Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog

Interface Design

  • Client-side Image Composition with HTML5 Posted Monday, April 11, 2011 Jim Garretson 0 Comments

    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, but still time-consuming, procedure is a problem we’ve solved for Constant Contact customers through our new Insert Video feature, but it’s still been eating up significant time internally! Rather than continue to create these images manually, Labs took a look at the problem and came up with an automated solution that uses some pretty cutting-edge browser features. Read on for details and a demo.

     
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    Tags

    Interface Design • Platforms • Web Development

  • Visualizing Information Posted Friday, June 4, 2010 Huan Lai 0 Comments

    With the massive amount of information to sort through, finding everything that you need becomes a difficult and tedious task, especially when that information is dispersed across several different places. Alongside the data mining project that we are currently working on, the problem of contact management has always intrigued us. With some of our customers having well over 25,000 contacts being managed by Constant Contact, and most likely even more information about these contacts and others spread out amongst several other mediums, there had to be a better way to do things, to easily extract valuable information out of that.

     
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    Tags

    Data Management • Interface Design • Social Networks

  • Putting the Mobile Web First Posted Friday, May 28, 2010 Jim Garretson 0 Comments

    It is unfortunate, but probably not very controversial, to say that mobile web sites tend to be second-rate afterthoughts compared to “real” desktop-browser-optimized sites. A lot of popular web sites either provide no mobile-optimized version at all, provide an overly-specific one built only for the iPhone, or provide a super-generic, watered-down WAP version that admittedly presents the content, but usually so that it looks like an unstyled bulleted list. What’s worse, none of these mobile strategies really scale well to handle new devices - say, a new class of device with a screen halfway between that of a smartphone and a desktop. The iPhone-specific version usually doesn’t display properly, the WAP version is way too basic, and the full desktop site often requires Flash, Silverlight, Java, or other heavyweight plugins that aren’t always available.

    It’s kind of a mess.

     
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    Tags

    Interface Design • Mobile • Platforms • Web Development

  • Review of an Empty Canvas Posted Tuesday, May 18, 2010 Jim Garretson 0 Comments


    (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 that Labs members have put together. As always, the opinions expressed herein are those of the individual author, not necessarily those of the company.)

     
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    Tags

    Blog • Innovation • Interface Design • Iphone • Mobile
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