Postcard Extravaganza

As part of our marketing campaign we created postcards that advertised our company and our new product release, Project-Contact. Since we are a design firm as well we had the postcards designed in-house to keep the cost down. They are standard two side color cards with one side gloss and the other matte. We dedicated a portion of the card to our new full featured RSVP application. To have them printed we sent them to a very reasonably priced print shop called Vista Print. The cards were shipped in a week and came out very nice.


For the mailing labels we used the Avery Easy Peel white labels which come in 30 per sheet. The packages of 750 are a reasonably priced. The template is available online for download. Once the list of companies was purchased the next step is to copy and paste each address in to the template. It makes it much easier to combine all the information in to one cell for reasons of cutting down the copy and pasting.

To target the right demographics we sent nine hundred cards to entertainment companied all over New York. We thought these companies were the most likely to use Project-Contact because they are event planers.

We bought the list from Certified Lists. We got nine hundred addresses in the entertainment section. The list came as a coma separated document and we converted it to Excel file.

Next we purchased nine hundred stamps at 24 cents a piece; the standard price for postcards stamps. We believe this is a good technique for marketing for a moderate price. The final product looks great and kept with our budget.

TechTrax Article Debut

Hello all,

Our first TechTrax article has debuted! ProjectSkyLine' chief engineer Ben has written a great article, 'Automatically Generate Documentation for Source Code with HeaderDoc', which explains how to setup a mechanism for generating source code documentation for any project (PHP is the example).

The same technique debuted in the article is used here at PSL. Because of the size of our clients projects, we need up to date, detailed and accurate project documentation.

In other news, we've landed a large job for 'mash up' of types. A beta will be released in a few months so stay tuned. Not much else can be announced...its a skunk works project!

See you soon!

- psl

PHP to the rescue

Greetings all,

We recently purchased a business listing from certified-lists to aid in our project-contact marketing effort. They supplied us with a niche list for a reasonable price.

The list is provided in CSV format, however our lead designer was still spending a lot of time creating the mailing labels. Our lead engineer threw together a quick PHP script to take the mailing fields and combine them into one cell. This improved the copy and paste time for our mailing label maker.

Here's a copy of the script:

/*  Quick script to take particular CSV fields
    and arrange them into a single cell.
    
    When:       Who:   What:
    -----       ----   -----
    13-Feb-07   BJS    Created. 
*/


function stripQuotes(&$str)
{
    $tmpStr = explode("\"", $str);
    if ( isset($tmpStr[1]) )
        $str = $tmpStr[1];
    else
        $str = $tmpStr[0];
}


$fHandle = fopen("text_list.csv", "r"); /* open for reading */
$cHandle = fopen("new_list.csv",  "w"); /* open and truncate for writing */
$newCSV  = '';
//$count= 0;
while (! feof($fHandle) )
{
        $lineStr = fgets($fHandle, 2048);
        list(   $executiveName,
                $tmp,
                $companyName,
                $address,
                $tmp,
                $city,
                $state,
                $zipCode,
                $zipFour) = explode(",", $lineStr);

        stripQuotes($executiveName);
        stripQuotes($companyName);
        stripQuotes($address);
        stripQuotes($city);
        stripQuotes($state);
        stripQuotes($zipCode);
        stripQuotes($zipFour);

        $newCSV .= "\"$executiveName $companyName $address "
                . "$city $state $zipCode-$zipFour\"\n";
        /*        
        if ( $count > 2)
            exit;
        $count++;
        echo $newCSV;
        */
}

fwrite($cHandle, $newCSV);

fclose($cHandle);
fclose($fHandle);                         

?>

It takes the desired fields, (everything except $tmp on the list( ) = explode) and builds them into a new CSV file, this time all in the same cell.

That wraps it up for today..thank you PHP!

- psl

Its All About the Tween

We believe using Macromedia Flash to present content for the web is a wise choice. A lot of the Flash done at ProjectSkyLine involves time line control and motion tweening. One of the coolest functions of later versions of Flash is 'motion tweening'. Over the years, Flash has developed from a tool used to create lightweight animations for the Web to an authoring environment that is used to create animation, effects, applications, widgets, CD-ROMs, to display video, and more. However, a recent step-by-step tutorial on using tweening is hard to find. This is why I am writing this passage today.


Motion tween is nothing but tweening a symbol's movement from one position to another. To implement motion tween all that you have to do is, provide Flash with a symbol's initial position and the end position. The rest is taken care by Flash. Isn't it really pretty simple.

The Tween
Place a symbol in a keyframe on one layer. A keyframe is a frame that holds an object or symbol. In this case you will be using a symbol. Select 10 frames down and press F6 to insert a new keyframe. These will show as dots on each end of the tween.

Still keeping play head on the same frame, move your Symbol to any other position other than the present one further down the time line.

After you select any frame further down the time line, then select 'Motion' from the tween pop-up menu in the Property inspector. Now your layer will look something like the one shown on the left with the blueish rectangle area with the arrow that runs along


The blue boxes are motion tweens


Now, before you can notice your tween, you will have to change you symbol on one side of the blue box. Click on the keyframe (black circle) on one side of the tween and with the free transform tool change the shape of the symbol. Now slide your time line flag back and forth inside the motion tween and there you go. You have a tween.