FlamingCGI Extranet
FlamingCGI Image Bank
FlamingCGI are a 3D graphics production facility, based in Soho. They approached us looking for some help. The problem was that the animators, artists, designers and clients who are spread out all over the world all need to share huge amounts of data. In early stages there are story boards and sketches, then great stacks of reference materials, more sketches, rough renderings, models, animatics, and ending up with the multiple versions of the final movies. They had a range of disparate and proprietary software tools, some of which weren't quite up to job, and most of which refused to talk to any other software. What they wanted was a central pool of files, living on their own, in-house server, that would be accessible via the internet.
Enter Vertebrate. We spent quite a bit of time unravelling the complexities of their workflow, finally breaking it down into series of stages. Then we wrote a specification for the software for each of the stages and set to work. Stage one, by necessity, was an extranet manager, allowing them to set up projects, assign permissions to users, and users the various stages of various projects.
Then came the image bank. It allows everyone at FlamingCGI to share a collective pool of reference images, complete with hierarchical tagging and very powerful search facilities. The end result is that stack of images that used to be scattered randomly across dozens of workstations now have a single home, accessible to everyone who needs them, from anywhere in the world. Anyone involved in a particular project is then able to create sub-sets of images that are relevant to the job at hand.
Next up was a texture library and a storyboard and shot-log manager. And then... well.. It's a big project that we've had to break into many stages. So far we've completed two of those stages, with an indeterminate number still to go (with the FlamingCGI staff dreaming up cool new ways we could make their lives easier we really can't say how many).
New AJAX-flavoured Toys
One of the things that this project demanded was an interface that could run in a browser, but behave like a 'real' application. Which involved us jumping feet first into the strange new world of AJAX (aka Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
AJAX allows us to do great things like have live search results that load as you type, forms that can be submitted/saved without have to reload the whole page and drag-and-dropping images around the page. All very cool and very cutting edge. So cutting edge, in fact, that we'd actually finished the first stage of the project before O'Reilly had published the first decent reference book on the subject.
The end result of all this work is that we've written a bunch of AJAXy goodness from the ground up, including a lean, mean and super-efficient Javascript library of our own, much of which will be filtering down into future versions of Weblobe.
Sadly, all of the work so far has been done on the FlamingCGI intranet (and if you can access that then you already work for for FlamingCGI and don't need us to tell you how cool this is) so we can't actually show you anything more than a screen shot...
FlamingCGI Image Bank