Fraser Crosbie – Calgary Flash & Flex Developer

Home Hardware recently launched their Design Centre, a collection of applications geared towards helping homeowners research a huge range of products available at their local store. The Design Centre includes the Beauti-Tone Paint Home Designer and the Beauti-Tone Paint Colour Finder, which I blogged about in the previous post, as well as two new applications, the HomeWorks Visualizer and Your Scrapbook.

HomeWorks Visualizer is similar to the Beauti-Tone Paint Home Designer in that it allows the customer to apply product to a variety of home exteriors and interior rooms, including kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms and more. HomeWorks Visualizer includes a wide range of product categories including siding, stucco, brick, stone, roofing, decking, garage doors, concrete coatings, paint, doors, windows, flooring, ceiling, countertops, wall coverings and tiles. Users can save their projects, email them to a friend, and request a home install from their local Home Hardware store.

You can use the HomeWorks Visualizer here: http://www.homehardware.ca/index/renoworks-homeworks

Your Scrapbook is a great place for members of the Home Hardware site to store photos they find inspirational into their very own scrapbook. Using the Image Grabber utility, which can be launched on any website using a bookmark, a member can add photos on the fly while they are surfing any web site.

You can use Your Scrapbook here: http://www.homehardware.ca/index/renoworks-scrapbook
Note: You will need to register on the Home Hardware site before you can use the Scrapbook.

We developed the HomeWorks Visualizer & Your Scrapbook using Adobe Flex, Java and db4o. We developed the Image Grabber using JSP, JavaScript & HTML. Congratulations to everyone at RenoWorks for bringing this project to life.

Home Hardware recently launched the Beauti-Tone Paint Home Designer. You can now customize the look of dozens of stock photographs using Beauti-Tone’s large selection of paint swatches and coordinated paint palettes. Users have the ability to save their projects, email their projects to a friend, calculate the amount of paint they will need, save their favourite paint swatches, and even print their completed project.

Home Hardware also launched the Beauti-Tone Paint Colour Finder. This desktop application allows users to drag an eyedropper over any image on their computer and find the nearest matching Beauti-Tone colour.

We developed the Home Designer using Adobe Flex, Java and db4o. We developed the Colour Picker using Java. Congratulations to everyone at RenoWorks for bringing this project to life.

You can try these applications out for yourself at http://www.homehardware.ca/index/renoworks.

While working at Rare Method our team invested a lot of effort into designing and developing this great interactive Flash and HTML/CSS hybrid site. ArtPad was commissioned by the Calgary Glenbow Museum for the purpose of informing and interesting youth in contemporary art. I’m not sure when this site finally went live, but chances are that you have never seen or even heard about it, as I was unable to find a press release or news article anywhere. Take a few minutes to check it out. I think you will enjoy it and maybe learn a thing or two about contemporary art.

http://www.glenbow.org/artpad

I just finished skimming through this book and have decided that every Flex developer should own a copy. I have been developing Flex applications for over a year now and I still managed to learn a ton of new things from this book. The authors have done an excellent job of formatting the book into problem and solution scenarios. Quick and easy answers. The book starts off with issues a Flex noob might encounter and then proceeds all the way up to issues a Flex pro might encounter. Each solution includes code and a discussion/explination. This book is not really a cover to cover read, but more of a quick reference that you want to have within an arms reach while coding. I still recommend skimming through it when you first get it, because I’m sure you’ll learn a bunch of new tidbits right off the bat.

You can get more info and purchase this book here.

Yesterday MBUSA.com launched their website redesign. The new site is a major face lift from the old version, which was beginning to look outdated in comparison to many of its competitors. Every single element of the site has been upgraded and built completely in Flash, improving the overall user experience throughout.

I worked on the initial stages of this redesign at Critical Mass over two years ago. My involvement at the time was building a working prototype of the site in Flash. Only a few vehicles could be selectable back then, but overall the site’s design has not changed too much. The Mercedes-Benz’ development team has done a great job of finishing it off.

Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this site.