Constant Contact creates technology products for a pretty specific audience, and the needs of that audience have taught us to use highly functional and highly familiar interface metaphors. Successful small businesses and nonprofits master a variety of skills – marketing, financial management, hiring, product pricing, customer support – but a mastery of the latest consumer […]
Posts by Jim Garretson
Client-side Image Composition with HTML5
April 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment
As Constant Contact produces more and more video content, we’ve started to run into some unlikely bottlenecks in the video creation process. One of the big ones turns out to be the creation of preview thumbnails, which requires compositing a play button over a frame of video and saving out the resulting image. This simple, […]
Image Handling and iPhone 4
September 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Development for Apple’s iOS – the operating system running on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad – is a funny combination of wonderful and maddening. The platform’s native API, called Cocoa Touch, provides an app developer with an amazing combination of power and flexibility – and it’s been improving with each version. But the power and […]
Review of an Empty Canvas
May 18, 2010 by Leave a Comment
(Since its launch a few weeks back, the iPad has been a hot topic at Constant Contact both internally and in questions and comments from customers. As part of its technology investigation charter, Labs has been coming to grips with what the iPad is all about. This is the first of two contrasting opinion pieces […]
How to Use Processing from the Command Line to Generate Images
January 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment
The Processing project provides a great Java-based visual programming environment with a number of compelling features, including cross-platform support and OpenGL-accelerated graphics. We’ve used it at Constant Contact Labs for a number of internal data visualization projects, and it’s worked very well for us. Lately we’ve had reason to work out a way to have […]
