Last night at Campfire One, Google announced the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, a destination where developers can sell apps for integration with Google Apps. According to Ryan Boyd with the Google Apps Marketplace team, there are three steps for a Google Apps Marketplace app:

1) Have or create a cloud application and host it on the platform of your choice
2) Integrate your cloud app with Google Apps using available APIs
3) Create a manifest file describing your application and list it for sale on the Marketplace

You can find a whole series of videos from Campfire One, discussing the Google Apps Marketplace here at Google’s Developer YouTube channel. In addition, there is more information on the Official Google Blog, the Google Code Blog, and the Google Enterprise Blog.

After a bit of radio silence, Scotch on the Rocks is back with a bang this year and it’s coming up soon, just a month after cf.Objective()! Scotch hits TigerTiger in London on May 24th and 25th.

A limited number of Super Early Bird tickets were available and they’re already gone so you’ll want to buy your tickets fast to get in on the action!

And action there will be with the speakers currently (mostly) under movie hero pseudonyms and the first few topics announced.

I guessed one of the speakers’ secret identities and Andy said I’d won an Irn Bru (I love Irn Bru!) but I don’t know whether he’s offering prizes in general

He let me know some of the other speakers and their topics – kick ass stuff, so don’t miss Scotch this year!

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I was going through some old World War Two Propaganda Posters and I found one I really liked. World War Two was one of the worst battles we have ever seen as a race, but I am not going to focus on that. I am going to focus on the forefathers of modern graphic design. Propaganda Posters were simple in design but held a powerful message. So let’s create one from my current obsession, World of Warcraft.

To begin open a document 1000×1500 and fill it with white.

Make a new layer and add a 50 border using your guides. Make a selection within the borders and fill the selection with #E2DBCB

Now we need to add four new guides. Set the left and right guides in 90 pixels from the 50 pixel border. Then set the new top guide 230 pixels from the top 50 pixel border. Then add a new bottom border 260 from the 50 pixel bottom border. Then make a selection within and fill it with #C8BEB4

Next download AllianceAsset here. Open this file in photoshop and using the pen tool cut out King Varian Wrynn. Then add him to our poster inside the darkest box. Align him to the bottom left of the box.

Since the colors of the time were somewhat subdue we are going to soften his color pallette useing a color overlay. Open your blending options and select color overlay. Then change the default color to #C8BEB4. Set the opacity to 25%. Your can do more or less if you like.

Now we are going to start adding the poster font. In your text pallette choose Arial as your font, set the style to Black (we did not go with arialblack as the font because it is has a slight italic style to it), set the size to 50, the leading to 45, and the color to #FFFFFF. Then type out “Land Sea Air” after each word hit enter to star a new line and make sure all the letters are capitalised. Once you have it all typed out set the aligning to right and place the text next to his sword.

Make a new guide 25 pixels from the bottom of the small inner box. Continue using the same font and set up only this time make the size 35 and the color #403B35. Type out “PLEDGE FOR THE ULTIMATE VICTORY”.

Next add a guide 10 pixels below the text you just created. Set the font size to 18 and type out “DEATH KNIGHT”. Use the same color as the previous step. Then rotate the text 45°.

Copy this layer 8 additional times. Space out each copy 40 pixels to the right of the one before it. Then highlight the first copy of the text and type out “DRUID”.

Then “HUNTER”.

And “MAGE”.

Next “PALADIN”.

“PRIEST”

Followed by “SHAMAN”

Now “WARLOCK”.

And finally “WARRIOR”.

Now change the font size to 197, set the color to #A12B2B, and the text tracking to 10. Type out “GLORY” and place it at the top of the inner box.

Rasterize this layer then make a selection of the inner box. Now erase all of the parts of text outside the selection area.

Using the same color as before set the font size to 70, and the tracking to 2. Type out “FOR” and angle it 20°. Place it like below.

Now set the font size to 90, the color to #818F9A, the height to 125%. Then type “THE ALLAINCE”. Also angle it 20° and place it 5 pixels before the “FOR”

Next duplicate the “THE ALLIANCE text 5 times. each copy move one pixelto the right and down from the one above it. Merge all the copy layers and add a color overlay in color #3D444C.

Merge both parts of “THE ALLIANCE” together and set the opacity to 90%.

Now copy the inner box layer and move it to the top of the pallatte. Set the fill to 0% and add an Inner Stroke. Set the stroke to 3 pixel, centered, in color #403B35. Add all the layers between the Inner stroke and the first three boxes by highlighting the layers and hitting CTRL+G. Name the Group Alliance. And you are finished with the alliance side. Now let’s create the horde version.

Next download HordeAsset here. Open this file in photoshop and using the pen tool cut out Thrall. Make a new group and call it Horde. Then add him to our poster inside the darkest box. Align him to the bottom center of the box.

Open your blending options and select color overlay. Then change the default color to #C8BEB4. Set the opacity to 25%. Your can do more or less if you like.

Duplicate all the Alliance text layer and place them in the horde group. Hide all the layers except the “FOR” layer. Change the font to “GLORY”.

Now unhide the “PLEDGE FOR THE ULTIMATE VICTORY” and change the font to “BLOOD AND GLORY TO THE VICTORIOUS”.

Then unhide all the classes.

Now change the font size to 197, set the color to #A12B2B, and the text tracking to 10. Type out “HORDE” and place it at the top of the inner box.

Rasterize this layer then make a selection of the inner box. Now erase all of the parts of text outside the selection area.

Now set the font size to 90, the color to #818F9A, the height to 125%. Then type “LOK’TAR OGAR”. Also angle it 20° and place it 5 pixels under the “GLORY”. Next duplicate the “LOK’TAR OGAR” text 5 times. each copy move one pixel to the right and down from the one above it. Merge all the copy layers and add a color overlay in color #3D444C.

Merge the “LOK’TAR OGAR” layers together and set the opacity to 90%.

And you are finished with your propaganda posters. What did you come up with? Send me a link and I will post your here for all to see.

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Independent mobile ad network Jumptap has introduced a self-service application for mobile application developers and publishers.

“Jumptap is committed to continually adding value to our network and this is a great means for app developers and site owners to take advantage of our exciting growth,” said Paran Johar, CMO of Jumptap.

“Preliminary data shows in app ads are driving click through rates five times higher than online advertising, increasing demand from our brand and performance advertisers. This presents an enormous opportunity for developers to earn revenue from their applications.”

The first 100 new app developers or sites to join the Jumptap mobile ad network will get to keep 100 percent of the ad revenue for the first 100 days.

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff. Like everyone, they want to build things that gain the respect of their peers. This aspiration is where the problems get started. Unless you happen to develop for an extremely technical audience, users don’t want cool stuff. They just want stuff that works and makes their life easier. For example, let’s say a developer wants to build a weather dashboard with real time satellite video feeds, an AJAX module that show the latest temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed/direction, the sunrise/sunset times, and tidal data. A regular user, on the other hand, just wants to know “is it going to be sunny or cloudy and do I need a jacket or umbrella today?”

We’ve seen several examples of this played out in public in our little tech-bubble-blogosphere in the past year:

• Google Wave: Google wave is cool. It doesn’t solve any problems that any real people have but it does a lot of great things that developers get excited about. It includes embedded video, sound, and chat from multiple users that a user can enable playback from… Yeah, I was saying just last week how I wished I could do that. The only useful thing I’ve ever seen done with Google wave is the Pulp Fiction movie (1000% NSFW).
• iPad: When the IPad first came out, I (like many others) complained that it was an oversized iphone with less functionality. However what we missed was that it really wasn’t for us. The iPad is for regular users, not developers or techno weenies. In other words, people–in fact, most people– want an internet appliance that just works. They don’t want to have to deal with nonsense like registries, print drivers, patches, updates, and so on. Why does everyone have a refrigerator in their house? Because it’s easy to to use! You plug it in and go. Imagine for a minute if you had to play with the evaporator driver or download and install a thermometer patch update every week. Your refrigerator “works” because 99% of the time it just does its job without any fiddling.
• Google Buzz: Google assumed that everyone wanted to share all of the stuff they are doing, reading, and looking at with people they talk to. Because many Googlers have become victims of their own hubris, they assumed everyone is like them, wants to be like them, or should be like them. However when the realities of everyday life entered the equation, in the shape of something like an abusive ex-husband, it was a condition that didn’t exist in the artificial utopia of the Googleplex. Google failed to test the program in the real world and instead relied on the developer’s vision of what the users wanted. The result? Failure.

So how do you recognize when you are in this situation? If you, your developer, or anyone on your team makes these kind of statements, chances are strong that you are on the wrong path:

• Can’t the users open their eyes and just read? The answer is right there in front of them.
• The users need to use a little common sense. We can’t keep dumbing down the world for them or we’ll end up like (insert tv/movie/pop culture reference for stupid people here).
• They use the term UX to mean user experience or UI to mean user interface in common everyday speech and would feel comfortable using it when speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

What can you do to prevent this kind of mistake from ruining your project? Here are some ideas:

• In most cases, developers don’t make good team/project leaders. They carry with them the bias of wanting to be cool, respected developers. If you have or can find a developer who has a proven track record of placing user needs above cool programming features, ignore this recommendation.
• User testing: find someone who is not involved in the project or, even better, get a NIF (non internet friend) to try out your website. Put them on the homepage and ask them to try and do what your primary goal is, whether that’s to create a gift registry, put something in a cart and checkout, find a specific piece of information, or something else. Whatever it is, ask them try and do it. If you can video tape them, that’s great; otherwise, watch without interacting and take notes.
• Test different options. Use services like Crazyegg or Google multi variant testing to try out different options. See where users are and aren’t clicking then make adjustments based on data not on intuition. (disclosure: Crazyegg is an advertiser here)
• Don’t make changes because they are cool, neat, interesting, or stroke the ego of your developers. Make changes that solve problems people have. This is one of the biggest complaints I have with Wordpress as a platform. They coddle developer’s whims instead of addressing real problems like security.

At the end of the day, you and everyone involved needs to understand that, for your project to succeed, it needs to solve a problem users have first and foremost. Stroking the ego of the CEO, making the marketing department look clever, or making a developer feel stimulated are not real goals.

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Developers who have occasion to interact with YouTube videos should prepare for a slight (but important) change concerning video page URLs.  They’ll be altered just enough to screw a few things up.

The change is as follows: a question mark in the URL will be replaced over time by an exclamation mark.  And a post on the YouTube API Blog promised, “The old-format URLs will continue working indefinitely when used for browser navigation, so if your web site has existing links to YouTube video pages, you don’t need to worry about them breaking.”

But the post then continued, “What we’re concerned about is developers who have written code that takes a user-supplied YouTube video page URL as input and attempts to parse out the video id using a method that assumes there will be a ? character in the URL.  If you have such code, you will need to make it flexible enough to support both styles of URLs.”

Get ready accordingly (YouTube would like you to use its oEmbed service) if this move has the potential to upset anything you’ve developed.

Google has announced a new Geocoding Web Service that adopts improvements from the latest version of the Google Maps Javascript API – v3. According to Google, these improvements include:

- A flatter response format for address components that is easier to parse
- The ability to tag an address component with multiple types
- Both full names and abbreviations for countries and states
- Differentiation between rooftop and interpolated geocoder results
- Both the bounding box and recommended viewport for each result

“The Geocoding Web Service is intended to enable precaching of geocoder results that you know your application will need in future,” says Google Maps API Product Manager Thor Mitchell. “For example, if your application displays property listings, you can geocode the address of each property, cache the results on your server, and serve these locations to your API application. This ensures that your application does not need to geocode the address of a property every time it is viewed by a user. However we do ask that you regularly refresh your cache of geocoder results.”

Mitchell is careful to point out that according to the Maps API Terms of Service, you must only use the Geocoding Web Service in conjunction with a Google Map.

More info about the Web Service can be found here.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create an animation that moves from one position to another, using the Motion Tweening Tool.

Mochi Media and Shanda Games Limited, announced the Mochi Game Developer Fund, a $10 million fund that will help Flash and social game developers support their games through sponsorship, licensing and publishing deals.

The fund will assist small Flash game development studios and independent game developers globally in building games and businesses.

The initiative will be managed by members of the management team of Mochi Media and Shanda Games. Through participation with the fund, developers will gain access to technical, design and testing resources from Shanda Games, as well as a host of development tools and distribution to nearly 40,000 websites globally from Mochi Media.

“With the creation of the Mochi GAME Developer Fund, we’re putting substantive muscle behind encouraging creativity in Flash and social gaming,” said Justin Wong, general manager of the fund and head of business development for Mochi Media.

“We are committed to working with developers all around the world to create games unlike we have ever experienced before and help catalyze growth of the browser-based game industry.”