Shepherd Interactive

Marketing your message in a tight economy

In this kind of economy, marketing efforts may be one of the first areas to feel the effects of budget tightening and cost trimming. But slimmer spending can be an opportunity to explore less expensive, more effective methods for getting your message out. You can keep the marketing momentum going with a few creative approaches to communication.
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Do you live in the Portland Metropolitan area and ride TriMet? Have you ever missed your stop because you were busy viewing the inside part of your eyelids, reading a great story, or watching the drama unfold in the back seat? Fear not, here at Shepherd Interactive we are developing an application for mobile devices that will notify you when your stop is upon you, using the built in GPS device found in modern phones. Better still, the app will be free to download and distribute. Why? We ride TriMet ourselves and know how frustrating missing a stop can be, we like to give back, and it gives us a great excuse for developing cool new apps. Stay tuned for more to come on this must have download!
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I really admire the work of our graphic designers, the way that they create compelling visual experiences that draw visitors in to engage with the content. Being a developer, it’s easy for me to focus on what is beautiful from a technical perspective, and so I appreciate how our designers lift my developer eyes out of the code and onto the visual aesthetics that are more important to visitors.
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We just celebrated the launch of the new Oregon Re-Bath website this last week. I’m proud of the work we did on it. This site marks the third site I’ve developed at Shepherd Interactive using HTML5 markup. HTML5 is the next version of HTML which standardizes the language of Web 2.0. Ben Brown (a designer here at Shepherd Interactive) did a great job on the graphic design, incorporating the Re-Bath franchise’s graphic elements into a unique design while at the same time allowing for the latest Web technologies to be employed. I worked to make the interface more engaging by adding in some animation. The navigation menus, home page elements, and the special offers sign-up are all animated using declarative CSS Transitions, which are supported natively by Safari 3 and Google Chrome. Firefox and Internet Explorer, however, do not yet support CSS Transitions. Because of this, I worked on implementing a subset of the specification so that the site could maintain a clean separation between HTML content, CSS presentation, and JavaScript behavior—this CSS Transitions via jQuery Animation source code is available under an open source license. It was a stretching experience to say the least, having to delve into CSS DOM internals and XBL/HTC bindings, but it’s rewarding to see the great results.
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Object-oriented design principles are one common way of designing distributed applications.  In this methodology, the system is architected (by way of state diagrams and UML sequences) primarily by focusing on generating actionable results based on computations and processes done at endpoints, designed as procedures or objects (think stubs and skeletons).  This means that data within the system cannot be viewed in its ”raw” format (because it is presumed to be an intrinsic part of objects), and the data format itself is fixed within the object — although generics alleviates this somewhat – and access to this data is only available through predefined methods within the context of the object.  Relational databases such as MySQL and SQL Server have table definitions which cannot accept data in an arbitrary format, because data must first be adapted to meet existing table constraints(unique and primary key), NULL-field requirements, data-length requirements and column-type requirements.  This type of design architecture is known as “application-centric” architecture.
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