We expanded during the recession. Now we have the confidence to help steer the future.

Now the world looks to be coming through the recession, we at altFusion are looking to strengthen our brand to become one of the leading developers of new technologies. We want to be at the forefront of building new and innovative online and offline systems.

The sign that we expanded (doubled in size) as a company right in the middle of the recession shows that our customers must like what we do and think we are value for money.
Now we have a good regular base of design houses and IT companies that call upon us for our knowledge and skill set, we want to utilise that cushion, and dictate some of the future of Information Technology.

We have a multitude of top secret good ideas and we are used to hearing others say they have the next "Facebook" of the X industry, and would we like a share in their possible profits once they are rich by developing it for free?
Well we have the next "altFusion" of the software industry, and when we get our revenue to a level where we can fund a couple of our developers outside of the bread and butter work, you will start to see some of it.

Regards,

The experts.

altFusion has a new website.

All of us at altFusion are proud to announce that our new website has been launched. When altFusion started out we initially put up a website that, it can be argued was only suitable for search engine spiders, and wasn’t interesting to look at from a human point of view. The initial intention was to have something that gave us web presence and experiment with different search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. It allowed us to understand and play with different online tools, but it became apparent that nobody wanted to look around it. You can shoe horn in as many effects and technical tricks on a web page as you like, but the resulting content may not be something that will draw attention. Realising that the internet is after all, supposed to be a tool that makes life easier and more interesting for humans, not search engines, we came to a point where we needed to update our website.

Since David and Lindsay made the leap from freelancers to company directors, they have learnt a lot about running an IT solutions business. One thing in particular was knowing what does and doesn’t work on a graphical user interface such as a website, but also recognising that a good software engineer doesn’t automatically make a good graphics designer. Luckily for us we have come into contact with some excellent graphic designers who solved that problem for us. Originally we contracted out to Victoria who did a sterling job on the original template ideas, and now we have Darren as a more permanent member on board our team. He is a fantastic designer with an excellent eye for a clean layout, and possesses the skills to turn any idea into a slick looking well presented interface.

I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everybody on the altFusion team who have all had their input to the new website. Please take some time to have a glance over it. Leave us a comment if you like, letting us know what you think. If you wanted to compare it to some of the earlier iterations of our website then you can check them out on the Wayback machine here.

Please take a glance over the new website here.

The altFusion team.

Android v iPhone - Which is better?

It looks like there is a healthy debate coming up on the mobile apps market and that is who should we be looking at developing for.

I think I already know the answer and will put forward my argument because I want a healthy debate so I am well informed before buying my kit and jumping in.

In an earlier posting on here I was looking about for an iPhone job. I had heard rumours that the USA developers were cleaning up and in some cases demanding $200 an hour because of the demand for apps writers.
This obviously made me want to get an iPhone right away and a MacBook and get right into learning COCOA and XCode so I could claim some of this lucrative market.

Firstly I wanted to find these people that are paying extortionate amounts for developing apps. What I actually found across the Apple developer communities is people who want to sell their ideas for you to run with and see if you can make something with it, or they all want to give you the idea, have you do all the work and write it and then split any profit with them 50/50.
So it seems there are a lot of people that want to leverage the iPhone to make money from apps, but they don’t want to pay developers to do it, they all want rewards from just coming up with a concept. And while original concepts are worth paying for, most of these ideas are bound to be rehashes of current ideas.
I also thought about my own ideas for what could be handy for an iPhone developer, I had loads, from auto handwritten Postcard services from when you are travelling, to help me solve the Rubik’s cube apps.
It turns out that everything has been done before (that is why I can put some of my ideas up here because I know they have already been done).
Everything from shopping lists that are linked into your supermarket account, thru to games that use the accelerometers to bounce a basketball.

I heard recently that there are about 400 new Apps per day coming out on the iPhone so chances are whatever you want as the saying goes (there is an app for that).
So I want to see what competition is out there.

The main runners as I see it in the smart phone world are:
iPhone
Android
Palm Pre
Windows Mobile

I think personally I can dismiss Windows Mobile because even though they are trying to claw back some reputation for their ASP.NET compact framework, they are too far behind now to compete in this market and are better placed for touch screen panels and Pocket PCs and other areas.
I can also dismiss the Palm Pre, because although I love the look and idea of it, I think the fact that they are now under an O2 exclusivity contract is going to stop them from ever getting to the stage to fully compete with the iPhone.

So this leaves Android. Good old faithful Google...
I guess I started writing this post because it has just been announced that Google has launched its free Sat Nav service this week. This is a sat nav service that not only can show Google Earth photographs, but can even go down to use the new Google Street View. It can also hook up with Google traffic watch, and basically does everything that a top end Tom Tom or Road King can do (on a device that costs less and can be used as a phone as well).
I believe with one foul swoop they have probably just killed off the Sat Nav device business and firmly positioned themselves as the best and cheapest (free) service, so who can compete?
I also believe that because Android is Open and the phones aren’t locked then I can take my Vodafone pay as you go SIM and plonk it straight into an android phone and it will work (unlike the iPhone with its locked device state).

So what about the business models and their future?
The best analogy I've heard is that Android is like Windows - runs on many different hardware set-ups whereas iPhone OS only runs on iPhone hardware. So it's the classic Windows vs MAC debate all over again. And the windows approach (lots of hardware support) is the proven winner over time. I don’t want to start a Mac / Microsoft debate on here, and I am not saying which is better, Windows or MacOS, I am saying the business model is making Microsoft more profit still than Apple on the software side. If you don’t agree that Windows software is still making more profit than MacOS software please start the debate elsewhere.
AAANYWAYS..
So now I have insulted Google and called them the Microsoft of the mobile world, my serious point is: I think the Android is going to get stronger and stronger.
I think that is my informed choice of next Gen phone that is the most future proofed.

Also and most importantly. I think that is my choice of phone to start developing Apps for. One great thing about that is they haven’t already been done. I can take some of the more popular apps from the iPhone and Port them over, or I can take my ideas and run with them knowing they haven’t already been developed.

So I guess I have written enough to start the debate. What are other peoples thoughts?
Just as a side note - As for Android devices, I am thinking that the HTC Hero is currently looking like the best Android phone on the market and would be the one that I might go for as my development kit.

So after extensive research and trying to make sure I don’t follow a dead horse (VHS versus BETA MAX and Blu Ray versus HDDVD etc..)
I believe I now know what platform I want to start developing things for.

I’ll let you all know when I have developed my first app and when I have anything cool for you all to have a look at.

Regards,

Lindsay.

Many thanks to Victoria

Many moons ago Victoria Sills provided us with some designs for our web site. We liked them a lot since they were clean and concise which was exactly what we were looking for. She's a talented designer and artist - check out her work at http://www.outofcontext.co.uk

Launching our web site

Even though we've been doing this as a company for four years (and as freelancers for much longer), it always surprises me how long it takes to do internal jobs. Several months ago we intended to relaunch our web site, the designs for it had been done and it should have simply been a case of converting those into a proper site structure and adding some content.

Several months later and we're only just finishing it off! The reasons for this are varied but primarily come down to the fact that we always put customer work first and foremost. Naturally this is partly to do with it being paid work and paying our bills, but we've always felt that our clients success outweighs our own. If our clients are successful then we benefit from that in terms of extra work and name recognition. Despite being excellent web developers we've never had much of a web presence ourselves, we've always managed to get work via repeat business and personal recommendations from existing clients.

Now that we've been around for a few years we felt that we ought to establish a web site that represents us and who we are. Hopefully you'll go and look at it and like what you see!

http://www.altfusion.co.uk

Why good HTML is important HTML

Because there are many ways that a web page can be built up then it is important to ensure that what you are paying for is done to the highest possible standard.



We are currently seeing a lot of people looking for HTML rewrites of their pages because of the following reasons:

· When originally written it was made to look good in Internet Explorer 6 only, but the website no longer lines up correctly or looks like it was originally intended. This is because the newer browsers (like IE7, IE8, FireFox, Safari, and Google Chrome) use higher standards of HTML validation. So invalid code will now become far more obvious when people upgrade to the newer browsers. It used to be a case of Internet Explorer was the only widely used browser so other flavours didn’t need to be considered because the time taken to tailor the HTML for them was too expensive for the market share they owned.

· Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) works best on a website that separates out its content from its styling using properly formatted <div> layouts referencing .css style sheets. Using this method it is then possible to tailor content to an SEO strategy and give the website the best ongoing chance of climbing up the search results.



For this reason I wanted to take the opportunity to show how our engineers can take a design from Photoshop and use that to get a pixel perfect site template across all browsers that will validate for worldwide W3C (XHTML and CSS) standards correctly.

For this case study we had a flat Photoshop template of an internal system for Age Concern supplied to us from a design agency. Following is the steps taken to ensure that the template is given the best possible start in the project life cycle.


Step 1.

Initial screens are tied down in Photoshop or Image Ready. The page has been designed and the left hand space has been reserved for the site navigation. The style of the navigation buttons is yet undecided so the design has come to us with that area blank.









Step 2.

We use photoshop to set up the guide slice lines. You can at this point get Photoshop to chop up the image and generate an HTML table from it which can be used but is not good practice. We use the pixel perfect positioning coordinates for the DIV positioning and slice and save off the image areas as JPEGs.






Step 3.

Using Visual Studio to edit the .aspx and .css pages. Put in the main DIV sections for the page (headers, icons and content). I personally set the DIV backgrounds to contrasting colours to show the line-ups of it and the text alignments it contains.



Step 4.

The screen is then displayed in Safari, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Chrome, and FireFox. The style sheet is tweaked for the differences between them until they all match. As an example the first try of the above screen is shown below in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.



The way FireFox shows it:


The way Internet Explorer 7 shows it:







Step 5.

The above 2 browsers show that there are major differences for instance the footer is in a different position. But the subtle differences like the gap between the maroon and dark blue sections in the header also need addressing before we have a template to move on with.
Once they are all lined up the same, we can put in the imagery and place holders. We can also set up the text colour, size and font.



Step 6.

Reset the DIV areas back to white.




When we get to this stage we can split up the page into an ASP.NET MasterPage, and enter the content placeholders that we are confident will work flawlessly across the browsers. This should also ensure that future browsers that conform to the W3C standards should not have problems with the site.

Why a lot of large corporation software projects fail

I have worked with a lot of large corporations, and as a lot of others reading this might understand all too well, getting anything done always takes far longer than doing the same thing for a small business (SME)

Usually the people who hold the purse strings don't talk to the people who want the system, and there are company procedures that have to be completed before a design is signed off as ready to implement. In fact I remember an old job where the pressure really came on (from the accounts department) to get the code written and delivered. Then once we spent all hours hitting the deadline, we found out that the IT department weren't ready for the system for another 4 months, and it sat on the shelf until they were ready. Aaah well, you have to laugh (or cry).
Well a few years ago, I was working through another software house similar to mine, which in turn works for a very large corporation.
Because my contact wasn't the major company then I can sit back and laugh at the procedure for getting this product to market. Don't get me wrong, I feel sorry for my customer because he is now going through what we have gone through before, and you can just see the frustration building up.

I am not going to name customers or reference these on my website as a customer I have provided a solution for, so there is no need for you to try and find out who it is. The fact that I have my main customer as another SME shields me from the fact that the larger corporations can recognise me.
Some large companies are fine (in case any of my repeat customers are reading this - it's not you heheh). But this project has the main paying customer (Company A), then another IT security company handles, well the security (Company B), and another large IT company handles the hosting, and server (Company C).
We - well basically we do all the work.

I wanted to just catalog the list of errors, because it may entertain some, and it may also show some, the pitfalls to avoiding these situations in future.
So this is a system that has moved servers (decided by Company B and handled by Company C) and had an upgrade to server technologies, fully rewritten by me. Obviously being way down the chain, I cant get access to the server (there are many servers, ranging from development, to testing, to final server). We get an ftp to the development server, and there are some fancy replication things going on to get it to the other servers when signed off.

So, major balls up number 1:
The system gets written, and then goes to the development server and in turn the testing server, it goes through testing and some pages aren't accessing the database correctly. Instead of Company C seeing the blatant error message on the screen (Invalid database connection string) and sorting that out, the information gets passed down to my customer who then passes the problem to me. Except I cant get access to the server to find out the database user accounts.
So I have to write a simple page with a textbox to enter a connection string, and then attempt to read a record from the database. I put that on the server, and allow Company C to enter connection strings, or set up database accounts until my test page says (Connection Successful).
Then I can take that string and add it to the system. So what should of been a case of a network admin seeing the obvious error, changing the string and fixing it in ten minutes, this took a week to finally get fixed. But fair play to them, they managed to get the problem fixed and can tell their boss that they never compromised security doing so.

Major Balls up number 2:
The system finished testing and goes live. However the paying customer (Customer A) was never told about this, and now the public can use it, but the office admin hasn't been told about new procedures or account changes, and so get locked out of this very expensive system they have just paid for and don't know why.
Looking into this a bit more we find that Company B and Company C have somehow managed to work this so that there is no one person that you can point to to say "They are responsible for this whole system". Each decision and small change has got a committee with a leader, but that gives a list of people of whom Company A has no clue of which one to contact to say why cant our admin use the system any more?

Balls up number 3:
The development server is uncompiled code because it is development and small bits always need changing and you don't want to have to compile the whole site and upload everything every time a little change is made. Now because the rest of the system is hidden from us lowly developers, then this development code is replicated up until it gets to the live server. So now the live server is running uncompiled code, which isn't really the most secure or fastest way to serve a system. By keeping the developers out of the top end, they have really invited the hackers in. Anyway that is a small thing, and as you are thinking, at the end why don't I upload the compiled code to the development server to get replicated. Well if and when this job ever finishes then I intend to :)



Balls up number 4:
This one made me laugh because this kind of sums up the whole process.
There is a new small change that needs to be made to the system. An update. A very simple update that can take the newest entered record in a certain table (about 10 fields), and send its details somewhere in a standard formatted CSV file. Nice and simple, I can write that with my eyes closed to take the record and send all fields in the file. They can then import it and use the fields they want, and ignore the ones they don't. The update would take less than a day to do and get on to the server.
Well, I just heard that there has been a committee assigned with 4 days to decide which fields they need and which they don't want exporting. This committee is more than likely 3 people, and they are going to take at least 4 working days, so instead of paying one person (me) for one days work, this update is now going to cost the customer (Company A) 4 days for paying 3 consultants, added to my day to implement it (that's 13 man days) so were talking at least 1300% markup. Now knowing that I am probably the lowest paid in the chain, I can hazard a guess that in reality it is way more than a 1300% markup.


Conclusion:
Like I say I can sit back this time and laugh, because over the last 15 years I can give many examples of how large corporations who want control over something end up over controlling it to the point where it becomes far too expensive. There ends up being too many committees all pulling in different directions, until you get a product that is nothing like what the customer ever wanted. The argument is it has been done securely and everybody got their say all through the development process, but my word, it would be nice to be able to cut through all of the red tape, sit down with the customer (actually sit down with the customer's employees who use the system), and build something that the end user wants.
Aaah well, if I could perfect that business model to keep everybody happy then I would be a rich man.


Oh dear, this isn't so much as a rant because I am writing it with a smile on my face. I also know if my immediate customer reads this he should see the funny side.
But I am glad to get this documented. Please feel free to add your comments and similar experiences if you have any.

Cheers,

H