I’m sure I’m one of the millions who hate grocery shopping. I dread going and there always seems to be something else I’d rather do. I wait until I am completely out of everything to go. Apparently, even people continents away share my mutual hatred of grocery shopping.

In South Korea, an advertising agency’s client needed to increase the number of consumers who shopped at their grocery stores without having to create more brick and mortar locations. Their solution was to set up virtual grocery stores in subway stations. The shelves of items were stocked and laid out just like the shelves were in stores. Consumers were able to scan the QR code on the items they wanted with their smartphone and add them to their shopping cart. Once they were finished, they could pay and the groceries would be shipped to the desired address within hours.

Research showed that most South Koreans were constantly on the go and thought grocery shopping was a mundane task. The agency brought the grocery store to the consumer and sales for the client increased. While we may not have subways in Louisville, the idea is still pretty cool. I know I would use the technology! If mobile phones are capable of helping us grocery shop, just think of where we’ll be in the next five years! Mobile technology is huge and increasing at a rapid pace. According to MHG Marketing, about 62% of those who have scanned QR codes have done so multiple times and seven out of ten say they would be interested in using a QR code, for either the first time or again. Mobile barcode (1D and 2D) scanning traffic has also increased over 800% from this time a year ago according to ScanLife. It looks like QR code usage is on the rise but for now check out this video to see the virtual grocery stores for yourself.

Look through the comments and examples to see what people think about mobile browsing and the problems that arise when adapting for our phones or tablets. WTF mobile web is a blog that claims they didn’t create the website to “be mean” but their purpose is to be helpful. They also have a section called “Do It Better” that has links to tutorials and advice on building an adaptive website.

The folks at WTFmobileweb.com are adamant in their message that there is no Mobile Web, there is only The Web, which we view in different ways. It’s sort of along the lines of the whole “Responsive Web Design” argument. If you’re interested take a look at the discussions on WTFmobileweb.com and/or submit a site you know of that you think could use some improvement when viewing on a smartphone.

During the London subway bombings in 2005, cell phone cameras brought in a new era of community journalism, allowing civilians to quickly capture the breaking news and update their family, and also the rest of the world. News organizations broke the news with dozens of images that were grainy, terribly composed but none of that mattered because they still told the story.

It’s a far cry from what most of us are using our cell phone cameras for today. We document our breakfast, kids and the nightly sunset. We share it on social networks and wait for people to tell us what great picture takers we are, or how cute our offspring is. Through services like Tumblr and Instagram we don’t need a news organization to show the world our photos, we’ll apply our favorite hipster filter, hit “Publish” and do it ourselves.

I’m a fan of these photographic diaries. I like seeing how other people see the world, and the convenience of a cell phone camera has made this possible. I’ve long dreamed of what it would be like to have an 8 megapixel camera in my pocket. An iPhone 4S has the same megapixels as my first digital SLR. So naturally, that means it’s just as good, right?

NO.

There isn’t a font bold enough to express my enthusiasm when I say that, or this: Just because your cell has a lot of megapixels and you know megapixels are “good” doesn’t mean it suddenly replaces DSLR cameras.

Lately there has been a flood of Apple fanboy videos and photos showing side by side comparisons of iPhones to professional cameras, all of which foolishly conclude that an iPhone 4S camera is the equivalent of a $2,500 DSLR.

It’s time put these Mac myths to bed, one at a time:

But I saw a video of the side-by-side comparison. Looks the same to me.
You mean this video? The one where they dumbed a Canon 5D MarkII down to its crappiest settings to get it as close to an iPhone as possible? Let’s add some color, movement, selective focus and zoom. Suddenly your similar comparison just became Planet Earth. I don’t think I need to say which is which.

Yeah, but it says it’s showing in HD.
No. The video has been compressed. Let’s look at the raw video of each camera and see which one is really high definition.

Photographers shoot weddings on iPhones now. They must be good cameras.

You’ve seen this video, too? Yes, they’re good cameras compared to any other phone and even some consumer point and shoots, but the idea of paying someone to shoot a wedding on an iPhone is incredibly moronic. If you notice, even in that video they hired a professional photographer.

The iPhone has no control over aperture (depth of field), shutter speed, zoom (available to the camera with exchangeable lenses), doesn’t perform well in low-light, editing and processing would be a nightmare, and the file sizes and quality are not even close to a professional DSLR.

What do you mean the files are smaller? It says 8 megapixels. That’s a big number.

Megapixels aren’t as telling as people think they are. Pixel size is affected by sensor size, so you can’t compare exactly compare a Canon pixel count to a phone’s. You can use megapixels to get an idea of the file quality, but don’t live and die by it. Ron Galbraith breaks it down on his website.

Is the iPhone’s video pretty? Yes. Does it take good pictures? Yes. But both of these answers should conclude with “for a phone.” Heck, the iPhone takes photos that compete with many point and shoots if you’re outside, and apps like DerManDar put together some beautiful panoramics.  It is an impressive phone.

That is what makes this great: We’re talking about a phone that can do these things. It wasn’t that long ago I thought the game “Snake” was the best thing to ever happen to phones – and it was back then. So only time well tell, but I feel confident a phone will never replace my DSLR.

Especially if I can get a DSLR that will make a phone call.

‘Retina display’s pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels.’ – Apple Inc.

With the advent of high pixel density displays, i.e. the iPhone 4 ‘Retina Display’ and many more sure to follow the pixel itself is now a relative unit. I always thought of a pixel as on dot on a screen, and it may have been in the past but that concept has evolved.  Basically with more advanced displays 1 virtual pixel could equal 1.5 physical pixels and so on.

Front-end developers define everything in pixels. Such as, width: 300px or font-size: 12px. With the popularity of the mobile and tablet zoom features, web developers now have to consider what an image will look like at different size ratios. A ‘CSS pixel’ indicates one point on the virtual pixel grid to which our CSS design aligns. This either directly matches the actual device pixel grid on which our content is rendered or it is intelligently scale.

Will higher pixel displays be a massive change for the average web developer? I think it will force us to code with more fluid layouts as well as targeting high density pixel displays with alternate style sheets and media queries. It’s not incredibly inconvenient at the moment, I would prefer this than having to deal with ie6.  Since this concept is still relatively new I think a best practices way to handle high pixel density is still in the testing phases.

Oh no! Not the death bell for Flash … again.

Adobe announced that it is going to stop pursuing and enhancing the Flash Player for mobile browsers. They’ll concentrate on HTML5 authoring tools for mobile browsers (Webkit, Opera, etc). This has of course fired up the anti-Flash bandwagon ranting all over the web. Of course, most of them ignore that Adobe is instead concentrating on AIR on those platforms which to me is infinitely more exciting.

Look, I know there is bad Flash out there, but there is also bad HTML5. In fact, one thing I see lacking still, is great, cross-platform, engaging and dynamic HTML5 content. There are lots of experiments that work in this browser or that (mostly Chrome), but how far are we off from real content? We’ve talked about it before on this blog and I still feel it is a ways off.

Don’t take that as CurrentMarketing being anti-HTML5 — we’re anything but. We’re already experimenting with the rest of the world, we’re just not caught up in the hype. We do HTML5. We do Flash still too. And Flex (oh-em-gee I love Flex so darn much)! We create rich internet apps (what the cool kids call RIAs) and we do them in whatever the best technology is for that project.

So, we’ll keep a finger on the pulse of this and play with the edge like we have with the other development we do (iPhone, iPad, Android, Facebook and other rich app platforms). Long live HTML5. Long live the Flash Platform.

We’re an app making machine!

In the past 8 weeks the Geek Suite, and of course CurrentMarketing as a whole, has produced 2 mobile sites, 2 iPhone / Android apps, and 1 iPad app for a single client.  Start to finish, concept to execution, in 8 weeks.  How’s that for productivity?

They’ve been a joy to work on and though fun, quite challenging as well.  Personally, the best part for me was getting blaze the trail with a few new technologies for producing apps.  That’s a benefit of being the Geek In Charge, I get to play with all the cool toys first. But that is fairly short lived because we move so fast, I’ve already started the rest of my team down the same knowledge path and soon the whole Geek Suite will be cranking out native iPhone / Android apps.

I don’t tend to brag in the blogs I write, but I’m damn proud of this accomplishment.  And what I’m most proud of is that we’ve done it all in-house.  The knowledge, man-power, blood, sweat and tears were all CurrentMarketing borne.  There are not a lot of agencies in town that can say that.

In a recent blog post on this site, one A. Bouvier posed the question that has been lurking in the backs (and fronts) of minds everywhere: “Is it OK to go HTML5 crazy?”  Those winged words left our browser screens and echoed across the Commonwealth and north across the Ohio River, seeming simply to dissipate into the ether. We all knew the answer to that question—or least hoped that we did.  At any rate, the only thing really crazy is how busy things are around here so we left it at that and got back to work.

A few short weeks later came the response:  Adobe announced its acquisition of Nitobi, the company that created PhoneGap, and is supporting Nitobi’s transfer of PhoneGap to the aegis of the Apache Software Foundation.  PhoneGap is a tool that helps developers to develop cross-platform mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (as opposed to having to develop apps separately in Objective-C, Java, etc. depending on the target platform).   The Apache Software Foundation supports a multitude of great open-source projects, perhaps most notably the Apache web server, the single most widely used web server.  In short, I don’t know exactly what this means for the particulars of the future development process of PhoneGap, but the gist should be that PhoneGap will just keep getting better and better.

Add to this the announcement last week of the release of jQuery Mobile 1.0 RC1, a framework that will aid in the JavaScript component of cross-platform mobile app development, and it seems that, yes, we can and, in fact, already have gone HTML5 crazy here in the Geek Suite.  At least, that’s what I say.  But Katy Miller says we can’t go HTML5 crazy because the Geek Suite is already certifiably loony.

So I completed work on a mobile app not too long ago—it’s always an enjoyable and gratifying experience to deliver projects to our clients.  This time, however, there was a catch. For this particular app we had initially decided to try out a framework that uses HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to replicate the look and feel of a native mobile app.  The framework appeared to be well-constructed, well-documented and even more importantly, well-suited to the requirements of the app.  Although I loved all of the functionality built into the framework from a data delivery and manipulation perspective, it turned out that the appearance of suitability ultimately revealed itself as a nasty illusion when I tried to learn how to incorporate a custom visual design into the look and feel of the app.  This became such a mountainous obstacle that we eventually decided to abandon this once-promising framework for a solution that offered more flexibility in the area of aesthetic appeal and usability.  It was big disappointment to come to the realization that we had invested so much time in what turned out to be the wrong framework for the job.

Now that I’ve had a little time to think over this recent project, I have begun consider a few things about the two major mistakes that I made along the way. First, I chose the wrong framework. Second, I probably spent more time than I should have trying to pound a square peg into the round hole.  The first mistake is one that all developers try to avoid in the first place—if (or should I say when?) one does make such a mistake, it’s always good to have a plan B to fall back on, which we did.  In this case plan B was better than plan A.  As it is, I learned that there were some gaps in how I previously went about evaluating an application framework. In particular, I overlooked how challenging it might be to customize the look and feel of the framework that was my initial favorite.

Learning from the second mistake seems to be a case of discretion being the better part of valor.  I fully believe that there is a way to accomplish what I wanted with that first framework but that I simply don’t currently have skill and familiarity with that framework to do it.  Eventually I would have gotten there but that’s a battle for another day.  Learning to avoid the second mistake for me is a matter of balancing persistence in the face of a challenge with enough awareness of my own strengths and limitations to recognize when too much persistence becomes just plain stubbornness.  In that regard, I might have sooner asked myself if I was trying to overcome the challenge out of a sense of personal pride or if it was really in the best interest of the customer.  Had I done so, I think I would have been quicker to move to the solution that we ultimately decided on.

Web development is ever a process of learning–whether it’s new technologies, new programming languages, new ways of programming in existing languages, or just figuring out how best to apply them all to provide our clients with websites and mobile apps that set their brands apart from crowd.

What would it take to get you to choose one brand of potato chips over another? When standing in your grocer’s aisle, contemplating the perfect brand and flavor for an afternoon snack, you may ask yourself, “How do I know which one is for me?” “How can I be sure if the ingredients are real or merely chemically based?” Well, fret no more, my friend.

PepsiCo is unveiling an innovative way to market Lay’s potato chips. Beginning this month, the company is launching new vending machines that will demonstrate how Lay’s creates their potato chips. This is no ordinary vending machine, you see. It does not accept money or coins! It only accepts potatoes! Now I bet I’ve got you wondering…

Wondering, how will this work?

Wondering, how will I get my beloved bag of chips?

Well…

First, a promoter will be standing by to give you your golden ticket (the potato) to start the vending process. You simply drop the potato in and a show unfolds before you. It shows you how they wash, peel, cut, cook, salt and package your chips. As soon as the demonstration is over, a warm bag drops down for you to retrieve. It seems as if they’ve just made the bag especially for you- cooked to order!

These special vending machines will not be distributed everywhere. They will be rolled out to retailers such as Walmart and Carrefour in Argentina. These retailers will simply be product sampling testers. If all goes well, you may be seeing one of these vending machines at a store near you. Click here to see a video sneak peek of the new and innovative machines!