Dog food manufacturer Bakers has just launched the first British advertisement made specifically for dogs. The advert, which aired for the first time last week on ITV 1, includes sounds which are beyond the range of human hearing.

The commercial is a pastiche of classic movie ‘The Italian Job’ but with a difference. According to the producers, the advert features whistles and barks above 17,000 hertz which have been included to get the attention of any canine “viewers” who happen to be near the television.

According to one report, the thinking behind the advert is that: “It will provoke dogs, who are not usually captivated by visual stimuli, into reacting to the TV, convincing owners that they are interested in the product on the screen”.

Bakers claim that most dogs are expected to react by pricking up their ears, tilting their heads or walking over to the TV set. So as an experiment, we filmed our resident canine and Studio Manager, Huxley, during its first airing in order to gauge the success of the advert in attracting a new, more furry audience.

The agency responsible for creating the advert tested it on 12 dogs who were distracted with toys and found that they all reacted to its subliminal sounds. As you can see from our research (and the video above), despite there being no toys to distract Huxley, he seemed pretty unimpressed.

Will we as owners be responding to the advert and buying Huxley some Bakers dog food? Probably not.

The advert may have attracted a small canine audience and generated some interesting press coverage and publicity but it’s hardly been a resounding success, based on the evidence which we’ve seen. The target audience has limited spending power and coupled with a mixed reaction on social media networks, we believe that Bakers are barking up the wrong tree.

The Apple computer’s operating system – Mac OS X – has a neat, in-built function that allows you to quickly grab a screen shot with a simple keyboard shortcut. By holding down the Command (⌘) and Shift keys and pressing 3, you can take a screen shot of your entire screen. But what if you want to take a screen shot of just a part of your screen?

Well you can, and what’s more, Apple have designed a solution and built it right into Mac OS X and it’s triggered by another easy keyboard shortcut. By holding down the Command (⌘) and Shift keys and pressing 4, the cursor turns into crosshairs which you can use to select whatever portion of your display you’d like to capture in a screen shot. Simply choose a start point, click and drag the desired selection and when you release the mouse button, your screen shot is saved to the Desktop.

But Apple didn’t stop there. If you press the Spacebar immediately after typing the Command-Shift-4 shortcut, Mac OS X replaces the crosshairs with a camera icon. Using the camera cursor, you can take a screen shot of the Dock, the entire menu bar, a single open menu, the desktop, or any open window, simply by clicking on it.

If you’re looking to go one-step further, then there are some great apps available that offer similar functions to Mac OS X’s Command-Shift-3 but also allow you to annotate your screen shots. Skitch is a favourite in the Quentin James Design studio as it’s an easy-to-use, free app that helps you capture, edit and markup your screen captures and images with shapes and comments.

In August 2011, Skitch was acquired by Evernote, another of our favourite apps, so the future for this particular screen capture app is bright. But if you want to just capture some, or all of your screen quickly, then the Apple shortcuts are a huge time saver.

Regular clients will be pleased to learn that office dog Huxley will continue in his role as Junior VP of Client Relations, warmly welcoming clients to the studio, efficiently running project meetings, chasing off unwanted sales calls and chasing after any late payments.

We look forward to working with all our existing customers during 2012, as well as meeting new clients, with exciting new projects for us to get our teeth into. If you have a design, branding, marketing or web project that you’d like to discuss, please feel free to call us on 01772 685977 and arrange to drop in for a coffee (or tea) and a chat.

As such, Quentin James Design will be closed for the holidays from Friday 23th December 2011 and will reopen in the new year on Tuesday 3rd January 2012.

May we take this opportunity to wish all our clients, suppliers, partners and friends a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We look forward to catching up with you all after the festive holidays.

In this blog post we’ll highlight a few simple techniques that can help you to streamline the search process and improve your Google-fu.

Few Google users know that adding a + (plus) sign before a word in your search forces Google to return results, where only websites that feature that particular word are shown. For example searching for ‘+Quentin Web Design Preston‘ will only show results that feature the word ‘Quentin’. Conversely adding a – (minus) sign before a word in your search excludes that particular word from the results.

Wrapping your search phrase in “” (double quotation marks) will only show results with the entire search phrase in that specific order. As an example a search for “Quentin James Graphic Design” will only return results for web pages with this exact attribute.

Inserting an * (asterisk) into a search will fill in the blanks, so in the search ‘Quentin * Website Design Preston‘, the results will show web pages for ‘Quentin James Website Design Preston’.

To search just one particular site, for example this one, simply type your search phrase, in this case ‘website design preston’, followed by ‘site:www.quentinjamesdesign.co.uk’. You can see the results by following the link ‘website design preston site:www.quentinjamesdesign.co.uk‘.

To improve your Google-fu further and for additional information on these tips for searching and even more advanced search techniques, visit the Google Support pages.

In no particular order, here are my top five Apple technology Podcasts:

MacBreak Weekly

Leo Laporte hosts another great show from the TWiT Netcast network, offering the latest Mac news and views from the top journalists and guests covering Apple, its competitors and the wider technology sector. Regular contributors to Mac Break Weekly include Andy Ihnatko and Alex Lindsay.

Listen to MacBreak Weekly

We Have Communicators

This audio podcast covers all things iPhone from news, tips, and opinions each week from a roundtable panel of Apple experts including host Michael Johnston, Jeff Gamet and Adam Christianson.

Listen to We Have Communicators

Mac OS Ken

Monday through Friday, Ken Ray brings commute-sized tech news to the podsphere. If it’s Apple news, Apple-related news, or news related to Apple-related news, you’ll hear about it here.

Listen to Mac OS Ken

MacCast

MacCast is the show for Mac Geeks by Mac Geeks, covering everything Macintosh, hosted by Adam Christianson. Keep up to date on the latest Mac news, topics and rumors. Throw in a good dose of helpful tips and listener questions and feedback and you have the MacCast.

Listen to MacCast

The Mac Observers Mac Geek Gab

Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun come together weekly to discuss things of interest to Mac geeks, yet present them in a way that’s both entertaining and informative for the average listener.

Listen to The Mac Geek Gab

Skype

Skype isn’t just another VOIP client (Voice Over IP), it’s phone calls, video calls, instant messaging, voicemail, conference calls, a collaboration tool and yes, VOIP too. With Skype, we are communicating with an ever growing number of our clients all around the world, holding meetings and conference calls, working with colleagues who are based hundreds of miles away, on just about anything that we need to do together.

We use Skype on on our mobile phones, computers (desktops and laptops), even on our TV! The great thing about Skype is that it’s free to start using it to speak, see and instant message other people on Skype and you can even try out group video calling with the latest version of Skype. Additionally, we’re reducing our telecommunications costs and working smarter at the same time.

Mac/Win/iOS/Android
http://www.skype.com/

Dropbox

Dropbox is a really neat, free service that lets you effectively take all your documents, photos and videos anywhere and it’s quickly become vital to running our busy studio at Quentin James Design. In a nutshell it’s very clever, yet simple cloud storage, where any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and the Dropbox website. Dropbox also makes it easy to share documents with others as it allows you to invite friends, colleagues and collaborators to use folders within your Dropbox. It’s a great solution whether you’re distributing a few large files or many smaller files with another person or even a group, as all they need is a Dropbox account – which is free. If your laptop is accidentally dropped and damaged or lose or stolen, you can relax knowing that your data stored in the cloud and none of your important stuff will be lost.

We’re using Dropbox to easily and safely manage and store ongoing projects, distribute essential files with our collaborators and partners, as well as working closely with our clients on new briefs where sharing files is key to the creative process.

Mac/Win/iOS/Android
https://www.dropbox.com/

Evernote

When managing a busy design studio, keeping track of that brochure design project and website development proposal can be difficult. Not any more thanks to Evernote. Evernote is a powerful and flexible app which makes it easy to remember all sorts of things, both big and small, allowing you to work online, on your computer or on your mobile device. Evernote, as the name suggests, lets you to create and organise notes, which are searchable, can include photos, web clippings and even entire web pages, you can even record and store audio notes. When it comes to organising your notes, Evernote enables you to create notebooks and share your notes and projects with friends, family, colleagues and classmates. All of your notes and notebooks are stored in the cloud and automatically synced across all of your devices.

We reply on Evernote for taking notes of phone calls with clients and suppliers, creating minutes from video conferences and face-to-face meetings, as well as storing useful and important snippets of information found online as well as offine. These are all organised into notebooks, sometimes notebooks within notebooks, which are all fully searchable and stored in the cloud.

Mac/Win/iOS/Android
http://www.evernote.com/

1Password

We’re all spending more time online be it working, shopping or occasionally tweeting. This means our digital profiles are growing and we’ve got to manage and remember many different logins for many different websites. Often, people use the same, easy to remember password for each website but that password is which is easy to remember is likely to be easy to crack. 1Password is a nifty little app that can create strong, unique passwords for you, and then remember them, and restore them, all directly in your web browser.

You just remember ‘one password’ to unlock the app on your device, and 1Password then logs you in to your social media website, grocery shopping site and every other site that requires you to log in. Even better, you can store your keychain in your Dropbox account giving you access to 1password on multiple computers, safe in the knowledge that your keychain is stored securely in the cloud. 1Password can also store FTP login details, notes, software licence details, credit card details and other account information securely. It’s simple to use, easy to setup and saves us a lot of time during the average working day. We’re so reliant on this app that we’d be lost and logged out without it!

Mac/Win/iOS/Android
https://agilebits.com/products/1Password

SuperDuper

Data backup strategies and disaster recovery plans are vital to businesses large and small and something that we take very seriously at Quentin James Design. SuperDuper makes data backup and recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup simple. It uses a clear, friendly interface that is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper’s built-in scheduler makes it simple to back up automatically. It’s a great sidekick to Apple’s own Time Machine and works great under Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion, allowing you to store a bootable backup alongside your Time Machine volume. Plus it runs great on both Intel and Power PC Macs!

Mac (Intel and PPC)
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

So much has been written and said about Steve Jobs in the last 24hrs that I don’t think I can contribute much more. So instead, I think I’ll go and use the tools which he helped bring to the world, to create some cool stuff of my own.

I think he’d like that.

You read that right, way before the current, sleek, brushed aluminium enclosures, even before the fresh, fruity flavoured original iMac, Apples were big beige boxes, much like their Windows PC counterparts.

So why am I an Apple user then? Mainly because back then, and even to this day, Apple computers are the de facto standard in the pre-press industry. Having studied graphic design for five years to degree standard, then worked as a junior designer and pre-press production artist, before founding Quentin James Design in 1998, there really was no option but to use and embrace Apple computers.

New adopters will point to other factors that influenced their choice of fruit. Some will talk about greater security and the virus free eco-system that the Apple platform currently offers. Others will have been drawn in thanks to the ‘Halo Effect’ after purchasing a single, smaller, stand alone device, such as an iPod. Some more recent converts will simply have chosen Apple products, as they are undeniably fashionable.

So why stick with the Apple eco-system? Well, for me, it all just works – seamlessly. Sure I have the odd hiccup or problem from time to time, but having owned and used Apple computers virtually every single day since mid 1996, I can count the serious failures I’ve encountered on one hand.

In fact, I count just two failures. Firstly the Apple 1710AV monitor that came with my first Power Mac 7600 way back in 1996. The solution – buy another 1710AV with a different fault then ‘cut and shut’ the good bits together! More recently, my venerable iBook G3 developed a motherboard problem, common to that generation iBook. Leave the failing laptop in a cold room overnight, and enjoy a hour or two of unbroken usage the next day. Don’t, and the iBook would suffer a total failure soon after startup – strange but sadly true. The solution on that occasion was to sell the iBook for parts and treat myself to a shiny new Powerbook G4. Ignoring one other ‘accident’ involving a laptop on a table, a trailing power lead and boisterous Tibetan terrier named Huxley and my fifteen years of personal and professional use has been virtually hassle free.

Among the many, many Apple computers I’ve used regularly during the last fifteen years, I’ve been lucky enough to own and treasure the following examples:

• Power Macintosh 7600
• Power Mac G4 (Sawtooth)
• Powerbook G3 (Lombard)
• iBook G3
• PowerMac G5 (Q77)
• Powerbook G4
• iMac 27” Core i7
• MacBook Air (M96)

These last two models are my current crop. The 27” iMac is my daily driver and the MacBook Air, which I’m writing this blog post on, is my sporty little weekend number. But Apple don’t just design, manufacture and sell computers anymore. In fact they dropped ‘Computer’ from their name to simply become Apple inc.

The beautifully designed Apple MacBook Air.

Probably the best device/gadget I’ve ever owned, Apple or otherwise, is my iPhone (3GS). It’s a phone that syncs with my iMac, it’s also an iPod, a pocket computer, a gateway to the internet, a camera, it takes video, is a Sat-Nav and is massively, limitlessly, expandable thanks to the Apple App Store – it’s just about perfect.

So will I always be an Apple guy? I became a full time Apple user in 1996 during what was arguably Apple’s darkest hour. The products weren’t fashionable, reliable or affordable. Two years later, their founder and would-be savior, Steve Jobs returned and has since steered the company to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. They have, and continue to design and produce, some of the most iconic products in world, which are at the cutting edge of design and technology.

The fashion aspect doesn’t bother me, as I became a user when they were beige. The higher price point doesn’t bother me either, as I’m prepared to pay extra for a quality product. So, I suppose as long as their products continue to just ‘work’ straight out of the box, I’ll almost certainly be an Apple guy.

Footnote – I wrote this blog post before I had listened to episode 364 of the MacCast podcast (31/08/2011), where host Adam Christianson (@MacCast) asks eleven esteemed guests “Why are you an Apple User?” Why not listen to the podcast and find out why I’m not alone in being a long-time, committed Apple user.

Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at Bit.ly used the concept of ‘Half Life’ to help explain the patterns observed when users clicked on 1,000 popular Facebook, Twitter and YouTube links. In their study, half life is “the amount of time at which a link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it reached its peak.”

The Bit.ly study showed links to breaking news stories typically had a shorter half life as their relevance drops off rapidly. Links to amusing videos have longer half lives as they are less time sensitive and not part of an on-going event or continuous information stream.

The half life of a link is also related to the platform upon which it is released. Links posted on Facebook last, on average, 24 minutes longer than links to the same content posted on Twitter. Furthermore, links contained in emails and instant messages last even longer than those posted on Facebook, though only slightly.

Links posted to Facebook, Twitter, email and instant messaging follow a broadly similar pattern. According to Mason, this is likely to be the result of the way these platforms interact. For example the links posted on Twitter will then be shared again via Facebook, then again via email.

Interestingly, YouTube links displayed a completely different click through pattern. The average half life for the 1,000 links on Twitter, Facebook and email/instant messaging was approximately 3 hours. The average half life for the same links posted on YouTube was 7.4 hours.

Mason believes that “You could say that Twitter is the best way to post something if you want people to see it quickly”. “But one platform isn’t necessarily better than another. We’re just showing that the platforms have different dynamics.”

So in summary, it’s not only what you post but also where you post, that has a major bearing on your link’s lifespan and ultimately, it’s impact. From a Social Media Marketing point of view, the timing of your posts also plays a huge part in the effectiveness of your overall strategy and this is something we’ll explore in a future blog post. By pushing your content out to different platforms, at different times it’s possible to maximise the lifespan of your Social Media links, making the most of your content.

For help and advice with your Social Media Marketing Strategy, please give us a call on 01772 685977 or email us hello@quentinjamesdesign.co.uk. You can follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook and see our web video productions on YouTube.