Holiday Park Hat Trick

It sure has been a busy few months at BLISS HQ. The advent of 2012 blessed us with the task of building three very different holiday park websites for three fantastic clients. It's a bit like twobuses coming along at the same time but, well, three. Gallons of coffee has been supped, many a dark night the lights of the office have remained burning, blood pressures have run high and it's fair to say a few relationships have been stretched. But it's been worth it.

We've been lucky to work with Vale Holiday Parks and Clarach Bay Holiday Village for several years now, and as they've grown as a business our digital offering has improved to accommodate and help achieve their successes. Argyll Holidays appointed us last year to provide the digital face of their massive marketing push which included full rebranding and huge on-site improvements.

The most exciting aspect of these projects has been that although all three clients are in the same sector, they each have an entirely different personality and target market that has challenged us to tailor a fundamental user experience in different ways, to meet different objectives. And hopefully we've not done a half-bad job; at least our clients are all very happy. And that's half the battle.

In addition to the websites, we've built a sturdy, modular booking system capable of integrating with the bulk of the holiday park reservation systems employed throughout the country, which in turn we've plugged in to the three new launches.  

So, out of the wintery darkness of square-eyed solitude BLISS brags the launch of the new Argyll Holidays, Vale Holiday Parks and Clarach Bay websites.

A bit of external press can be found here:

• How-Do
• The Drum
• Creative Boom

Even better news is, there's still more to come over the next couple of months :)

Old Man Adamski's Awesome Gift

It has been a while since we celebrated anybody's birthday over here at BLISS. Everytime one comes around we discuss doing something special, or at the very least all chipping in for a present but it never seems to come to fruition.

Well that's all in the past. We've turned over a new leaf and from here on out we will be paying proper respect to the anniversay of life. We will now be rewarding anyone who manages to survive for another year with (at the very least) a nice gift. Said gift must fall under the following criteria:

1. Be awesome.

2. Not be a 'Magma' voucher.

This has started with Mr Adamski who recently got a bit older

(download)

Click here to download:

IMG_0641.MOV (1.01 MB)

"This... is... awesome!"

Adamski, Brian

Adam: The Last Man

You may have noticed that our blog has been a little inactive over the last few months. Well if you are wondering why, it's because we have been awfully busy. We're not complaining (at least not all the time) on the contratrary, but the time has come for us to recruit an extra set of fingers, so let me please introduce the last man, or rather latest man to join our ranks... Adam.

 "It feels good to be part of the BLISS team." Nuttall, Adam

Here are his vitals:

• - A/S/L: 27/M/Burnley
• - Hair: Not so much
• - Skills: Can do PHPs and other techy stuff.
• - Fifa Ranking: TBC (but not looking good)

Movember at BLISS

A few of us here at BLISS are doing our bit for mens health by taking part in Movember. People who take part in Movember are required to grown their best (or worse) mustache and get sponsorhips in the process.

As a team we're looking at rasing at least £100 so it would mean a lot if you could go to our page and donate some money. It doesnt matter how much or how little, any contribution is welcome. We understand a lot of your friends may also be doing the same thing.

You can view our page here.

Web App Wednesday – Google Music

How does it work?

Unlike cloud music services like Spotify and Grooveshark, Google Music allows you to upload tracks from your own music library to the Google Music servers. Your music from that moment is accessible anywhere with an Internet connection.

Google allows you to add 20,000 of your own songs to your library. This is around 80GB of music if the average track is 4MB. While the service is in beta it will be free, prices for the service after beta have not yet surfaced.

Quality

As far as I can tell Google Music does not compress your music, unless it is FLAC, and supports a wide range of audio formats. A full list of acceptable file formats can be found here.

Music on the go

Google Music is available on multiple platforms. You can listen on the move with the official app for Android and listen on your iPhone with the very impressive mobile web app. PC’s and laptops can access the service through a web browser.

What's missing?

I like to keep track of my music and I'm an avid user of Last.fm currently I'm not given the option to link into last.fm and scrobble my tracks. This was close to being a deal breaker for me as last.fm is something that I use so frequently.

Downsides

If you run a normal broadband connection chances are your upload speeds are quite poor. It can take a long time to upload your albums to Google Music. I have around 60GB of music in my iTunes library which unfortauntely wont be going to the cloud anytime soon.

Similar apps

Droptunes - Droptunes is very similar to Google Music and allows you to play music stored on your Dropbox account.

Spotify - Both free (limited) and paid services Spotify is leading the way in streaming music services.

Grooveshark - Free but less organized than Spotify.

The Magnificent Mr.doob

Mr.doob, real name unknown (although we like to think he's called Gustavo), has doing some pretty nifty stuff with javascript and canvas and all those toys the cool kids are playing with nowerdays.

Reminds me of the boundry breaking work Joshua Davis used to do with Flash (http://www.joshuadavis.com/).

As of yet I've yet to see anything we could personally apply to a project, but we need such pioneers to help lay the flags, sow the seeds and inspire us for what may become commonplace in digital design over the next few years. Remeber when Clearleft did that sly parallax background on the Silverback website? At the time everyone thought it was cool, but couldn't imagine how they'd realistically get round to implementing it themselves. Well, visit any web design showcase website now and have a swim in all that delicious parallax goodness.

Although I'm not sure what part he played, Mr.doob was involved in the Ro.Me - 3 Dreams of Black project with Chris Milk, which I'm always blown away by. So, Mr.doob, definitely one to look out for.

Office Essentials #1 - Web and Mobile Development

At Bliss we’re always looking for ways to help make our days more productive. With that in mind we’ve put together a list of software that does just that, making our working lives more enjoyable and managing time easy. 

To make it easier to digest we've split the list into 5 parts covering different areas of working in a digital marketing agency. Meet the first in the series below.

Web and Mobile Development

We love Coda here at Bliss (we know, we know - another list with Coda in - what can we say?) and think it’s a fantastic IDE. It lets us manage our Terminal sessions, saves us time by auto-completing our code and does lots of other lovely things that generally speed up development time. It’s probably the perfect IDE for our uses. 

However, our Senior Developer Conor Clafferty has been causing a stir in the office with his ditching of Coda as his preferred IDE and his subsequent decision to spend more time on the powerful and overlooked Aptana Studio 3.  On his recommendation we decided to take a closer look at what Aptana has to offer. 

Don't Judge an IDE by its GUI

At first look Aptana Studio 3 is quite daunting and isn't the prettiest piece of software but some of it’s unique features really make it stand out. Once you get past the outer shell the goodies that await you inside certainly make up for it.

Browser Specific Tagging

Aptana really seems to want to make our job easy. It has a really handy feature that tells us which browser the code we’re currently typing is compatible with. No more having to look up which browser the opacity property will work with. 

Cross Platform

Aptana is built with Java which has its benefits; mainly that you can run Aptana on Windows, Mac and Linux and don’t have to pigeon-hole yourself to one environment. Downside, Aptana is heavy; as you’d probably expect from Java applications. At times it can be very resource hungry although it’s still more streamlined than Eclipse.

The All-in-One IDE

Interesting news for Aptana's future development is that multi-platform mobile application company Appcelerater - who produce the mobile development framework Titanium - have bought into it. This will see Titanium framework built into the Aptana IDE and create an all round programming solution software. As mobile and web specialists this is great news: it means we won’t have to constantly switch between development windows or clutter our workspace with more apps than we need. Everything is under one umbrella.

Final Thoughts

I’ve covered only a handfull of features that Aptana has, it comes with everything you’d expect from a modern IDE and more. Some may not like Aptana just for the fact that it isn't the most aesthetically pleasing environment to work in, however we think it has some genuinely great features that can’t be overlooked. With the mobile development features coming in the near future it’s certainly a piece of software we want to invest more time in. Plus, did I mention it’s free?

Use Aptana in your daily work? Let us know in the comments.

BLISS Brownies

First impressions are everything when meeting new people to talk business and are something few companies get a second chance to correct.

We @blisshq always show our best hand when meeting people and today was no different. We threw away the old tradition, a lonely plate of biscuits in the middle of the table and replaced them with something far better. A batch of homemade BLISS brownies; a superior improvement our guests did not fail to notice.

At BLISS we don’t feel we need to win over our clients with food but we sure as hell love to make that extra effort. If you’ve ever heard of our cookie campaign, you’ll know we aren’t the only ones who love it when we do.

And it's live

It’s nearly that time of the year again, relationships will be tested, beer will be guzzled and rivalries overshadow friendships. That’s right the Football season starts for the Premier League this weekend and we’re all very excited (most of us anyway).

Not all the team are avid followers of Football, Nathan, Conor and Laurie casual followers of the game and don’t really have allegiances for any teams. On the other side we have myself, Brian and Jon who are all Football mad.

This season could certainly test relationships in the office with myself and Jon big Manchester United supporters and Brian supporting Liverpool. Brian, being a typical Liverpool fan, is confident it’s their year this year, however I think I may have heard that before.

Like many others we’re hosting our own internal Fantasy Football league which should give us all lots to talk about on Monday mornings. The overall winner will get a night out paid for by the losers.

We’ll also be taking on our good friends Cahoona having set up an inter agency league. After going head to head for Best Newcomer at Big Chip 2011, friendships again will be tested but this time we'll both be newcomers and BLISS will take home the coveted Fantasy Football Champions 2012 award. Game on guys!

New website for Duffy HR

Last week we quietly put this little bugger live - www.duffy-hr.com.

Duffy HR provide virtual human resource services that save the costs and management of an in-house HR person/team; ideal for SMEs with tight overheads. Ooh sounds like a mission statement, but that's what they do.

Try as you might, HR isn't the easiest thing to make look interesting. But we've carefully avoided the traps of the dreaded 'shaking hands', 'smiling call centre girl' and 'plant in hands' stock photography and opted for a balance of typographic headings and illlustration. And the client loves it, which makes us all very happy.

Just so you know.

Check her out.