I’ve been working at s1 for eight years now, designing and developing some of Scotland’s leading online destinations like s1jobs, s1homes and s1′s local community platform.  As one of the original three members of the tech team, I’ve been involved in virtually everything that s1 has launched over the years.

Since December 2007 I’ve been working as Web Producer, managing a four-strong development team with responsibility for s1jobs, s1learning and a number of smaller sites.  Our biggest product launch of the year was the redesigned s1jobs (“now with fancy bits”) which launched successfully on schedule earlier this month.   At that time I decided to seek out a fresh challenge and was offered a move into the newspaper side of the business.

So… my new role is as Digital Innovation Manager for the Herald & Times group.  This role will see me return to the bits of my job I really love — playing with technology and coming up with innovative solutions to complex problems.   Or as the job spec puts it, I will “lead thinking on innovation, identify relevant emerging technologies and business ideas and spearhead audience drivers like search engine optimisation”.  

I’m really looking forward to starting this new role at the end of October, but in the meantime I’ve got one last project to complete for s1.  I can’t say much about it just now, but look out for a new launch in early 2009.

I finally gave in last week and bought an iPhone.   I’d been trying to resist for ages, and bought the LG U990 (supposed iPhone-beater) just at the start of the year.  But the one thing the LG taught me was that tech specs don’t count for anything – it’s the quality of the UI that’s most important, and that’s what Apple have got right.

My first paid-for App Store purchase was Dynolicious, one of the many car speed/performance apps already on the market.  What really appealed about Dynolicious over the competition was that it didn’t use the GPS at all.  Instead, it relies on the built-in accelerometers and some clever physics to work out the acceleration (and therefore speed) of your car.

I was already fimilar with performance meters that work this way, having played with my friends G-Tech Pro a few times over the years.  I’d actually considered buying a G-Tech myself, but couldn’t really justify the £250 or so it cost for the odd occasion I’d use it.  But a £7.95 app for a device I already own?  …much more interesting!

I’ve read a lot about the impressive accuracy of Dynolicious online and have to say it seems pretty damn accurate.  

First I tried the 1/4 mile timing.  You just press the ‘start run’ button and it waits for you to move off.  As soon as it detects a movement of over 0.1G (configurable) it starts the timer.   Again, the results seem really accurate.  Compared to my TomTom GPS the terminal velocity of 83mph was bang on and the 0-60 time of 9.69s felt spot on too (the quoted figure for the IS200 is 9.5s and I expected to be slightly slower given the cold damp road surface at the time of the test).

Next I gave the skidpan feature a go and managed to rack up a Lateral G figure of 0.90 and a Braking G of 0.86 on the local roundabouts.  I have less hard facts to judge these on, but again they felt about right, my braking being less effective than the cornering due to the ABS kicking in.

All in all I’m dead happy with it.  The only thing I’d like to see in a future revision of the software is a way to store and review the dyno graphs it captures during a run.  The graphs — showing BHP, torque and speed — have an impressive level of detail that I’d like to take a look at later.  For example, you can clearly see the length of time you lose on each gear change.

Today sees the launch of the new s1jobs.com, now full of ‘fancy bits’ like homepage personalisation, AJAX search results, drag & drop personalisation of My Account, etc, etc.   It’s also a completely fresh, new design which gives us more space for content while allowing new ad formats such as the leaderboard and useful new stuff like our tailored tip (CRM) messages.  Naturally, there are some SEO improvements in there too.

We actually flicked the switch around 7pm last night, just to give us enough time to test and tweak it on the live servers before the usual morning traffic spike.  So far the site is actually performing even better than expected, the AJAX search results are so quick you’d swear they were cached.   Here’s a quick shot of the new homepage:

The site is the culmination of nine months work from the planning stages and four months full-time design and development.  I’m really pleased with the result and I think it pushes us even further ahead of the competition in Scotland, indeed even in the rest of the UK.  Congratulations to everyone involved – you know who you are.

The re-design will be backed by a TV, press and online advertising campaign starting today.