Behind the scenes

UKSnow is on the way

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:51:28 GMT

A new version is with Apple waiting for review. No major updates, just fixing authentication is iOS5

UKSnow will be back soon

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:27:52 GMT

We've temporariily withdrawn UKSnow from the app store while we sort out some weird issues with authentication. At the moment some users can't authenticate with twitter and can't send snowy tweets! This seems to affect only the latest version of iOS. We'll submit a fix to the app store as soon as we have one.

When the north wind...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:51:08 GMT

When the north wind doth blow, we shall have #UKSnow.

Its around this time of year I begin thinking about #UKSnow - the twitter hastag, the numerous websites and the iPhone app we produced. The app shows where people are tweeting about snow, providing real time updates, way ahead of the news services. If there is a big cloud coming your way - its going to get deep and crisp and even.

So...

What features would you like to see in the 2011/2012 version of UKSnow?

Timbmet chooses Fifty Eggs

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:41:50 GMT

Timbemet (www.timbmet.com) have selected Fifty Eggs to provide the next version of their website. Wanting to move away from a bespoke CMS, we are working with Orchard CMS to deliver the site using as much out of the box functionlaity as possible.

The main goal is to ensure that their staff are back in control of pages, of news, of blogs and of publication.

Fifty Eggs Launch Beko

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:18:18 GMT

Fifty Eggs are proud to launch the new www.beko.co.uk site.

Based on our own CMS, with the ability to act as a centralized product management system for the client, we are pretty proud of the new look. Let us know what you think in the comments.

HTML to PDF

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:15:54 GMT

I would have thought that producing a PDF was not that hard. We take some industry standard markup*, thrown it into a library, and get a PDF out the far side. Right? Wrong!

*By industry standard markup, I of course mean HTML. What else ?

To start with there is not a lot of compatibility between HTML and PDF markup, and secondly thats just not how it works. Most libraries concentrate on building a document by positioning each item of text or graphic or line or curve individually. Which is fiddly.

I went through every library I could find yeasterday, so find one that can do a good job of HTML=>PDF (and by that I mean rendering HTMl, CSS images etc). And the winner...is of course the second most expensive one. I should have known that

The most expensive one would not work (for my purposes)
Anything cheap or free would not work for my purposes.

Therefore, the best was the second most expensive.

Drumroll...

I ruled out:

Spre Office: Html-pdf does image capture (i.e. the text is no longer live) and the the compression makes it of unsuitable quality

PDFSharp: no Html-pdf but a nice looking library
HTMLDOC : no css support
ABCpdf : not good enough

And todays winner

www.evopdf.com/defalt.aspx which was, by all accounts nearly flawless. Some HTML5/CSS3 gradients and curves were less than perfecct, but to build an invoice or a datasheet it will do just fine.