HTML5 is the new emerging web standard, the technology that brings internet content to the screen.  This is the code that acts as a toolset for developers to design and create web content and applications.  The new standard will address the way the internet has evolved in recent years, giving developers greater control of media and graphics content and a suite of tools to facilitate building services and applications.  HTML5 also makes it easier for developers to work cross-platform, creating content that will work on mobile platforms such as tablets and smartphones as well as on PCs.

It will be some years before HTML5 is completed and fully deployed, but many developers are already starting to use the technology in exciting ways.  We at Scribble are excited about the possibilities offered by HTML5 and potential applications in the future.  So we’ll be keeping an eye on developments and making regular posts to talk about things that get us excited about the future of HTML5.

One of the main views of HTML5 is as a replacement for Flash.  While Flash is a popular choice for interactive and media content on the web, it’s closed nature and search engine unfriendliness has had developers yearning for an alternative for some years.  Apple’s refusal to incorporate Flash compatibility into iOS devices has also added significant pressure for developers to move away from Flash. HTML5 offers media playback, animation, 3d graphics and many more tools for rich-media content.

In fact, HTML5 offers many more tools outside of rich media content and is much much more than an alternative to Flash, but we thought this would be a good place to start.  We’ve picked out a number of beautiful examples of what developers can do using HTML5, and they paint a pretty picture of what we can expect from HTML5 in our web browsers and on our mobile devices in the future.

Click the images to view these beautiful examples of HTML5 in action.  A recently updated version of Chrome is recommended to view these.  Many of these are found on ChromeExperiments.com a site set up by google to showcase the exciting possibilities of HTML5.

WebGL Terrain

Beautiful landscape procedurally drawn in real time.

Endless Forest

An endless generated 3D spooky forest.

3 Dreams of Black

This is what you get when you put HTML5 tools in the hands of amazing artists and animators.  A jaw-dropping journey through a 3D world exploding with life!

8-Bit Colour Cycling

This demo replicates an old-school effect used in the days of 8-bit colour palettes.  This involves ‘colour-cycling’ – automatically shifting specific sets of colours in the palette - to create animation effects.  At the time, this was used as an efficient way to bring movement to images without actually animating multiple frames.  Enjoy this stunningly beautiful set of images steeped in gaming nostalgia!

Arcade Fire – The Wilderness Downtown, Interactive film by Chris Milk

A superb example of innovative and out-of-the-box thinking. Difficult to sum up in words…  as you go through the experience, the browser opens and closes windows, showing you pictures of your home town fed in from Google Maps and depicting flocks of birds that interact with the narrative.  In addition to the beautiful and impressive motion graphics, the experience is thoughtfully designed to instill nostalgia and make you engage with the music.

Contactless payments are arriving.  The technology, Near-Field-Communication, can be embedded in a small chip or in a mobile phone, and allows messages to be quickly exchanged between devices.  This is one of the key technologies behind the vision of a ‘digital wallet’ that will do away with the need to carry physical cash to pay for things.

If you happen to have an NFC enabled phone, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, BlackBerry Bold or Nokia C7, you can already make small payments for things just by holding your phone near, or tapping, an NFC reader.  Or you may have a MasterCard ‘PayPass’ enabled credit card or key-fob, or a Barclays contactless debit card.

Many UK retailers are signing up, with 25% of stores trailing the systems now.  But you can already pay for purchases in McDonalds, Pret A Manger, EAT, Little Chef and Subway, just make sure your order doesn’t go over £15, the maximum payment you can make.

But before we fully embrace the digital future of mobile payments and liberate ourselves from heavy leather money-tombs we call our wallets, will we be able to do everything that we usually do with physical cash?

Things you will or will not be able to do with your digital wallet:

Buy a Twix from a vending machine..

Some of the first pilot schemes for NFC and mobile payments have been in vending machines.  Since many of these machines are owned by large snacks and drinks companies, there is a pretty good chance of a reasonably fast rollout.

Lend your mate 50p to buy a Twix

As it turns out, this is already very easy to do with NFC.  Paypal have already launched an app to allow users to transfer money between PayPal accounts just by entering the amount requested on the payees device and tapping the two phones together, simple!

Buy a pint of milk

The fastest proliferation of the technology will be across large chains: supermarkets and high-street retailers.  Many large chains already accept NFC payments.  So if you buy milk and bread from Sainsburys or Tesco, there’s a good chance that you will be able to pick up the essentials even if you’re short of change.

Pay for a parking space

There are a number of companies deploying NFC and mobile payment based parking meters and terminals for car-parks, but privately run car parks may be slower to update their systems without sufficient pressure from the market.

Buy a bus ticket

Various cities around the world, such as Milan, are implementing NFC payments into their public transport systems.  The City Of London will soon adapt it’s Oyster payment system (itself, a form of NFC) to allow NFC payments. It may take quite a bit longer for public transport systems around the UK to follow suit.

Play on the ‘Penny Shove’ machines on Brighton Pier

Many traditional games and attractions such as the much-loved (and hated) coin-shove games, of course, require the physical object of a coin.  It is very unlikely that mobile and digital payments will totally replace physical money.  But if the convenience of being able to pay for almost anything digitally outweighs the need to carry a wallet, the remaining services that still depend on notes and coins may feel pressure to update or retire.

Technology has been striving for many years to do away with the old fashioned paradigm of carrying around heavy wallets full of cash in the form of notes and coins.  But just as the arrival of the PC did not banish paper from the office as many had hoped, the adoption of online payments and plastic bankcards has still not replaced the need for physical cash.

 The extremely fast proliferation of mobile phones and smartphones has made them into a great candidate to become a ‘digital wallet’.   There has been much excitement in the field for some time now, but progress has been slow because of a struggle to reach a common standard and slow adoption rates from retailers and consumers.  Nevertheless, the reality of mobile payments is drawing closer, with major players such as MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, Intel and Google joining the race.  As well as offering a convenient alternative to cash payments for consumers, mobile payment technology offers an easy way for small business to accept payments.

 Visa has introduced a mobile payment system that does not require a bank account.  The system is a pre-paid account that allows consumers to withdraw funds from ATMs, transfer funds, and make purchases from online merchants who accept Visa payments.

These kind of mobile money solutions have been designed to work via the standard mobile network; no internet connection is required, maximizing the accessibility of the service as a leap-frog technology: in many developing countries, mobile phones are more available than many much older infrastructures such as, in this case, banks.

In order to replace the need for carrying cash, an infrastructure for enabling mobile payments needs to be rolled out across the retail sector.  One key technology in this area that is starting to gain momentum is Near Field Communication, or NFC.  Also known as ‘contactless payment’, the technology allows transactions to be processed just by holding a NFC enabled card or device next to a reader.  Nearly 20% of stores in the UK already have NFC enabled readers, and the NFC chips are being introduced in new mobile handsets.  Since the chips can be very small, there is talk of building them into SIM cards, and some banks already have them built into bankcards.  Public awareness of the technology is still very low, however, and confidence will need to be won before the technology is widely adopted.  NFC technology is currently limited to a maximum transaction value of £15, surely a reflection that the public will need to be eased in.

Whilst there is still fierce competition between the major players to produce a dominant standard, much of the technology and infrastructure is already well established.  Public awareness and confidence in the technology is still very low however, and will present the main challenge, but with such heavy investment going into mobile payments from major organizations the knowledge gap is sure to close soon – the reality of mobile payments may be closer than we think.

Augmented reality is going to play an increasingly important role in mobile technology into the future.  Our mobile, web and social media are becoming more integrated every day, with every piece of internet content bearing the obligatory line-up of ‘connect’ and ‘share’ icons along the bottom.  Even this approach to connecting services is likely to change.  Facebook is leading the way, absorbing many more content and services so that users access third party content without leaving the site – creating a seamless experience.  In the same way, augmented reality promises to integrate our mobile devices with the world around us.

Combined with location services, augmented reality is an attractive technology that promises the potential to enrich mobile maps and directory services with information relevant to our immediate surroundings:  simply point your phone at the theatre building to find out what plays are on, see on-screen directions to find your way to the nearest oriental restaurant, or point at a bus stop sign to find out when the next bus is coming.

 Just as social network integration enriches our web experiences by connecting them with our friends or social contacts, augmented reality will integrate our mobile devices with our locations and physical surroundings, making experiences more relevant, engaging and real.

The technology is still new, however, and it will be some time before the technology becomes settled enough to provide a set of standards and become seamlessly integrated into our phone’s camera and map apps.  In the meantime, developers are hard at work innovating with new features and exciting applications.

Augmented reality games using a device’s camera are popular, particularly with marketers looking to create an engaging experience connected with their brand.  Recently at Scribble, we have received a number of briefs showing interest in another area: location-based augmented reality apps.  There are already some great examples of this; marketers have started using this technology to incentivise users to ‘check-in’ to a particular location, rewarding customers for attending specific events, for example.  A popular concept that we have received inquiries about from clients is the AR ‘Treasure Hunt’: this involves hiding virtual ‘treasures’ that users have to find using their phones, and can take place on any scale, over an entire city, or around a building or venue.  New applications are emerging that can trigger events or gameplay features based on the user’s location, or incorporate real-world locations into the gameplay experience.

Being a new technology, there are some good and some bad examples of augmented reality in action.  So why not try some out yourself?  To make this process a bit easier for you, we’ve tried and selected a few great examples that we feel really show the potential of augmented reality:

Shadow Cities, created in Finland, is a game that combines augmented reality and geo-location to create a unique gaming experience.  The game turns the player’s local area map into a game ‘board’.  Players move around the area, battling for control of territories, casting spells by making gestures on the phone’s screen.  This innovative approach exploits new technologies whilst harking back to childhood playground games.  Shadow Cities has become a popular title in Finland and has recently launched in the USA and Europe.  The game is a MMORPG, an online multiplayer game, and as such requires quite a commitment to get anything out of it.  The real meat comes from forming teams with other players.  But the concept of battling it out for control of real-world locations is great.  It’s worth checking out just to see what an imaginative use of the technology this is, and a glimpse of things to come.

MyTown takes a great spin on the concept of town-building by letting you choose real businesses in your area to add to your town.  It’s a simple concept that adds a unique level of personalisation to the game.

Star Walk is not only a wonderful idea, but is amazingly well executed.  Point your phone at the sky (or even at the ground), and you will see a representation of what stars and constellations you should see in that direction.  It’s great for learning about stars and constellations, but it goes much further.  The whole picture is zoom-able to an amazing extent, like Google Earth for the stars, and each and every star in the sky can be tapped to show extra information or will take you to an online encyclopaedia.

I would expect to see something like Layar built into our mobile devices in a few years’ time.  Layar helps you to find points of interest in your local area.  Locations are sorted into ‘layers’, which anyone can create, and you can select at will.  You can point your device at points of interest to show more information, or get Layar to give you directions.  Layars layers are user generated, and sorted by local relevance, which allows for some interesting content.  Firing it up in the Scribble office allows me to view a guide to nearby street-art in Brighton, nice!

People are downloading apps to their smartphones and mobile devices more than ever before.  But with more than half a million apps in the Apple App Store, and more than 200,000 in the Android Marketplace, it can be hard to make an app that stands out.

As well as making an app stand out, it is important to ensure that users will keep using the app once they have downloaded it.  Here at Scribble, we know that getting users to keep coming back is of the upmost importance, and we are always looking at ways to keep users engaged and to create apps that last.

Loyal customers can be an important revenue stream.  More and more developers are exploiting in-app purchases over app sales as the main income from apps.

Make it usfeul

The apps that stand the best chance of staying on users’ phones are the ones that serve a specific purpose, and do it well.  If you can find a niche and create a useful app, then your app has a good chance of success.

This is useless, however, if your app does not find it’s way into the hands of your target audience of ‘organic’ users.  These are the users who will seek out your app themselves and are the most likely to keep using it.  Advertising, of course, is important, but it is also important to make sure that your app is easy to find in the online stores – this can be as simple as giving the app a title which is self-explanatory and search friendly (ie the app title contains words that users are likely to type in when searching for the app they need), and making sure the app is in the correct categories.

Make it fun

With so many choices, users are likely to lose patience quickly and look for an alternative app if they become frustrated while using your app.  Conversely, if the app is fun and enjoyable to use, they are more likely to keep coming back.  This can be as simple as making the language of the content entertaining, and making the presentation attractive and fun.

Update Content

We regularly build CMS systems into our solutions to allow clients to manage the content of their app themselves.  Regularly updating content within the app is a great way to keep users engaged.  Live feeds from social networks are an easy way to bring up to date information into the app.  Push notifications can be used to alert a user when new content has been added – this feature should be used sparingly though, annoy your users and they will simply disable it or remove the app!

Give Incentives

We‘ve found that competitions and exclusive content are a great way to reward users and keep them interested.  You can also reward your users for using the app frequently or for posting messages about the app on their social networks, increasing their engagement and spreading the word!

Measure Engagement

Simple download statistics do little to tell you how your app is being used and how often.  Building measurement tools into the app can give you useful information; such as how long gaps are between usages of the app and how users respond to push notifications.  Getting a detailed picture of how your users are using the app is essential if you are to respond to user habits and tailor updates to your user base.

We love to chat about new and exciting ways to make apps that stand the test of time, come visit us to find out more, or let us know your thoughts.