New Site Launched

Congrats to Matt and Stephen for getting EyeScience launched.  Check it out at http://eyescience.com

How NOT to Design a Website

If you need to create a website, you could hire any old company to do it for you. However, you might end up with results like this (be warned – may induce epileptic seizures in sensitive individuals).

…Or you could just hire Switchbox to build your site. Our work tends to be of much higher quality.

Easy AR with Javascript

After doing some digging, I’ve finally found a decent Javascript Library for Augmented Reality. It uses Flash to receive data from your web cam. From there, it looks for a marker in the video feed. From there, it can tell where the corners are. I took it a little further and threw our logo on top. I also made it scale to the size of the box, so it has some depth.

Original Code:  http://code.google.com/p/js-aruco/

Our Application: http://switchboxinc.com/ar/

Batch Install Applications with Ninite

Prepping a new computer with a fresh load of Windows is often a pretty tedious task – critical apps that take significant amounts of time to install (Visual Studio, SQL Server, Management Studio, etc.) mixed together with hundreds of updates and service packs with your odd mix of browsers, media, chat, and other random apps takes hours at least, if not days.

Thankfully, a solution exists that consolidates a selection of the most common applications into a single, standalone installer: Ninite.

Simply custom build your app package via checkbox selections, and let the installer do all of the work!

There are lots of great options for web developers including all the major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox), popular chat clients (Skype, Google Talk, etc.), application runtimes (.NET, Flash, Java) and tools (JDK, Eclipse, Notepad++, Filezilla).

Definitely worth a look if you prepping (yet another) machine for web or client development.

2011 Design Trend – jQuery Parallax Scrolling

How’d they do that? Parallax Scrolling is a type of scrolling technique that gives a pseudo-3D appearance and is truly eye-catching. This technique has been simplified with jQuery Plug-Ins. Check it out at http://tympanus.net/codrops/2011/01/03/parallax-slider/

Our newest Droid App

And to top off the launch of a brand new site (see our previous blog post) we just launch another Android mobile app.  This one is designed/developed to be both a tablet app and an phone app.   You can download it in the app store https://market.android.com/details?id=me.lifecubby.mobile. 

Newest Site Launched

We just launched a new website.  Visit http://barbaramcvicker.com to see it.

 

Never a dull moment at Switchbox

What would you do if you had 55,000 new visitors hit your site in 3 hours? Apparently you would crash the worlds largest hosting company. Two of our clients made a huge press release today and there was so much traffic that their visitors were doing 5 searches a second for the last few hours and it isn’t slowing down yet. Check out http://tos.ohio.gov and http://buckeyeinstitute.org if you want to join in the fun.

Lightweight charting with JavaScript

Everyone loves charts – and more importantly, everyone loves fancy charts. So, what if you want fancy charts without a plugin like Flash or Silverlight? Highcharts is a very simple approach with striking results – a purely JavaScript solution based on top of jQuery. We’ve been experimenting with it at the office and are pretty happy with the results – check it out at http://highcharts.com/!

A better way to develop mobile websites

Matt at our office just found out that jQuery mobile 2.0 just got released.  Check out http://jquerymobile.com/blog/2011/08/03/jquery-mobile-beta-2-released/  for more info.  We are constantly building mobile websites and mobile applications for our clients so this is going to make it a lot easier.  Too bad it doesn’t help more with building iPhone or table applications.