HTML5 Archives - Applied Information Sciences

@aisteam

AIS recently completed work on a complete revamp of the Texas Workforce Commission’s “Texas Reality Check” website. Texas Reality Check is an Internet-available, fully accessible, responsive, mobile-first and browser-agnostic design. This website was tested for accessibility, performance, vulnerability scans, and usability.

Background

Texas Reality Check (TRC) is targeted at students on a statewide basis, ranging from middle school to high school (with some colleges and universities making use of the tool for “life skills” classes). The goal is to inspire students to think about occupations, and prepare for educational requirements so they can achieve the income level that meets their lifestyle expectations.

This tool walks students through different areas of life, on a step-by step-basis, identifying budgets associated with living essentials such as housing, transportation, food, clothing, etc. Students make selections and then calculate a corresponding monthly income that would afford the selections they make. From here, the students are directed to another page and connected to a database on careers and associated salaries.

However, the existing site was dated and in need of improvements in three core areas: UX, Accessibility, and overall performance. Here’s how AIS delivered:

Terence Wiles

The mission was critical, and the task complex: Ushering a print publication like Rolling Stone, a Bondi publication, into the digital age by providing them with a turnkey solution to present their print magazine archives online, for viewing on high resolution-connected devices of all shapes and sizes. Unlike other digital versions of magazines on the market, the new platform would allow the publisher to monetize its own unique brand through the years.

The Challenge

AIS needed to address multiple technical areas to provide the most viable solution for Rolling Stone and other archives.

Speed
Scale
Security
Continuous Delivery
High-Definition Presentation

Rolling Stone’s existing solution (‘print to digital’) only supported 100 issues, and AIS was challenged to multiply the output tenfold while reducing management costs and allowing Rolling Stone the freedom to design their interface in a way that matched and enhanced their other digital presences.

Solution

AIS implemented a multi-tier solution in the creation of the Bondi Archive Platform. The platform we built consists of a flexible, scalable website architecture using HTML5, JavaScript, ASP.NET MVC and SQL Azure. The system allows viewers to see exact replicas of the original print issues, something not offered by any other platform. Users can navigate using a mouse, keyboard or touch and can zoom in or conduct complex searches. Bookmarking inside the archive is available as is print, based on the publisher’s preference.

Results

The new archive platform has allowed Rolling Stone to join the online revolution and bring their print content online in its original format and context, thereby retaining copyrights. By serving the content directly from their own website or from the cloud, the company can avoid content restrictions and fees imposed by third-party aggregation platforms and app stores. The project and platform has been an unequivocal success. Rolling Stone chose to enhance its print subscriptions by offering the full digital archive at no extra charge. By tightly integrating their online content with the digital archive, a deeper level of interaction with readership has been realized.

Terence Wiles

Our work with Rolling Stone and Bondi Digital Publishing is yet another example of how AIS can develop technology that creates new revenue streams for publishers. We built a digital distribution platform to usher print publications like Rolling Stone into the digital age – by providing them with a turnkey solution to deploy print magazine archives online for viewing on desktops, laptops and mobile devices. For Rolling Stone, the initial launch included more than 1,000 issues from 1967 to the present.

Click here to read more about the distribution platform and how we customized it for the Rolling Stone archives.

Ash Tewari

@ashtewari

Bootstrap’s grid is extremely versatile. K. Scott Allen wrote about this recently: Why use the Bootstrap Grid?

However, as I learned more about how Bootstrap grid is used, I realized that there is a problem with the way I was using Bootstrap. Bootstrap’s grid is steering me away from the path of semantic markup.

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

Let me state at the outset, I have no intention to compare “JavaScript with HTML” and “C# with XAML” styles of building Windows Store Apps. This is a choice you have to make based on your skillset, reuse considerations (i.e. do you plan the target the app for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 OS), whether the functionality you are targeting for the app is already available as a web app or not, etc.

For last several years I have focused on the web technologies, starting with server-side technologies but lately client-side single-page style apps. So the h5c3js model is more suitable based my skillset. (Additionally, my knowledge of XAML is limited to WF serialization format.)

This model, which allows HTML-based native Windows 8 apps, is innovative in my opinion and I applaud the folks responsible for the language projection in Windows RT.

Eric Svendsen

I’m not going to try and convince you that mobile development is important – I hope you already recognize that it is! If you need further convincing, head on over to Allison Christman’s article – she gives you all the reasons you’ll need. However, while she mainly discussed mobile websites, I’d like to give an overview on mobile applications and their development methodologies. Should you build for the platform or the browser? Or both? What is the difference between a mobile website and a mobile application? What is a hybrid application? Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach is vital when making the decision on how to best reach and serve your end-users. Read More…

Kevin Aenmey

Video has become an integral part of our web experience. This, coupled with the pervasiveness of connected and video capable devices, calls for an easy-to-use, flexible, reliable and scalable platform for hosting, processing and distributing media to anyone, anywhere, on any device. The availability of Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS) Preview lets us explore a promising new platform which aims to bring us closer to that goal.

Since WAMS is still in the preview release stage there are a few wrinkles in the platform that early adopters need to be aware of. These issues should be corrected in upcoming releases but until then, there are a few alternate approaches that will help you get your media solution up and running with as little frustration as possible. In this post I will show you how to get video content hosted, encoded and delivered using the WAMS SDK and how to work around some of the quirks with the June 2012 Preview version.

BlogPosts tagged with “HTML5”