flash) that they have thought to improve legibility by including this feature.

So what do I think of this feature? I personally think it’s great and use it now regularly, but with a slight bit of guilt. It seems that Apple do not trust web designers to give Safari users the experience they should be getting from the web and this is worrying because Apple usually get these things spot on and we should all take note from Mr Job’s ethos and maybe start thinking of cleaner, simpler designs.
But what does this mean for the web designer?

• It means readers can now ignore your ads with a click of a button losing a potential revenue stream
• It means readers can get a better experience from your website
• It also means you might like to re-think your design

I have never been a fan of modern day blogs and can sometimes see designers getting carried away with including too much content, just because they can. Do you really need that tag cloud? Or how about the Flickr feed showing pictures of your pet dog?

If you are worried about the reader button maybe you should simplify your design slightly and stop people like me clicking that little blue button.

There are a range if things that designers need to consider such as:

• Who are your target audience?
• Are you trying to showcase your portfolio to attract/ assist you to land that perfect job
• Do I want need a blog?
  If so this needs to be updated regularly or can become stagnated and outdated rather quickly but will also give prospective employers/ clients a good idea of your knowledge, interests and ideas
• Keeping it simple
  It is probably the designers most important job to keep content legible and to get the message across clearly. Strip out anything that does not need to be in there as it will just add to clutter and screen noise.

These are a few things that have gone into willwebdesigner.com and I hope you enjoy the end product.