I've just updated a massive part of my part hobby / part work project "GW In The Digital World" (Games Workshop). There are around 35 ideas on how to make a convincing, valuable digital service using the vast I resources they already have over on my personal blog . Your thoughts as always are hugely valuable.
The entire report will be presented here as portfolio work.
As part of a personal life / work life cross over I've recently started examining Games Workshop's digital strategy. They have just started to publish their army books (called 'Codexes') in Apple's proprietary iBook format (an expanded version of ePub), available only on the iTunes store. I can certainly understand why they're doing so - they are a predominantly offline company, if I didn't have a massive forward thinking IT team, I'd do the same. Hell, several major publishers who *do* have massive IT teams are doing the same.
The post is Why haven’t Games Workshop published their digital Codexes on Android as well as IOS/Ipad? and I'd appreciate your thoughts.
I am intending to either present a case study on how GW could profit long terms and bring more users into the system by adopting a HTML based secure subscription model or build an actual working example of how the system could flexible adapt to different user devices.
I've been lynda.com subscriber for about 3 years now. It's a brilliant tutorial service for all sorts of technical and creative subjects. The courses are fully featured, well shot and voiced, presented by people who really know their stuff. As we move into a world with more and more mobile access however it seems their service is struggling to keep up. I recently tried out the Khan Academy app which allows you to pre load videos onto your tablet or phone so that when you're in poor signal areas (say on the train or away on holiday) you can continue to watch all the courses you've marked and interact in just the same way as you would at home with a high quality line.
Lynda - please update your poor mobile services. I pay good money, willingly to access your materials and think it's worth every penny but I, and many other travellers who would like to make good use of our travel time, can't because we have no access to high speed mobile broadband.
My specific case involves travelling between London and Brighton every day (1:20) by train - I have two 3G connections with me, from 3 and Vodafone, neither of them give me a connection I can use for anything but text web surfing and emails.
And we'd appreciate your thoughts! Please have a look over the site and let us know what you think. The project started around six months ago with the release of the 2.0 version of HTML5Boilerplate, seeing the great starter code I realised I'd have to convert that code into a Shopify template every time I built a new shop, so as a company we decided to document and release the code as an open source project with the hope of involving the community more and building a better release with their feedback.
We've already released one shop based on an early version of the code, Spook Show Angel and hope to have many more.
This sort of thing takes your breath away if you're a developer on the web of any type, IE6, released by Microsoft many, many years ago (August 2001, so almost 11). You could have a quick google around to see why IE6 is terrible but I'd save time if I were you, it's the web browser equivalent of Comic Sans hated by designers, transparent to users.
We stopped supporting IE6 a year or so ago when the average percentage of users dropped to around 1-2%. Our sites would still work very well, but certain graphical niceties and special effects would be non functional.
The point of this post, if there is one, is that we always, always focus on our users, it doesn't matter if it's harder, less fashionable, if there's less opportunity to use "cool toys" or add shiny transitions between pages. Industry awards might not often go to "who has the best IE6 support?" but if there are this many users on a platform 11 years old, we'll deliver them the very best experience we can.