The world famous Ann Arbor Art Fair is here! With booths and displays setup throughout Ann Arbor, we’d like to get in on the action and showcase some of our artwork from the past few months. When the cruel weather of the midwestern winter and spring lured us back to bed each morning, these were the projects that kept us motivated.

More On the Way…

We’re well into Summer now with some great projects in the works. Make sure to follow our latest musings, launches and news on our Twitter account or Facebook page!

A well designed site can never really get off the ground without a little development love behind the scenes. We have some top-notch developers here at MetaSpring and they like to keep us up to date on the latest news in the industry. It seems like there’s always something to talk about with new apps and methodologies sprouting up all the time – so let’s get to it, before these stories are old news!

Google Bringing Accelerometer Support to Chromium

UberGizmo reports that Google is bringing accelerometer support to Chromium, an important move of note for developers. An accelerometer gives a device, such as a video game controller or iPad, orientation awareness which can be used for information input. With more and more devices built featuring accelerometers, developers will be able to craft new applications and programs for interacting with the user. Google, recognizing the significance of accelerometers into he future, has launched support for Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome.

Do Web Designers and Web Developers Need to Be Enemies?

Having trouble keeping your Design and Development teams on good terms? Rarely is there a project in which designers and developers see eye to eye immediately. And sometimes that’s okay, but other times…watch out. We’re fortunate enough to have a very tight knit group here at MetaSpring, with designers and developers getting through projects relatively hassle free. But we’ve heard the horror stories and so has Peter from Agriya. In this well-written post, he identifies 4 ways to keep your designers and developers on the same page.

Increase Productivity by Creating PHP Helper Functions

Whether its a new trash compactor or iPhone, time-saving tools are always important. This is even more true for development teams, as we’re often trying to create clean and efficient code in very short periods of time. This post by Michael Watson of Nettuts+, outlines several PHP helpers that cut down on repetitive tasks and help to streamline the development process.

Web Designer as The Artist, Scientist And Philosopher

As a web evolutionary, you must wear many hats. On any particular day, you are called to inspire others with colors and shapes, while also balancing the pragmatics of functionality and answering to the almighty dollar. The unique position of a web professional is profiled in this wonderful post from Smashing Magazine’s Alexander Dawson. It’s so good, you may have seen it on Twitter a couple times already, but if not, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s also a great post for inspiration when dealing with troublesome clients.

Mobile Developer Economics 2010: The Migration of Developer Mindshare

According to a survey by Vision Mobile’s Andreas Constantinou, developers are moving towards the Android platform with great ambition and focus. The survey reveals some telling tendencies as well. As the article points out,

A mindshare migration has taken place for mobile developers away from the incumbent platforms Symbian, Java ME and Windows Phone, while a substantial number of PC software developers have flocked to iPhone and Android

The reason for this migration might be attributable to the large market penetration, speed of development, potential to make money, and low cost dev tools as reasons for initially choosing Android.

Bootstrapping a Prototype-based Object-oriented Language in 44 Lines of Code

Ever dreamed of creating your own programming language? As Aaron Gough tells us, it’s slightly easier than you think. In a 44 lines of Ruby code, Aaron walks you through the implementation of a prototype-based object-oriented model without using any of Ruby’s object-oriented features. The project starts with storing a Hash and ends up with a micro-language that, while not pretty, definitely works.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Marketing

Thanks to all of you who submitted posts this month! We appreciate hearing from you and hope you’ll tune in next time as well. Our next carnival will focus on Web Marketing, a topic we’re very familiar with. As you’ll see in this blog over the coming weeks, we’re growing our Web Marketing services, building on past successes with clients like Amish Tables, FindItLocal411.com and Ashcom Technologies. Let us know if you’re interested in learning more about our SEO, SEM, Social Media and Marketing ideas. At MetaSpring, we connect all the dots!

Our first MetaSpring blog post in February of 2008 promised that our blog would act as a hub for communications between our company and the rest of the world. Since then, we’ve tried to stayed true to that commitment while also implementing some changes improve this communication.

The majority of these improvements have been pretty abstract, in terms of how we approach blog posts and what content is discussed. Well, we’ve recently launched a physical evolution of the blog in order to help our readers find the information that’s most relevant to them.

Our Creative Director, Ian Wilson, who oversaw most of the changes, explains:

We do a lot of different things for our clients and we like to share our knowledge and experiences in those fields with our readers through the blog. As our readership grew and we began to dedicate more energy to keeping the blog up to date, we quickly realized that breaking our blog out into more discrete categories would help our readers to more easily get to the content they want. On top of that we were also itching to update the design of our blog, so with that in mind we put together the three sections to focus on their specific topics and give our readers a little more eye candy.”

As Ian mentioned, the MetaSpring blog will now be broken up into four distinct categories, each with its own RSS feed (we’ll still have the cumulative feed available on the blog home page – so make sure to update your subscriptions):

• 

  Design

  The design process involves a lot of hard work and dedication in a constantly evolving industry. In this section, we’ll share advice on overcoming obstacles and keeping up with trends in the design world.

• 

  Development

  New trends in web and application development are constantly popping up, so in this section, you’ll find posts on new trends and technologies, code snippets, industry news, and a lot of Ruby-related goodness.

• 

  SEO & Marketing

  We are constantly exploring the marketing aspects of the web, and this is the home of our ruminations. Posts in this section will illustrate ways to capitalize on new methods to market your website or yourself on the web.

• 

  Company

  Are you a MetaFan? One of the best parts of a company blog are the conversations that spark up between the public and the organization. This portion of our blog will highlight some of the great things happening at MetaSpring, such as new job postings and site launches.

This new layout is designed to facilitate better discussion so if you are having any difficulties, please let us know. As we continue to adjust the style of the blog, you can look forward to the same high quality content. We’re happy that you’re here and look forward to many great conversations. Talk to you soon!

Valentine’s Day was more than a week ago, but we’re still feeling the love. We’ve been fortunate enough to get a bit of press attention recently and were thrilled to share our thoughts and ideas with the community.

Business Innovations with Larry Eiler

Last week, MetaSpring’s own Casey and JP were invited to record a podcast with Larry Eiler, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Eiler Communications. The podcast is part of a weekly series entitled Innovative Business Results. Guests on the show discuss their organization, as well as other business-related issues in the news.

We were very excited to join Larry on the podcast and thank him for the invitation. Topics discussed include:

• MetaSpring Company News
• Our recent exploration of Web 2.0 in the Academic community
• Ann Arbor’s Tech & Innovation Community

You can listen to our segment here: February 23, 2010 Podcast

And, you can find the full archive of shows at the Business Innovation website.

Job Searching in a Tough Economy

As many of you know, the MetaTeam has a pretty extensive online presence. Whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks, you can usually find someone at MetaSpring to connect with. That was the case when a student at the University of Oregon was recently looking for job-searching advice from recent college grads through Twitter. This sort of crowd-sourcing technique was one of the skills Casey discussed in his last post about Web 2.0 and its role in career preparation.

Casey was happy to answer the call and bestowed upon her the knowledge that he’d gained from his job search last summer. The student, Paige Landsem, was able to condense Casey’s thoughts into a very helpful blog post for her class entitled Gateway to Media. The post is intended to help students combat current economic conditions. Well done, Paige!

Upcoming MetaSpring Appearances

We’re continuing our publicity run next month with another local engagement:

Lucy Ann Lance Business Insider – March 16

Lucy Ann Lance is one of the most ardent supporters of the Ann Arbor business community, emceeing events and chairing several local advocacy groups around town. She also hosts a daily (Mon-Sat) radio show called The Lucy Ann Business Insider, 9am-12pm on 1290AM WLBY in Ann Arbor. The show can also be found streaming online on 1290AM’s site or archived on Lucy Ann’s website. We start our day listening to her show co-hosted with Dean Erskine.

After a few conversations with Lucy Ann on Twitter, we were fortunate enough to receive an invite to appear on her Tech Tuesday segment on March 16th . This pre-St. Patrick’s Day show will be a lot of fun and we invite you to listen along.

Contact MetaSpring

As you can see, MetaSpring loves to talk. Usually we let our web designs do most of the talking, but we love to chat in person too. Most of our staff is on Twitter and we maintain an active Facebook presence. If you’d like to get in touch with a member of our team for an interview, networking event, or speaking engagement, email us at info@metaspring.com or check out our staff pages for social networking info.