Bournemouth — Apr 17th 2018
Tony went on to show how, to design a responsive site, it pays to think in terms of horizontal stripes, each of which will adapt to the screen size in use so, although the relative position of elements within each stripe may change, the order of the stripes is maintained, so preserving the main structure of the page. As an example, a BMW site was shown, illustrating how, as the browser window is reduced in size, multiple column text reduces to a single column, images are re-sized and menus collapse into pull down menus indicated by the ‘hamburger’ icon.
Tony then did a live demonstration showing how to approach this type of design using Blocs. Each page consists of several stripes (or Blocs) of content sandwiched between a Header Bloc and a Footer Bloc which appear on every page of the site.
Each Bloc contains several Brics. The library of available Brics contains types such as layout, navigation and galleries. These pre-defined Brics serve a similar purpose to the templates found in other applications.
Blocs is developed in the UK by a small (one man?) company in South Shields. Although the documentation is poor, there is a good user forum and the developer is very responsive to queries and suggestions. There are a growing number of third party videos and third party Blocs and themes are beginning to appear. Tony observed (and demonstrated) that the interface is a bit quirky but hoped this may become more standardised in future releases. Blocs costs around £60 and you will need to source a separate upload app.
After a coffee break, the Q&A session dealt with a number of questions:
• Safari now sometimes requiring user names to be typed in whereas they used to be entered automatically.
• Erratic behaviour of MailDrop.
• Some websites yielding apparently blank pages, with the content being placed a long way down (a ‘responsive design’ failure?!).
• Videos appearing in iTunes on a Mac but missing from TV App on an iOS device.
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