You see quite a few of these types of article dispelling the mobile app and suggesting that HTML5 will conquer all.

Well, I think HTML5 just might do it (HTML5 obviously being a catch-all term, but you get the idea).

The capabilities of phones to handle complex JavaScript, advanced CSS and yes, HTML5 really does make you question why you would build an app in many cases. There are, of course, many situations where apps are the right way to go, but for many brands trying to handle multiple delivery platforms and large amounts of content, apps can be cumbersome, expensive and in the end not reach the audience.

Apps work when you're trying to deliver a product as an app - DrawSomething, Angry Birds, Twitter, Flipboard - but when you're marketing a company or range of things it's going to be more difficult in an app. 

People often say "oh but an app has a greater audience because it is in an app store", but this is only really true if you spend 10's of thousands of pounds pushing media towards it, whereas if you are John Lewis or Sainsbury's people are much more likely to just Google you, at which point you just need yourself a mobile-optimised website - either through some (buzzword-alert) responsive design solution or something more bespoke based on the mobile traffic the brand gets.

Android really isn't helping of course - the fragmentation of the handset base and platform is making it much harder to create apps quickly/easily/cheaply.

Anyway, we'll see, but it's definitely worth asking the question "wouldn't this be better as a mobile-optimised web experience?" each time someone says "we've got a great idea for an app to market brand X".

Your two possible answers, dear client are:

a) strict like Miss Whiplash
b) however I want it, baby

I have been working in software development and web development for government and agencies for the past 15 years and I've seen both sides of the coin.

Software development houses and government bodies tend to work to a strict process with timelines and milestones tightly managed and sign-off dates strictly adhered to.  As a client of these chaps you really don't want to miss a deadline or sign-off otherwise you'll find your project live date shifting further and further off into the distance. Each hour slipped on a milestone is an hour added to the live date. 
Even worse, you really don't want to change your mind half way through or they will change request your arse into next week and charge you handsomely for it.

On the other hand agencies (all the ones I've worked for, with, or heard about) give it to you, client, in any way you want it (baby). Agencies have processes and gantt charts and project managers, but it's a different mindset altogether. 
So, client, feel free to decide that your entire branding is changing just before your project goes live, revel in the joy of three rounds of amends when you were only allowed one and say cheers to the fact your agency will stay up to 3am to tweak the nipple of SEO ... your project will still be delivered.

But, and there is a biblical scale but in here, client, there's one thing you need to understand - the flexibility and suppleness of a Russian gymnast that agencies provide you with comes with a risk - a risk that you'll end up out of the medals and crying to your manager because you messed up your triple backflip.
Every time a change is made after code has gone into testing, every extra deployment that needs to be made, every extra round of design amends that squashes development or testing time increases the chance that something will break or not be as you expected when you open your new home page on Monday morning.

There's lots of things we as agencies can and do do to mitigate these risks, but client, understand, there is a risk - embrace it, get to know it, love it even ... but don't forget it.

Dear Sirs

So, already this 2010/2011 winter is breaking records - it's looking like being the coldest December for 100 years, on top of this we're not yet even a third of the way into winter yet. My meteorological background would also force me to pipe up that we're not even at the coldest part of the winter yet – that generally being in late January.

As I write this Heathrow and Gatwick airports have been pretty much shut down for three days, along with many other UK airports - and people are now starting to get a little bit cross.

Listening to the radio reports we're hearing people saying things like "how come Sweden can cope with snow and ice like this, but we can't", "it's a national embarrassment", "this is all because of the European Union and our immigration policy" (ok, that last one was made up, but I bet a Daily Mail reader has said that somewhere in the past few days).

What these people are forgetting is that this level of cold and snow is not normal for the UK, certainly not for many decades or centuries even would we expect to regularly see winters this harsh, and in those days the concept of an international airport hub hadn't really been floated, even by the most out-of-the-box thinkers.

Of course, we could tool-up to cope with rare events such as this and buy ourselves the worlds largest gritters and underfloor heating for runways (or however Sweden keeps it's runways clear), but it will cost … a lot, and this cost will end up on our air fares, and then we'll complain and moan and bitch about our supposed right to get a tan and an STD on a Spanish island being curtailed by stealth taxes etc etc.

Funnily enough (well, nerdily enough) it's exactly the same with a website – we all blithely think "well, a couple of servers should do it, it usually does, and besides I don't want to spend much", and then guess what, a blizzard of people put the whole thing under a massive strain and sometimes ground all traffic.

There have been many projects that I’ve worked on that I’ve loved, and each of them for different reasons.

Going back 11 years there was the millennium bug (remember that?!) project at the Met. Office – this was a tediously technical job checking and testing code, but it was the first time I was really responsible for something and I enjoyed the challenge … I even won an engraved tankard for “excellent work” or something silly like that.

There have been plenty of small projects too which have excited me by being cool in someway, or high pressured with tight deadlines – the high pressured stuff I particularly like in a kind of masochistic way.

Then there are the biblical scale projects that push everyone to the edge – Sprite Yard is the best of these so far – working with Sprite in the U.S. trying to deliver something that was oversold with a team that was inexperienced into a company that seems to specialise in IT more than fizzy pop. The end result – over four months of 14-16 hour days and weekends, but with a team that was so up for it they all pitched in without anyone asking.

Today we’ve just delivered “myFry” – an iPhone app of Stephen Fry’s latest autobiography The Fry Chronicles, and it’s been a perfect storm of a project.

For starters there’s that favourite ingredient of mine, time pressure – Penguin arrived on our doorstep with the idea about five weeks before we had to submit it to Apple. Then there’s the coolness – let’s face it, it’s Stephen Fry we’re talking about here! On top of this it’s great idea for an app – cutting up the book into chunks, analysing the content, then visualising this in a beautiful way to allow the user to read it in any which way they like. Into the mix we also throw two excellent developers who were relatively new to the iPhone platform, but were eager to crack it.

That’s a near-perfect storm.

What made it a perfect storm of a project is this: it was an example of all disciplines working together collaboratively with one clear goal – make it amazing, but make it amazing together.

Creative (@floheiss, @smirkey & @babybaigues) worked with data visualisation expert @stefpos to make a beautiful interface, whilst @smorgasbord nailed the user experience, all to be implemented frantically yet expertly by @jowie and @jamesodmitchell (with a little help from @perrynow), the whole thing driven along by @lizawostmann, Robin, @_seth and the client @jeremyet and the main man @stephenfry.

I shall be talking about this project for many years to come – maybe even tell my grandchildren one day, who knows.

<additional>
@smorgasbord has written a couple of great posts about the IA work on myFry and @floheiss has mused on the subject too.

Just had two weeks off work, I’m feeling good, and I don’t have a massive inbox full of unread emails.

How can this be?! Well, as per usual I checked into my emails each day.

Let’s face it, when we’re not at our computers we’re checking our emails every two minutes on our phones (not because we have new emails but just so we can show off whichever new device we’ve invested in) so to suddenly stop would seem bizarre, and would probably lead me to some kind of post-email stress disorder, or a tear in the space-time continuum – one or the other, it’s hard to predict.

Now, some might say that by reading my emails I’ve not had a proper break, the HR Director will probably have a word with me, and others may say I’m just being keen, but I say it’s just easier this way, and I like it.

Note: as I don’t want to lower the tone of this blog I can’t tell you what my wife thinks about my email habits, but suffice to say she’s learning to live with it.

I had a great holiday, thanks for asking, and I’m now going to have snooze on the 06:41 train from Welshpool (as I don’t seem to have any emails to sort out).

For years the idea that a techie might be in any way creative was seen as ludicrous – how could these incommunicative, sweaty, badly dressed misfits ever think outside the box, reach the blue sky, or get anything in a row except 1’s and 0’s?

It may have been ok to think this of techies a while ago, but only in the same way as not so long ago it was ok to think that computers would only ever be used commercially. 

In the same way that the house-sized, punch-card reading, inaccessible, lumbering mainframe computer of the 70’s and 80’s was replaced by something the size of a shoebox that handles hundreds of applications and processes, so the techie of old changed, and these changes are connected.

The drivers for this change were microchip size decreasing whilst their power increased, coupled with the growth of electronic communications leading to the internet. This combination allowed the computer to become personal, and in so doing enabled the population to become computer literate.

With everyone having a computer and an internet connection the advertisers jumped on the medium, so we then got digital marketing – and this is where we see the rise of the Creative Technologist.

Suddenly there was a need for a techie that watched adverts, understood them, had brand affiliations, had a passion for brands and a passion for media, and could talk to clients and teams about these new digital technologies that were and still are emerging.

The old misfit techie nerd was obsolete.

In the world of a digital marketing agency, Creative Technologists:

•         are a new breed of techie, not part of the old stereotype

•         are not from software houses

•         understand the creative process

•         are highly creative themselves

•         work with, and input to the creative teams during concepting

•         make things happen by being creative with technology

•         are not left until the end of the project to “just build it”

These people bring much more to your project or campaign than an old techie – they have ideas, they can enhance ideas, they know the technologies, APIs, and trends, and they can communicate and deliver them all.

If you’re in the digital space and you only ever use or see your techies in the latest stages of a project then you’re not using your tech resource to its full potential, and you’re probably missing out on a wealth of ideas and solutions that could make your campaign better, more efficient and more likely to win awards.

Of course, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and interestingly this migration of techies into creative thinking and understanding has seen a movement of non-techies into the technology world. We now see account managers that understand the architecture of solutions we build, and designers that are happy using HTML and Actionscript.

Long may that continue, and long live the Creative Technologist.

As we all know, these are difficult times, but they're made much harder when we don't examine what we're doing to make sure it's correct/expected/required/vaguely sane.

It's great to have a QA team to check your work (and when I say QA I mean Quality Assurance across all disciplines, not just "testing to see if something's bust"), however, a lot of the testing should be done by the Production team.

In fact, let's not use "testing" as the word for this - it should be "validation" - the Production team should validate what they're doing.

Using the word "validate" does two things:

1. it's not "testing" so all disciplines will relate to it
2. it covers all levels of detail from the font to the entire idea and solution

For example:

• the IA validates that their wireframes include all possible error messages
• a designer validates that the column widths on one screen match another
• a developer validates that data is being stored in the database as expected
• the whole team should validate that the solution still makes sense when brought from paper to reality

Now, we're all busy, and things get balls'ed up occasionally, but some more validation from everyone wouldn't go amiss.

If I were so inclined I'd draw a diagram showing “validation effort” versus “money saved”, but I'm not … and we all know the answer anyway.

Ok, don't answer that just yet, but I just felt that it was high time I gave this blogging lark a try.

A lot of people would say that a developer (aka techie) is a reclusive, inarticulate and unwashed chap who's only happy when not having to interact with anything other than a mouse, keyboard and screen. Well, maybe some are, but the majority ain't, especially in the marketing world.

I'll probably write something about Creative Technologists (an overused and misunderstood term) to follow this up and have a poke at these kind of perceptions of techies, but that's for later. For now I need to stop rambling, and in a paranoid way read and re-read this to try and make sure my first ever blog post makes some sense.

Talking of which, my next post is going to be about checking your work!