Thank you, thank you, thank you … your business and support enable us to do what we love. We’re looking forward to another great year of Service, Craftsmanship, Evolution and Happiness.
Season’s Greetings from all of us at ArcStone!
Any web developer will tell you that they love Firefox and we are no different. Firefox is an open-sourced web browser, that has promoted innovation and creativity in the web development community for the last five years. As we invent better ways of doing things, Firefox molds and evolves to keep up with us. Today, Firefox officially celebrates its 5th birthday.
Mmmmm, Firefox cake…
We would like to wish the folks of Mozilla a happy Firefox birthday because it has been a favorite platform for us to make our award-winning websites. Here is to the next 5 years and beyond… Cheers!
Firefox, currently at version 3.5, is a free web browser that can be downloaded at http://www.firefox.com.
Picture this: It is just another day at ArcStone. We grab our morning coffee, chat about this and that, and check our email. Then it is time to get to work. Time to delve into the world of never-been-done-before.
That’s our world.
We Love A Good Challenge
Our latest project coincided with the kick-off of Minnesota hockey season. Atomic School came to us with a unique challenge: They needed an e-commerce website that would allow the parents of Minnetonka, MN hockey players to easily order clothing and accessories. But there was a catch.
There were over 730 youth hockey players in Minnetonka. Each player’s team needed to have its own “store,” meaning its own personalized URL, as well as a simple checkout that ensured their orders were sent to the right places. Timing was tight. Hockey season was only weeks out.
But Minnetonka loves its hockey and we will always love working on web apps, so it was the perfect storm.
Unique Problem? No Problem.
Using Magento, a popular open-source e-commerce platform, we did some intensive customization to to allow the Atomic School staff to setup multiple “stores” with the click of a button.
We were able to improve upon the base Magento functionality, in this case to speed up the setup process. A member of the Atomic School staff uploads the entire inventory to Magento exactly once. They then enter the URLs and shipping details for each team.
Now it takes a customer less than three minutes from start to finish to order a Bauer Team Jacket. That’s the magic touch.
What’s Your Idea?
We love new and fresh ideas and Magento is just one of the many tools that we have at our disposal. And yes, we still offer one of the best guppy consulting services in the Western Hemisphere. What’s your idea? It would be great to hear from you.
I’ve been putting some thought lately into the best way to render shadows in AS3. The built-in DropShadowFilter is perfect for most situations – particularly headlines and simple movie clips – but it lacked perspective control, at least for what I was envisioning…
We recently completed an ‘Interactive Roof Designer’ Flash piece for Trimline Building Products. The objective was to create an area where prospective clients could customize the look of a house, and apply different colors from Trimline’s Distinction Tile and Distinction Slate composite roofing product lines. The final piece allowed for some interesting looking houses – here’s a break down of the process for each step…
1. CHOOSE HOME STYLE
3 photos were selected to represent different house styles. The idea at this point was to focus on the overall structure of the house – as the material, color and roof product would be customized in the following steps. ArcStone’s Nick Longtin created line drawings of each house. He did it all with his left hand while sipping a delicate blend of herbs and spices with his right.
2. SELECT MATERIAL & COLOR
This stage allows you to select a building material – brick, stucco or siding – and customize the overall color. Using ActionScript’s BitmapData, a custom ColorSelector class was written to avoid using a simple color picker with a limited palette. This allowed use of the full spectrum and a color intensity slider (saturation).
Surprisingly, the bulk of the work at this stage wasn’t the ColorSelector or Flash development – it was the laborious job of masking out the exposed building on all 3 house photos and applying brick, stucco and siding textures to to each house with perspective and shadows in mind. The textures where then desaturated to a medium gray and applied to each house in Flash as a MovieClip, set to BlendMode.OVERLAY. When the ColorSelector dispatches a CHANGE event – the new color gets applied to the selected texture movieclip (via ColorTransform manipulations).
3. DESIGN YOUR ROOF
The final step – applying different roof products – was achieved through the same techniques as step 2, but the tint color overlay was limited to the colors of the individual composite roofing products.
The final product allows visitors to visualize their dream roof in real-time, right in the browser, and without downloading any software. Other similar systems from Timeline’s competitors often rely on server side image manipulation that is slow, requires page refreshing, and just isn’t very interactive.
Flash is a great technology for visualizing products, and incredibly effective at drawing customers into site content by offering engaging interactive elements. If you’re interested in bringing a product or service to life on the web please contact us. We would be happy to discuss the wonderful options Flash and other technologies offer.
For those that weren’t aware of my latest adventure, here’s a recap 
Not technology related – but interesting nonetheless….
With the recent arctic air passing through, my buddy and I had a brilliant (well, crazy) idea…. We wanted to experience what 45 degrees below zero felt like. After a regular day at work, we somewhat spontaneously made the 4 hour drive up towards Embarrass, MN, where the lowest temperatures in Minnesota are typically recorded.
The conditions were just right for extreme low temps in that area – high pressure a little bit North West (pushing cold air from the North down), and very clear, calm nights.
We rose at about 6 am, bundled up, and walked around with a wired thermometer for a little over an hour…
Cold like that feels quite a bit different than 10 below and windy in the cities. That windchill feels like its ripping your skin off. The extreme but calm cold isn’t as sharp, but it’s unrelenting — loose a little bit of heat with a glove off or exposed skin, and its pretty difficult to warm things back up.
After our chilly morning walk, we got some pancakes and I spent the rest of the day telecommuting from our hotel.
Ridiculous, I know.