January 17, 2007 at 2:27 pm · Filed under Visual Thinking, XPLANE
We try to eat our own dog food at XPLANE as often as possible, and thus a visual map of our culture was created for internal use. Not only does the map describe all the core values of the company in a clear and concise manner, but by making it visual it is also remembered with ease.
More information is available on Dave Gray's blog (Dave is the CEO and founder of XPLANE):
http://communicationnation.blogspot.com/2007/01/xplane-culture-map.html
and a marked up and larger version with Dave's notes is available here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/355002597/
December 26, 2006 at 5:43 am · Filed under Personal, XPLANE
Some of you may already know, but in early October I switched jobs and started working full-time with XPLANE as their Senior Flash Developer. While XPLANE has been in existence for over thirteen years, the interactive arm of the company is fairly new. Because of this, the Portland office still has that start-up, new company atmosphere and feeling. In fact, besides the amazing potential, it was probably the major reason I decided to join the team.
So why hadn't I posted about switching companies earlier? Well, the corporate website was very dated and didn't clearly state what we do. Funny considering we are all about clarity in communications, right? :) But as of Christmas eve, a new website (in Flash!) has gone live at http://www.xplane.com.
The best feature (from a Flash developer's perspective) is the usage of SWFAddress. I had posted about SWFAddress's ability to allow deep-linking and bookmarking of Flash sites a few months back, and this was the first project to use it. I have to say, it was very easy to use and the developer was very responsive to my bug reports and helped me to resolve them in a very timely fashion. And, it's open source to boot.
So go check out the new site. I'm interested in hearing your comments!
Update [2007.01.02]: Looks like the new design is being very well received. Word is spreading as bloggers have found the site and the internet linking engine has taken effect. In the first week the site was live the number of visitors has just about tripled!
