The largest media house in Denmark, JP/Politikens Hus A/S, had a challenge lined up for Spoiled Milk: Come up with a formula for distributing Denmark’s most popular travel book series – Turen Går Til – on the mobile platform. And we proudly present the result.

CHALLENGE

JP/Politikens Hus A/S – the largest media corporation in Denmark – sought to digitise their large amounts of rich information and thereby capitalise on new media platforms.

A relevant part of their enterprise is the travel books section named ‘Turen Går Til’ (translates to ‘the trip goes to’). Here, travellers should benefit from travel guides that could be downloaded and used “on the go” with add-on mobile-specific features.

As the editor-in-chief Søren Sattrup remarks: “Turen Går Til is the favourite travel books series for Danes. We should naturally also be on the mobile”.

On choosing to go with Apple’s model, Søren Sattrup adds: ”iPhone is a telephone with broad appeal. The Turen Går Til series has during the last three years undergone a significant development, and we believe the new Turen Går Til series suits the iPhone well”.

Spoiled Milk was engaged in the project for overall consultancy, concept, design and development.

 
SOLUTION

The Turen Går Til iPhone apps succeed in merging the famed distinct usability of the printed books with the characteristic feel of the iPhone devices.

Attractions can be filtered by area, purpose or even browsed on a map view. Quality images are seamlessly integrated into articles. Search can be conducted on the fully extracted A-Z list.

When viewing a specific article, you can mark it as a favourite, enter it via Google Maps, view related YouTube videos, directly dial the facility or jump on to the transportation map.

In this first round, 6 books have been made available for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Paris and Rome. All apps are in Danish, except for Copenhagen, which is launched in English.

As an introductory offer, Copenhagen can be downloaded for free.

• View all six apps in App Store
• Head directly to the Copenhagen app for a free download
• Visit the related microsite mobilguidebog.dk
• Read some of the Danish press: “Drop guidebogen“

The in-house developed content management beauty does it again: Casein CMS proves her multifaceted worth with the launch of two mirrored Flash websites for Schweitzer Project and Interstore.

Schweitzer Project produces furniture and installs shops with tailored and rollout solutions. Interstore offers consultancy, design and planning – also in relation to the establishment of shops. The two companies are closely linked and so are their completely new web profiles.

All concept and design was completed by the recognised design agency Feurer Network, which focuses on business corporate aesthetics and provides strong cross-media solutions.

Spoiled Milk steered the entire development and implementation phase, including the consultancy on functionality issues. The front-end is based on AS3 and the mirrored back-end (supporting both Schweitzer and Interstore) rests on our in-house darling, Casein CMS.

• Schweitzer Project
• Interstore

It’s the talk of the town; Apple brought out their latest touch gadget, the iPad. The anticipation of the announcement last week has been immense, as it always is with new Apple products. The tablet talk has filled most channels that I take part in. Blogs and Twitter streams have been swarming with the expected speculations in details and horribly blurry mobile photos of possible designs.

Now it’s here and it’s already gotten a lot of… well… feedback. Generally a lot of people are at the same time excited about the iPad, but on the other hand also have a lot of reservations and arguments for why they shouldn’t have put it out or what features it’s missing. I remember this was the similar situation when the iPhone first came out. The feedback then was mainly that it seemed like a big and clumsy smartphone, but has since pioneered the new way for smartphones and how we perceive the way we use the mobile phone – especially with the App Store, which no matter how you look at it, is a stroke of genius which not even Apple were aware of.

The way I see it, the iPad is not for everyone. If you, like me, already own a laptop and an iPhone, you will most likely not go out and buy an iPad. But if you on the other hand have neither, the iPad could quite possibly be the ideal home Internet hub. With access to the same applications that you get on the iPhone, along with iPad-revised native apps such as Mail, Calendar etc. you’re getting a nice gadget that you sit, feet on the table, for an hour or two, writing emails to friends or flip through the latest photos from your travel. For those people whose life doesn’t regularly involve interaction with computers or advanced phones.

I’m looking forward to when it hits the shelves and how it will affect the applications that will be built from now on. There’s definitely more opportunities, rather than restraints.

Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done. That’s where checklists can make your life a whole lot easier. With lists of points covering multiple areas from content to usability, from accessibility to standards, you’re a lot less likely to overlook important parts of a site.

You can create checklists for very different points. For example they can be focused on making the relationship with your clients better. You can use the checklist to gather information from your clients or prospects at the beginning of each project, so that everyone is on the same page.

Also, you can make checklist just for yourself. The list should help you to design your website. There are probably many items that could be added on the checklist and it’s important that you pick the ones most significant to you.

You can create sections with all your check points included. Here an example:

Planning
- Briefing
- Develop a business plan
- Budget indication
- Initial timetable
- Choose a good domain name
- Choose high quality web hosting

Design/Layout
- Basic website Elements like navigation, content/body and footer
- Logo and Branding
- Attractive Design
- Avoid information overload
- Effective colour scheme
- Develop focal points
- Readable font size
- Use of space

Usability/Accessibility
- Usable, easily accessible, and consistently placed navigation
- Check for dead, broken links
- Test the website on real users
- Compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Content
- Unique content, presented in an exciting, straightforward manner
- Regularly update content
- Break content up with headings, captions, images, videos

Website Optimization / Standards
- Standard compliance / cross-browser compatibility
- Optimize page size (images, content, video, audio)
- Clean code for updating / multiple programmers

“If only our translation quotes were produced automatically”, the translation agency fintrans thought. Today, with the help of Spoiled Milk, they are.

fintrans is a different kind of translation agency. Based on
 the principle of “thinking globally, acting locally”, the
 organisation has established itself as a “lean and mean“ agency that can count on the support of inumerable specialised translation professionals in their respective fields and located around the world. As they say
 themselves, there is hardly any language combination, for which
 fintrans could not offer a translation.

The agency has undergone steady growth throughout the last
 decade, and recently, fintrans sought to optimise its flow
 of producing real time quotes and receiving orders. The channel for this
 change: Their website.

Spoiled Milk was pulled in to do what we love doing: Implement solutions in order to make business processes smoother. We built the
 new fintrans website around a web application that allows
 users to submit their own document and instantly receive a quote
 based on the size of the document and the deadline.

In the back-end, users can retrieve an overview of all their
 orders, choose to approve or disapprove translations, set a rating
  and download finished translations. Similarly, fintrans’ agents can have a full overview of orders and assign tasks
 to specific translators.

Visit Fintrans to have a look for yourself.

Wildcards in Ruby’s regular expression (reg-ex) are by default greedy, meaning they will capture as much of the string as possible.

Let’s say you have to parse some strings which will be either “Sweet entertainment!” or “Great entertainment!”. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you want to grab the first word of these strings (”Sweet” or “Great”) using a regular expression with wildcards.

If you wrote the regular expression like this /^.*t/ it would capture “Sweet entertainment” because it’s greedy by default, so everything up to the very last “t” will be captured, hence, “entertainment” is included too.

Luckily, there’s a simple way to make your wildcards non-greedy: Just append a question-mark to it like this: /^.*?t/. Now, the wildcard is non-greedy and you get the wanted outcome “Sweet” or “Great” without the “entertainment” part.

The highlighted characters represent the matching part of the string:

/^.*t/ = “Sweet entertainment!”
/^.*?t/ = “Sweet entertainment!”
/^.*t/ = “Great entertainment!”
/^.*?t/ = “Great entertainment!”

So there you go. Just append a question mark to the wildcard to make it non-greedy. This rule also applies to the plus character, which by default is greedy too, but can be turned non-greedy by appending a question mark the same way: /^.+?t/.

Predictions say more about the presence than about the future.

However, they may serve as inspirational food for thought to act (or counter-act). I here bring you a short selection of the more interesting ones. Feel free to add comments or links, if you consider yourself more clairvoyant than these authors.

• Brian Solis provides a “Social Network Advertising and Marketing Outlook for 2010“
• Christopher S. Penn believes 2010 is the year that calls to “Play To Your Strength“
• Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch makes guesses for “Top Ten Digital M&A Deals For 2010” and lists “Top Technologies That Will Rock 2010“
• Frederic Lardinois of ReadWriteWeb questions: “Will 2010 Be the Year of the Smartphone?“
• Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, advocates that we have reached “The year of the products + a new way of working“
• John Baldoni shifts the table and asks “How Will You Make a Difference in 2010?“
• Mike O’Toole from MarketingProfs assesses “2010 in Social Media“
• Paloma Vazquez of PSFK collects “Lessons Learned from Google: What to Expect in 2010“
• Robert Scoble indicates “Hot Startups to Watch in 2010” + Pt. 2
• Springwise brings to us “Top 10 business ideas for 2010“
• Taly Weiss has 34 slides on “Trend Predictions in 140 characters“
• Tammy Erickson from Harvard Business Review believes 2010 brings “Five Changes in the Way We Work“

A highly popular travel book series meets a revolutionary ecosystem. This is the story of how Phaidon requested Spoiled Milk to bring their Wallpaper* City Guides to the iPhone platform.

CHALLENGE

Phaidon Press is the world’s leading publisher of books on the visual arts, with offices and distributors worldwide, and a history dating back to 1923. Last year, the publishing house was looking for ways to push their Wallpaper* City Guides into new digital formats and had fallen for the outstanding usability of the iPhone.

In Phaidon’s own words, “Wallpaper* City Guides present a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a location has to offer the design conscious traveller. Here is a precise, informative, insider’s checklist of all you need to know about the world’s most intoxicating cities.”

The iPhone and iTunes platform is a revolutionary ecosystem that not only brings an intuitive new interface to the mobile industry, but also opens Apple’s tested iTunes model and fan base to a whole new market. As the community grows, so does the users’ expectations that their favourite services will be available for the iPhone.

The match between the audience of the Wallpaper* City Guides and the users of iPhones and iPod Touches was striking and the decision to bring the unique content of Wallpaper* City Guides content to the mobile format appeared mandatory.

Phaidon decided to start out by producing 10 iPhone applications for the best-selling books: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Paris, Rome and Tokyo. With proven skills in merging strategy, technology and aesthetics, Spoiled Milk was chosen as the digital partner for the project.

 
SOLUTION

The look, logic and structure of the Wallpaper* City Guide iPhone apps largely follow those of the printed books. Clean design, simplicity and consistency.

In the section ‘the city at a glance’, a horizontally gliding image features a number of handpicked locations around the city. The different neighbourhoods of each city are characterised by varying colours and each area contains a list of places to visit. What you are able to spot in the city’s skyline is likely to be included in ‘landmarks’ with more information about the site.

You are able to filter by hotels, cafés, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, architecture, shopping, sports and out-of-town activities. If you only have a limited amount of time to spend in the given city, ‘24 hours’ tips you on how to spend your time, or you can choose to receive tips from an insider – e.g. Berlin’s gallerist Lisa Bosse.

The GPS comes into play when choosing ‘Directions’ on the bottom of each item page, which takes you directly to a Google Maps visualisation of the route from your current location to the requested destination.

• Continue to all 10 Wallpaper* City Guide iPhone apps in iTunes
• Hurry up getting Berlin while it’s free
• Read more at Phaidon’s showcase

A few days ago I had to implement some check boxes for a back-end system and I realised just how badly check boxes are labeled online. Most of the time, it’s actually really difficult to predict what impact it will have to leave the check box ticked or unticked.

In my case, the check box represented the ability to hide a page from all navigation on the site so it would effectively be a “hidden page” (yet remain accessible, so you for example could send people to this special page from an ad campaign without making it an integrated part of the entire website).

So in the page’s settings area, there was a check box which you could use to either hide or display that page in the site’s navigation. If the check box was ticked the page should be hidden from all navigation.

Below is the 4 iterations I went through in an effort to clarify what outcome you as a user would expect when leaving the check box either ticked or unticked.

1. Absolute nonsense

Now, by default the label name was mapped to the name used in the database, in this case “Menu hide”. Not very meaningful, at all. In fact, this was complete nonsense and the check box was also on a new line which seemed a bit strange. As a user, you had no idea what the check box would do unless you yourself coded the system. Rubbish!

2. Better, but far from good

I started by changing the label to something more meaningful – “Hide this page from the navigation”. Better, but still not crystal clear what would actually happen when the check box was ticked. Also, the check box seemed a bit lonely, being on a new line all by itself. The label was also difficult to scan because it was quite lengthy, which was a problem since there were 5 other fields (with their own labels) on this page, so getting a quick overview of your different options would be difficult without brief labels.

3. Close, but no cigar

So I had to make the label shorter. Then it hit me: why not put a longer description after the check box and then shorten the main label above? I gave it a quick stab, putting “Don’t show this page in the navigation” next to the check box in a slightly smaller font, indicating that this was a more detailed, secondary description. I also shortened the main label to “Hide this page” to make it more scannable. This definitely had potential since the labels that were now scannable yet also had an in-depth description of the outcome you should expect when ticking this check box.

4. Great

Still, the labels were still a bit unclear. There could still be confusion as to whether or not the ticked-state would hide the page or display it. Also, the two labels didn’t seem to interact, so there was obviously room for improvement in the wording.

After a few short iterations and a quick chat with Casper, I ended up with the final version, where the main label asked “Hide page?”, and the secondary label answering “Yes, hide this page from all navigation”.

The previous “Hide this page” label was actually a question, yet it didn’t end with a question mark which was confusing (and grammatically incorrect). Also, the “this” in “Hide this page” was a bit redundant, so I removed it to make the main label even more scannable. After these two changes, I ended up with a really concise question as the main label: “Hide page?”

With this change in place, I suddenly had an obvious way to make the two labels interact – by answering the question! To make things super clear, I answered the question with an unambiguous “Yes, …”. Now it would be really obvious that when the check box was ticked, the page would be hidden because it was now a question with a very clear reply: “Hide page? Yes.”

There was still one last problem, though – the secondary label was written in negative-form: “Don’t show this page in the navigation”. This didn’t make sense with “Yes” in front of it, but also – and this was more critical – the label told you what you didn’t do.

When you have a yes/no question you don’t want the label to be written in negative form, since people will then have to juggle around with the fact that yes means no, and no means yes. Or wait.. does it? By using a direct word like “hide” instead of “don’t show”, I got rid of any confusion and the final version of the secondary label would read: “Yes, hide this page from all navigation”.

Here’s the final result: “Hide page? Yes, hide this page from all navigation.”

Nice and clear. (It definitely beats “Menu hide”.)

As the snow settles outside at least one of our two offices, the time has come for us here at Spoiled Milk to close down for the year and celebrate yet another round of successful projects, interesting new clients and additions to our list of services. We have some really exciting announcements lined up for launch early next year and can’t wait to reveal them here.

Our offices are closing down from today and we’re back January 4th 2010 with renewed energy. We will still be keeping an eye on our mail in case of emergencies.

A merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Spoiled Milk team!