Bvsh Hovse's posts, page 26

BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

IE 5 is still supported, although to a lesser extent. The standards document is here for anyone interested.

BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

I think Heathrow Terminal 5 has demonstrated what happens if you try changing lots of things at once and hope for the best.

BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

It matters a great deal for the accessability of the page. Not everyone is using the same browser as you, or even any web browser. All sorts of devices be they mobile phones, internet TVs or even software that screen reads for the blind (like Jaws) could be trying to parse the page.

If it is written to standards it can be designed in such a way that the page formatting gracefully becomes less complex as the page is read by systems that support less and less of the features used (like Javascript, CSS etc.) The data on the page still remains the same, just looks less pretty. Using tables for layout purposes does not degrade gracefully, and will confuse some systems on the logical way to display (or read) the data. They are also completely unnecessary, not a table in use on the bbcworldservice.com homepage.

There is something that feels unfinished about things at the moment, so I'm reserving my judgement until things have settled down for a while. Although I wasn't the only one at work today surprised by the changes happening last night. It must have taken some serious bribes to get a development team in the office at the time of the morning

BBC Arabic

That's right, if you watch the latest headlines recording each side of a restricted hour then you will see the opt out in action. It is on the Arabic TV 'to do' list to tidy this up, as it currently just crashes between the two sources.

BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

CPS is a bespoke BBC system, used by BBC News and a few WS languages to update the BBC News website. I've heard there are plans to rationalise the number of different systems in use, and as a result English Regions are also due to be migrated to CPS.

The other big content management system is TOPCAT. This is used by the majority of World Service language services and the Gaelic language news service to update their web content.

BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

I'll be interested to what has been done tomorrow morning, as I have not been sent an email warning of CPS maintenance this evening. I would expect to have been told, as some World Service languages use CPS.

For those that don't know CPS is the content management system for everything hosted on news.bbc.co.uk.

Sky Guide Music...?

I saw a demo at an R&D open day recently, which was open to the public so I can't see it being a trade secret. However the guy demonstrating it was clear that what we saw had pretty much just been written the day before, as the EPG streams had only just started broadcast. So it was very much a quick hack, rather than finished product - so don't take any of this as hard facts!

It reminded me a lot of the EPG built into my Samsung IDTV for Freeview, except IIRC it used a palette based around the colour purple. Whether the colour scheme was taken from the freesat branding guidelines, or just happened to be the developers favourite colour I don't know!

[stands back and waits for 'The Freesat Branding Thread' to appear]

Sky Guide Music...?

When I was being given the tupenny tour of Broadcast Centre by some friends who worked on interactive, I was shown the interactive tv test suite. They have one of every digibox ever made, including the Sky Digital IDTVs. They have to ensure that all new interactive applications work on all the boxes, even the very first box that is nearly 10 years old. They also have guidlines on how quickly certain things happen as the application loads and runs.

Sky insist on this compatibilty, probably to save them having to start swapping out boxes. But it means that developers are now having to come up with more and more convoluted ways to make newer applications work on these older boxes - when they would rather be writing applications that use the increased memory and processing power of the newer boxes. If Sky were to retire just the first 4-5 boxes then it would make their life so much easier. There can't be that many of them still in working order 10 years on.

If On Digital were still going I do wonder if they would be enforcing the same policy on their boxes. If they were then I doubt the interactive experience on Freeview would be anywhere near as good as it is now.

BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

For the record, I've not seen any of the new branding for months now, so it could have all changed completely since. However nothing jumped out and said BBC Arabic to me at the time.

Sky Guide Music...?

One of the features of Sky is that the software in the box does get regularly updated. If your box has missed an upgrade through being switched off, then you might find some features are missing. One of the obvious ones would be the changed EPG making all the radio channels start with 0. I've no idea if you could access the radio channels on such a box.

I've read tales elsewhere of digiboxes that have missed several upgrades (say, has been in the garage for 3 years) which have become useless because they then cannot understand the current versions of the software being broadcast and so fail to download it.

Sky Guide Music...?

I was told the same thing as you about the EPG broadcast Noggin, but after setting up a digibox outside the footprint of the Default Transponder I've seen different behaviour.

One of the joys of the Sky system is that it is a black box, so we all have to look at it's behaviour as outsiders and try and draw our own conclusions from our observations of the behaviour of the system. It is possible we may all have seen different things and draw different conclusions as to how it works which are all wrong.

Whereas Freesat is based on more open standards so it should be easier for everyone to work out how it works even if they do not have access to documentation.

BBC News Rebrand - This Monday

No, no and thrice no. the Arabic service was always due to start before the new corporate look was even planned, so had branding delivered by BBC News, who won the bid to provide the channel identity.

Any similarity between the Arabic branding and the new BBC News branding is purely coincidental, as they were designed by seperate agencies.

BBC News have done a fantastic job of branding BBC Arabic Television, so I'm sure difficult questions will be asked if Lambie Nairn do not deliver branding for BBC News that is up to the standard set by BBC News for BBC Arabic.