Virtual 3d Applications

3d interactive content has now become the key to new original, efficient and intuitive applications. The game industry has made no mistake about that. Big companies also switched a long time ago ( Boeing, Nasa, etc), it now spreads slowly but surely to medium and small companies.

More and more customers are stepping forward for 3d based applications because it gives them the edge over the concurrence. But if it costs more and is less flexible, then the effort seems not worthwhile. I have been working and researching with passion on solutions that are viable for me, the customers and end users. I can with confidence propose full scale 3d interactive applications that will suits your projects needs.

Simulation: Either for safe simulations environment, or complex visuals that would otherwise take many stills and text to explain. It applies to all fields and industries without exceptions.

Education: Less words, more intuitive interactions and a close to null learning curve. Let's remove the medium distraction by making it the attraction and let student focus on the content. The medium has become the content. Without even knowing it, students will learn while playing, where in the same situation they would be bored to death reading a book.

Engineering: The goal here is not to try needlessly copying CAD softwares ( they are way ahead of the game anyway) but to provide simple and intuitive ways to interact and work for example with part of your production process, your products or equipments. Sometimes CAD solutions are too heavy and makes it too awkward for simple tasks, that's where custom made virtual applications comes handy.

Advertising: Letting potential buyers interact with your products in 3D increases your sales, that's a fact. It attracts attention. So if you are looking for a way to show your customer either existing or future products, concepts, ideas, think about interactive 3d medium.

Technologies

Unity3D: An full blown virtual 3D development software ( link here )that really shines and even provide ability to deploy application to iphones and wii. It surpasses many other solutions that are a lot more expensive and catch up with video games qualities amazingly. If you expect the best 3d look on the web, don't look further.

Adobe Director: A powerful tool that in my opinion when it comes to scope of possibilities and runtime speed ( link here ). From stand alone applications ( Windows and Mac ) to web applications via the shockwave plugin, it supports databases, xml, online access, video playback and editing, virtual 3d and many more features that certainly are going to answer your needs at a very affordable price with no obscure distribution licenses or hidden costs.

Adobe Flex/AIR: Finally bringing the flexibility and power of Flash to proper application development ( link here ). Development of beautiful softwares with extensive use of server based features like database, central repositories has become accessible and affordable. It also now seriously diminishes Adobe Director pros with Zinc wrapper that extends capabilities and potential where Air and flash plugins security restrictions applies (communication with dll and external tools mainly). You end up with a true desktop application with all the power of flash. Both web and desktop world beautifully united.

PHP-MySQL: A free solution to build rich web applications with almost unlimited possibilities and evolution abilities. No need to say more really.

Assembla: This is my preferred project management solution ( link here ). It is very flexible and propose all the mandatory tools for trouble free and effective management. The main advantage is that the clients is not tight to Assembla because it actually wrap several freely and opensource tools such as TRAC and SVN. As the project grows, we can then move everything on the client server without loosing anything.

Visual Paradigm Agilian: At last, a diagram software that is intuitive and targeted for software development ( link here ). I use it to lay down ideas and user cases which tremendously helps me and clients. it is sometimes very difficult to explain a process in plain text, you easily end up writing a novel. With diagrams, it's easy to follow, it forces you to visualize the process and that is a strength, because if you can't build a diagram of your feature, then the process itself is not good, and needs more thinking.

Project Management

Project management is at the heart of a successful development. What astonished me in many projects I have been involved in is the total lack of commitment in that area. Few simple rules should be applied when starting a project and benefits will clearly shine in the long run.

What is it?: 'management' is mouthful word that means in fact 'common sense'. Would you start building a house without a blueprint? Would you give directives to the builders on a napkin? This sound very silly, yet this is how most software development process are handled... sad but true. So by project management, I mean building a road map of what is needed and when. I also mean opening a communication channel other then via plain emails, that is via message board for example. Even just that is a fantastic step forward for mid size projects.

Where is the difficulty? Choosing the right technology is difficult, Defining specifications is difficult, communication is difficult, Project management will ease the pain. Without it, the least issue becomes a real problem putting the whole project at stake. The most difficult thing is to maintain a product up to date with its ever changing environment. How can this be possible without organisation and rules.

Client or Developer? It could be thought as if it's the clients job to handle this, but it is not the case. In my opinion, we developers, have actually a better understanding of the product we are building, because we build it! I think we are in a very good position to handle project management.

What solution? Today, there is many tools available to enabled communication between the client and the development team: Assembla is the one I prefer. The client can bring forward his ideas, set up deadlines, gives feedback on the current state of things and developer can record development progress and get organised.

Desktop/Web Applications

Better known now as Rich Internet Application (RIAS), it's actually been around for many years and most of us, developers, have always built such system even before it made it as a buzz word. Server based information repository has always been very important as soon as you build a community of some sort, no matter what business or field you are in. RIA is of course not just about data, it's also about how the user interact with it and how intuitive it can be.

Data centric: You need to manipulate informations? let people interact with data? This is mainstream development and many solutions exists at very affordable costs. WARNING: This is where you get lost and easily tricked by vendors that apparently can do everything you need only to find out 90% of it is of no use to you, yet the last 10% you want is not available. Companies, clubs, individuals often look for something very specific. That's where custom development is strong, forget the 90% features you don't want and tell me all about this 10% you want. Would you rather pay a little extra to get what you want, or keep getting frustrated with cheap or free software that are packed with features you actually don't need.

User centric: You want to let people interact on a specific topic. Manage, share and distribute multi media informations, this is what major vendors have been working on for the past decade. All these social networks and tools exist because now multi media materials can be easily developed. Does it mean it's good? I personally don't think so, I do not follow this trend and much prefer developing solutions for a specific and useful need, whether it's engineering, scientific or historical for example. Developing things to let people chat about the weather and show how much friends they have is not for me. There is tons of tools out there and very good ones actually. So if you are looking to develop your own social network, make sure it has the edge over what's already available and that it really brings something unique in its area.

Process centric: You want to group data and user together to propose tools and features that suits a particular field or environment?. A very interesting development area where you build things that are fresh, and most importantly answer specific needs. Processes has often been underestimated and what seems important is the data itself, that's how many companies lost track of how they conducted their business and had to solely rely on how the software worked. Process and data is equally important, Data on its own is useless, you need to do something with it, and that's where successful companies invest now, because they understand that processes is what make things happen, not data. Object Oriented paradigm contains such a vision, yet it proves difficult to understand and apply, very much like it was difficult to shift perspective during the industrial revolution a century ago. Exciting time ahead of us!

CMS and frameworks: Building everything from scratch is sometimes necessary, but most of the time, there is a solution already available to answer the project needs, whether it is a Content Management System (CMS) or a particular type of work. Using an existing framework to base development upon is the right choice most of the time. It will cost less, reach completion faster and benefit from this framework evolution over the years. The catch is to choose the right framework and be sharp enough to learn a new frame work to asset quickly its potential.