Mohu™

Jack and Jill of all trades...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 11:19 +0100

I recently attended an event sponsored by Adobe and this was their big push to introduce Edge Tools: their new suite of web design and development software. The demos were insightful and got a few murmurs from the crowd. At lunch I decided to duck out as I couldn't see myself sitting in a cinema chair all day. On the way back to the office it got me thinking how much the role of the designer and developer are merging.

Standing on the shoulders of giants...and geeks

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:56 +0100

I've fallen in (bro) love with 37 signals all over again. I first found out about them back in 2008 where I had briefly trialed their Basecamp web tool to manage a small design project. Nowadays I'm rarely off it as it forms a core part of our day-to-day running of Mohu.

Using non-linear systems theory to learn emberjs and canvas

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:40 +0100

For every one of us that handily absorbs knowledge from good ol’ book-learnin’, there are ten of us who learn more effectively by trying things out with our own hands. Today I decided to get my hands dirty by fashioning a wee graphing app to visualise chaos, in an attempt to understand emberjs a little better, get started with my first canvas app and most importantly figure out what on earth my good friend Roche was on about last week. Rather vocally. In the middle of a restaurant.

We don't need UX... yet

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:59 +0100

A user experience team design the flow the customer/reader/player takes through a site/app/game taking extra thought to make sure that the goals of the business are catered for and balanced with customer needs within the experience. In many agencies UX determines the flow and structure of the sites. This has good and not-so-good repercussions.

The case against outsourcing

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:01 +0100

We live in an age of outsourcing. Outsource your customer support, outsource your receptionist, outsource your whole business. These days you can outsource almost anything, and if your inbox is anything like mine you'll regularly be reminded of this fact by a slew of unsolicited emails from eager salespeople.

Our own open source CMS: Chuck Norris

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 12:15 +0100

At mohu we've always been advocates of open source software. Choosing popular open source products lets us deploy rapidly and reliably and most issues we might encounter have already been dealt with by the community. Sometimes, though, the requirements of a project mean that we can't use the system we would like to. Towards the end of last year one such situation arose where open source just wasn't the best solution, thus our custom CMS/Framework 'Chuck Norris' was born.

Too much information

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 12:55 +0100

Last week I made the journey from Shoreditch to Hammersmith, the reason being to see one of my favourite female vocalists in concert. Who she is isn't necessarily important, but what I experienced during that concert was.

Multi-channel madness: Where does it all end?

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:24 +0100

I've seen many of multi-channel strategies that consist of orbiting circles and perfectly connecting lines that show how Persona 1 will watch an ad whilst accessing extra content on their iPad/iPhone and the then signs up to the website, then downloads the app and finally "likes" a page on Facebook…or thereabouts. Now this looks great on a powerpoint presentation but we know the reality is quite rare for people to feel compelled enough to experience all this in different places and formats.

Remote control

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:14 +0100

After clawing through last year and finally coming out the other side, we've learnt to keep things very lean when it comes to growth - relying on re/training rather than just hiring in capability from the outside (expending time rather than money). I wondered if there were other ways of achieving a healthy rate of growth without needing to heavily invest in management infrastructure, larger offices and generally larger overheads.

Mastering all the skills

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:15 +0100

You may have to wait a bit longer for your “I know kung fu!” moment than Neo, but through the efforts of author’s like Malcolm Gladwell and Phyllis Lane, the idea that anyone can master pretty much any skill is making it into the mainstream.

On building a culture of learning

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 10:30 +0100

Having spent most of the last year working remotely with the rest of the team from Osaka it was with somewhat fresh eyes that I joined them these last two weeks in London as we moved into our new office in Shoreditch.

Heuristics - better decisions with limited information

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 23:53 +0100

There is something to be said for the rule of thumb; the pragmatic approximation.

Mobile gotchas

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:34 +0100

Considering building a mobile version of a site? If you do make sure you get your events working on all platforms, things that you'd think would always work, don’t!

Blogging lyrical

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:39 +0100

Getting into blogging is hard. After spending my teenage years benefiting from many of the merits of blogging, I find myself struggling to find the time in adulthood, so here's my plan to get back into it.

Tim's Technical Tips Part IV: Hacking the Flex compiler

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:50 +0100

In this advanced technical tip, I'll show you how you can modify Adobe's open-source MXML compiler to suit your needs, without having your project weighed down by the Flex framework.

Tim's Technical Tips Part III: Model-View-Controller

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:06 +0100

Continuing the series of in-depth technical articles on framework design, in this post we take a look at Mohu's MVC architecture.

Build a Twitter app using jQuery Mobile

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:57 +0100

We were commissioned by Web Designer mag to write a tutorial for their readers on how to build a Twitter app using jQuery Mobile. Check out issue 179 to see the results...

Tim's Technical Tips Part II: A Better Event System

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 11:56 +0100

In the last post, I went through the software we use to make sites. Now it's time to begin building our framework, starting with the glue that holds all our projects firmly together: a solid event dispatching system.

Processing

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:07 +0100

We've taken our first tentative steps into the world of Processing. For those of you who aren't in the know, processing is a free software sketchbook that makes it a doddle to work up quick programming prototypes. In this post I'm going to be using Processing to try out a method of speeding up many to many collision detection.

Tim's Technical Tips Part I: Introduction

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:14 +0100

After several years in the digital industry, and almost a year at Mohu, it feels like it's finally time to start Giving Back To The Community. This is the first in a series of technical posts which will run you through our programming workflow, starting by detailing the software we use to build a project.