Dieter Rams’s Ten Commandments

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You might not be aware of it yet, however SFMOMA (the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art) is currently hosting Dieter Rams’s “Less but Better” product exhibit.

You might also not be aware of who Dieter Rams is, since he is not directly related to the software industry.

Indeed, for almost 40 years Dieter Rams was Chief of Design at Braun’s:  he designed record players, razors, radio sets, etc.

A quick introduction to not editing video

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Pop quiz!

Given (A) foo.mov, (B) bux.avi, and (C) baz.m4v, which can your video software handle correctly?

  1. A
  2. A & B
  3. All of them
  4. All or some or none of them depending on their codecs, your software’s codecs, and whether they’re doing anything special with the container format.

Running A Good Scrum

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Scrum Master - Save the team

Whether or not they follow other precepts of Agile development, many software companies have implemented some form of a ‘scrum’ – a short daily stand-up in which team members report on their current progress.  A well run scrum can be an extremely valuable communication asset for team members.   A poorly run scrum can be an annoying and time consuming hassle that turns teams off of scrum.  And even though teams are supposed to be “self-organizing”, in my experience a good scrummaster is always important for a good scrum outcome.  Below I’ve outlined a few common problems for scrums, and things the scrummaster can do to keep things on track.

Name Recognition

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Dear reader:

After being heads down in the code for quite a while now, we decided to dedicate a little time to sharpening our writing skills. In the coming weeks you should see a number of contributions covering a wide variety of topics. We’ll kick things off today with a seemingly pedestrian subject: the naming classes, files, variables, packages, etc.

Solving the Firefox Ellipsis Problem

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On a recent project for a client, I was asked to make the CSS style “text-overflow: ellipsis” work on FireFox browsers, which has never supported this style. This style basically truncates text and adds an ellipsis (…) when the length of the text overflows the container. Supposedly FireFox 7.0 will correctly this issue, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Scientists Use Flash-based games to conduct brain research

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Posit Science as agreed to work with Grio in building an Adobe Flash-based application that will be used by scientists as a tool to study human brain. This application provides games and excercises designed to stimulate brain activities.

Posit Science helps people be at their best throughout their lives by providing brain training software clinically proven to improve cognitive performance.

Grio Helps Playnomics to Enhance its Software Platform

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Playnomics has agreed to leverage Grio's talents to provide software development assistance and recommendations for architecture improvements and optimization.

Playnomics provides a platform that publishers of online games can use to understand who their most valuable players are and how to acquire players who will be the most dominant to their game. The platform collects in-game event data and uses proprietary algorithms in combination with an advanced recommendation engine to quantify player value.

In this collaboration, Grio will help build applications that interact with and enhance the Playnomics platform.

Alltel Wireless Taps Grio for Website Development

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Allied Wireless (Alltel) has selected Grio to create its web presence that includes the alltelwireless.com <http://www.alltelwireless.com> consumer website as well as Alltel’s corporate intranet website.

Grio is assisting Alltel in various technical areas ranging from architectural recommendations to service integrations with Alltel's internal systems. Grio is providing software development resources for the creation and maintenance of Alltel’s website properties and content management systems.

Allied Wireless Communications Corporation is a wireless telecommunications provider based in Little Rock, Arkansas. It currently serves approximately one million subscribers in six states – Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, Ohio and Idaho. 

 

 

Game Developers Conference 2011 with Schedule Builder powered by Grio

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This year's Game Developers Converence® (GDC) will take place from Feb 28 – Mar 4, 2011 in Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. Grio developed and maintains Schedule Builder, Schedule Build Mobile (enhanced for Blackberry devices and iPhones) and Vault for GDC. 

The GDC is the world’s largest professionals-only game industry event. Presented every spring in San Francisco, it is the essential forum for learning, inspiration, and networking for the creators of computer, console, handheld, mobile, and online games.

The GDC attracts over 17,000 attendees, and is the primary forum where programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals, business decision-makers and others involved in the development of interactive games gather to exchange ideas and shape the future of the industry. The GDC is produced by the Think Services Game Group, a division of United Business Media.

vChatter Dials up Grio for Software Help

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vChatter has selected Grio to help enhance its Internet audio-visual communication tools and platforms. These tools provide video-chat capabilities and other features to the public via Facebook and other social networks. vChatter is the largest video chat service on Facebook with over 2 Million users and over 25 Million calls established. It provides a fun, casual and comfortable environment to discover new people and develop meaningful relationships.

In this collaboration, Grio team will provide engineering expertise and support for custom software development, recommendations for software design and architecture improvement and optimization.