Even though I love my job and my role as a developer, there are things that just aren’t that fun with it. At the moment, I don’t have much to do, until I get an e-mail about a website I worked a bit on a couple of weeks ago. It’s not live yet, but to be shown to the whole big company soon, and they want a few content changes, some minor changes in the menus and things like that. It’s not very hard work, but since I didn’t build the site I have to look through someone else’s files and try to figure out how to make the changes. It’s just tedious and boring, but I understand that comes with the job. I’m actually very happy I can say that is the only one thing I find boring in my work and that it doesn’t happen very often.

The last two weeks I’ve been working on an iPhone site, which means I’ve been doing much more HTML-work than usual. The site is so far only a demonstration, and we don’t yet know if the client wants it built for the public. I’ve never done anything for the iPhone before so it was interesting to learn more about it, what possibilities and restrictions there are.

Building a website for the iPhone isn’t too different from building a website to be viewed in a browser on a computer since you use HTML for them both. But there are some things you need to think about. Like what is gonna happen to the site when the user flips the phone, will the site adjust to the new width or look different in any other way? And apparently there are restrictions to what file-types you can download from a browser as well. (We wanted to make it possible to download a vCard with contact info to save to the contact list in the phone, but the iPhone won’t let you do that, even though you can save a vCard from your e-mail.) And all of the JavaScript I wanted to use didn’t work. There is one thing I really liked about working with an iPhone website though; there is only one browser in which you need to make the site work! Ok, you have Opera on the iPhone now, but it seems it won’t even render any other fonts than Helvetica, and for just the demonstration site, making it look good in Opera wasn’t important. (Opera is a great browser if your on a computer though!)

This week I’ve been working with a wordpress theme too. Which is great, I’ve learned so much about it in just two days that i now feel much more motivated to actually fix the theme for this blog. It’s just too bad I’m so shit at design, but I’ll try.

I’ve just had a meeting with Hege, my supervisor for the internship. I needed to make an evaluation of my internship with some feedback from her and leave the documentation on it to Hyper. I had prepared a few questions on my performance to Hege, but the meeting turned out she and me just talking in a more natural way most of the time.

We discussed what I had done well and what I could do better. Hege told me everyone was very happy with me, and she didn’t really have much to tell me on what I could improve. She said that they would like more feedback from me though on what I think of Sennep and working here. And they want me to keep learning new things the way I do so that I have a diverse skill-set.

We also talked about Sennep and how the company is evolving. When I first came here six months ago, Sennep was working almost exclusively with flash sites, except for one interactive installation. Now we are looking more into new technologies, installations, iPhone-apps and more HTML solutions than Flash. We are still doing much flash work, but I think the company overall is more open to other technologies. And it’s been really interesting for me to be able to see this development and I’m very happy with it since it will give me more varied work.

She also said something that made me happy to hear, and I think is the reason Sennep is such a good place to work: “We just want everyone to have fun, be happy with what we’re doing and do good work. And for Sennep to be recognized for our work and for everyone to be happy and celebrate!”

I don’t know how many times I’ve tried started blogging now. It just doesn’t seem to work for me; I write one or two posts and then never post anything more.

The reason I’m doing it again is that I just remembered  Hyper Island expects me to write at least four blog posts during my internship, and now there’s less than one month left! So yeah, I kind of have to start yet another blog. I’ll see how this goes, weather I continue blogging or just leave after four posts. If I decide to keep going I’ll try to design it, but at the moment I can’t be bothered with the design, I am a developer after all. I do need a new website / portfolio though, so I might just make the blog into that.

Anyway, my internship’s been going great! I’m a flash developer at Sennep in London, doing some HTML-development as well. I’m having a really good time and I’ve learnt so much. I’ve been working with different clients, mostly on Kantar Worldpanel and David James. Most recently I’ve been looking into HTML 5 to learn more about it. I enjoy working with it, but I must say I still prefer Flash. It might just be that I’m more used to ActionScript, but I find working with JavaScript very messy when building something more advanced. Though I like HTML and I think that when you can use it you should, but there are still uses for Flash, as I see it.

Client: Attitud

Loupe is a web application to be used by photographers as a way of communicating with their clients. I was approached with this project earlier this year when the idea and concept was fully developed, and asked to create the app in Flash. I took the job and developed the whole application including a CMS, also in Flash.

The photographer’s clients can log in to view all albums and photos they have with the photographer, place an order and move, resize and scale their photos on the “light table”. The photographer and client can also share a light table, where they both see and handle the same photos. I think the app is pretty cool and that it will be useful to photographers and their clients.

You can check out the demo by logging in the the name and password guest.

Client: opalescence.se

Opalescence asked us to restructure their webshop while at the same time redesigning the entire website. I was the developer for this project and I made most of the coding needed for the new design. There was of course some CSS to do, but also quite a lot of PHP since we were redesigning their webshop along with the CMS.

It turned out to be a good experience where I learned how to understand someone else’s code and to continue building onto it. I’m happy with the result and I’m glad I got to do a little more back-end development than usual and improve my skills in that area.