Confidant Communications Blog

Building Kitchens in 3-D

I am very excited to announce the completion of the largest project ever done by Confidant Communications: the RTA Outdoor Kitchen Design Tool!

It’s been months in the making—an HTML5 application which lets you build an outdoor kitchen and view it using 3-D in your browser.

How was it built?

While a lot of our own planning, problem-solving and original coding went into this, this project stands on a huge foundation of indispensable technologies for which I am grateful. The biggest challenge of the project was choosing the best set of tools which would serve our needs both now and in the future.

Kitchen design tool appliance seletion step

First and foremost in the toolbox is Haxe, a 15-year-old open source language whose superpower is its ability to compile to many different platforms and languages. The design tool is compiled to JavaScript so that it can run in web browsers of many kinds. While there were other options for making applications, the versatility of Haxe combined with our existing skills made this one a logical choice.

Riding on top of Haxe is OpenFL, a cross-platform implementation of the API which originated with the Flash plugin. It is a bulletproof way of handling animation, graphics and multiple assets. It also ensures the application will be very portable if we decide to make applications for iOS or Android at a later time. I considered other Haxe display libraries such as Kha and Heaps, but the large amount of tools designed to work with OpenFL (including a workable 3D solution) made OpenFL the winning choice.

A very important part of the technology selection was finding a good way of converting SketchUp files into something the application could use, and having a strong tool for displaying and manipulating the models at runtime. I mentioned Heaps in the previous section. It was very strong in its ability to handle FBX models—something SketchUp could export easily. After much consideration and testing I decided that a two-step conversion of models into Collada format was going to be the best solution. Away3D is a mature 3D engine with parser for that format and I already had experience using it. Collada is human-readable and editable, which also proved to be useful for late-stage adjustments.

This open-source 3-D software was responsible for converting and editing models along with their textures.

PureMVC

As a fan of the MVC design pattern in coding, I have been using this library for many years. It has versions for 18 different programming languages, which is a testimony to the strength of its design.

Advanced Layout

Since this application does not use HTML for its layout (it uses an HTML canvas) it is necessary to provide some intelligent features to ensure all the page elements display nicely on every screen. This was the perfect solution.

Glory Framework

This is an application framework built by yours truly. It is strongly inspired by the Gaia Framework from the days of Flash, and it unifies OpenFL, Advanced Layout, and PureMVC in a page-based way of building websites and applications. It has been a hobby project of mine for a few years and this is its first real-world application. It has made the development process much more pleasant and I invite you to explore it for yourself!

Adobe Animate (a.k.a. Flash)

OpenFL is built upon the foundation laid by Adobe Flash, and I used the application to create the layout for the final quote screen and its text fields. This allowed me some freedom in design without having to do a lot of hand coding of those elements.

Thank You

To all the developers who put their heart, soul, and brains into all these excellent tools, I send a huge thank-you! I also am grateful to RTA Outdoor Living for their vision in making this project a reality!

If you have an idea for a similar project, please give us a call!

Sincerely,
Allan Dowdeswell

Defeating the Jargon Hydra

Jargon drives me bonkers. Biz speak, technobabble—whatever you want to call the esoteric language people use so often. Now maybe I am simply losing my capacity for advanced wording but when I take the time to decipher jargon I often discover that it is being used to obscure bad ideas or empty words. It seems I am not the only person noticing this. As a lover of truth this bothers me. So why does it happen?

1. We’ve become conditioned to skip over it

Technology is making our society communicate more briefly. In high school I was taught to write business letters using a typewriter, and they would always include a proper greeting, fully formed paragraphs, and a courteous sign-off. These conventions were the norm when I began using email 23 years ago, and it wasn’t long before I was doing double-takes when someone left out what I thought were the right elements. Then just when I became used to the brevity of email, along came Twitter and instant messaging and even more terse exchanges.

The problem is as we get used to quick information we get lazy about reading longer writing. Nowadays we tend to scan for the takeaway items and buzz words but skim over the words that we aren’t wanting to read (maybe you’re even doing it with this article). Anyway, even in our skimming our brains still register the fact that we have just experienced some high-fluting language and the suggestion is planted in our minds that because the author uses some big words they must have some worthy ideas even when we don’t understand them. The result is that the writer can fake their way through the social media scene or even into a scientific journal without really saying anything of value.

2. We let them get away with it

Even before electronic media people could still spout drivel. In college I had a lot of exposure to the arts community and would come across statements like this:

My work, which is figurative and symbolic in nature, explores the complex narrative of “being”. I am interested in the anthropomorphic as it associates to the human condition, where image, self and the subconscious reside and collide. Abstraction and figuration constantly intertwine facilitating a narrative that is subjective, idiosyncratic and coloured.

It would be much easier for them to say “I like blending human and abstract images. Use your imagination to gain your own meaning and feelings from it.” However, just like in The Emperor’s New Clothes, the artist convinces many people to nod their heads and pretend that the word salad they just read points to some much deeper meaning.

Perhaps we’re already sold on this person being a legitimate artist or maybe we just don’t care enough about being deceived. The hydra will simply grow two more heads if we attack this one. So we don’t challenge it (as Tom Wolfe did) and the artist keeps on selling their paintings to the uncritical.

3. We Chicken Out

Most people like to live in peace, and the sad fact is that challenging someone’s ideas carries the risk of offending them. Do it online, and you might even get a legion of like-minded people harassing you for a long time without even fully understanding why. Is it any wonder that we avoid conflict online?

Defeating the Hydra

When it comes to jargon, it is the truth and our valued time which are at stake. We should do something to protect these.

There’s some wisdom on the internet which says “Don’t feed the trolls.” There is much older wisdom which says both “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him,” and “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” These statements taken together give us a good start for engaging jargon-spouters. There is no one right method—we simply have to choose our battles wisely with the little time we have. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Do I think the hydra can be defeated? It depends on how you frame it. There’s all sorts of little hydras we can defeat every day. Very few people can change the world all by themselves but we all can do good works and have victories of our own. Choose wisely my friend, and fight for truth when you can!

When Your Heart is a Hammer

It’s great when you find the perfect match between your challenge and solution. The right ratchet for your nut or the perfect swing for a hole-in-one.

As a web designer this often means choosing the right technology to support your end goal. Should the site be static, or CMS-based? Or will it be completely custom, like a web app or something built upon a 3D framework? Then each one of those paths carry a big set of choices of their own. It can be daunting, but good web designers don’t shy away from making the hard decisions carefully. After all, it’s a choice between long-term usefulness and prosperity versus wasted effort.

I ponder these things and am thinking that we need to be equally careful about choosing our people.

For example, a few years ago I took a job at an interactive agency which was looking for a designer with some Flash skills. The job began with a mix of both interactive work and design, but after a couple years I was only doing the technical work with no creative at all.

I began to have an internal struggle over this because I enjoyed programming and loved the company, but I was trained as a designer and was not prepared to abandon that other love of mine. In the end, my heart for being a designer won out over my heart for the company and job, and I eventually left to start my own business.

Although the changes in heart and job resulted in my leaving, I did work there happily and effectively for four years and we parted on very good terms. I would call that a successful employment.

In filling that job I believe my employer did well, because my heart matched well with their own corporate philosophy. Skills and versatility were important, but more important was that I agreed with their philosophy of caring for their people, having fun, being responsible and working hard.

The heart is most important. This might seem like a no-brainer, but if your organisation serves Liberals you don’t fill your positions with Conservatives. If your company exists to promote Christianity you don’t hire atheists. You don’t hire known anarchists for government jobs and you don’t outsource national security projects to overseas organisations if you can help it.

Any of these examples is like using a hammer to drive in a screw. It might sort of work, but in the end you will probably regret it.