LBi London

Interface Development team weeknote (week 1036)

Posted by Paul Carvill July 12th, 2010

Week ending 09/07/10:

Andrew spent some time this week catching up with our TripleLBi colleagues in Copenhagen, and was pleased to find the Danes were developers with sharp skills. Project Battle of the Giants is being built out of Copenhagen with Andrew advising on architecture and beer. And them Danes are giants: what do they feed them over there? Yes, I know, bacon and blue cheese; blue cheese that made Andrew’s eyes water and filled his hotel dreams with monsters with flowing fair manes.

Jon conjured up a nice piece of news over on Project Raiders of the Orient Express: they’ve tamed the Photoshop JavaScript engine (actually ExtendScript, Adobe’s extended implementation of JavaScript), which has been a standard part of the application since version 7. Using it they’ve written a script to receive a JSON file and an image button template and automatically generate 50 buttons in 5 different styles and themed 5 different ways. That’s 1250 different buttons! The script generates in 15 minutes what may take a tablet-wielding Mac operator much, much longer, no matter how strong their Photoshop-fu. Apparently the JavaScript took a while, but that’s an impressive return on investment.

Tom and Ray delivered another massive code drop to Project Incident In Istanbul, which includes some seriously innovative banking transaction representations. I’d love my bank’s website to have even a tiny bit of the impressive functionality and design polish that this project is currently rolling with.

Martin spent last week involved in yet more discoveries around the capabilities of CSS3 gradients and RGBa opacity, and investigating server-side image generation to enable Project Aurora to use fonts that we are unable to embed via @font-face due to restrictive licenses. It seems that this is the only non-sIFR method of including such font faces that doesn’t require JavaScript to work, and won’t present the FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text ). It’s not a discovery he’s particularly pleased about, and says it’s very frustrating to deal with font foundries who refuse to embrace the changing nature of the web by updating their licensing (seriously, he’s been bitching in the back-channel all week long about technologically-retarded and reality-denying font foundries)

Tags: bacon, cheese, font-face, fout, interfacedevelopment, javascript, json, photoshop, rgba, sifr, triplelbi

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New Facebook film not to be promoted on Facebook

Posted by Adam Russell July 12th, 2010

In  ironic but sadly unsurprising news Boom Town have confirmation from Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group that Facebook will not be used to promote David Fincher’s new film The Social Network that depicts the early days of, you guessed it, Facebook.

SVP of Media Relations Steve Elzer cited Facebook’s advertising guidelines which forbid the use of advertisements that reference Facebook unless Facebook have themselves granted permission. Given Zuckerberg’s personal disapproval of the film – he argues the book it is based on, Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, contains inaccuracies – this is obviously highly unlikely to be forthcoming.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that there currently appears to be no official presence for the film on Facebook at all, although the official site for the film does feature a button to share the link to Facebook and one unofficial . Whilst there are rules against trying to represent brands or individuals without authorisation there do not appear to be rules suggesting Facebook authorisation is required for fan pages in general. Indeed, in the past there have been debate over whether Facebook should delete pages that contain questionable views and the general consensus has been that to do so would restrict freedom of speech.

Elsewhere the promotion for the film is remarkably creative. The movie poster (pictured here) is a fantastic departure from the norm, using typefaces creatively and riffing on the browser bar, creating a recognisable strip down the side. So far two teaser trailers have been released (both are available on the official site) and they are a long way from the bombastic teasers we have come to expect, playing on text and the Facebook interface.

For a film about social media to lack a clear social media strategy appears to be a massive missed opportunity – there isn’t even a Twitter account – but with the film’s release not until November perhaps we will see this rectified. Who knows – maybe it is all part of the tease!

This story was originally posted at The Wall.

Tags: entertainment, Facebook, movies, Social Media, social networks

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