A successful application should help you achieve your goals. It needs to be reliable, it needs to be flexible, and it needs to be simple. But more than that: we believe it should also be fun to use. We have set ourselves a challenging goal: to make software that you feel good using.
Writing code is only one stage in the development process.
It's all about people. Your customers, your users are regular people. Any solution has to work for them. The development process starts early. We need to ask a lot of questions. We need to understand your business, your customers, what you're doing for them, why they come to you, why they keep coming back. From that basis of understanding, we learn how we can help your business. Perhaps we can expand your reach, make things easier and more efficient, help you keep in touch, inform your customers, establish and strengthen your brand. We will share our ideas with you as a functional specification and see what you think. Only then will we writes some code. It all starts and ends with thinking about people.
Thrive & friends
You may have heard of Thrive: our content management system. Thrive is also a platform which allows us to deliver an array of business applications to you -- both prebuilt tools, and new applications built just for you. It is the gateway to your digital presence, providing both asset and application management along with management of one or more websites.
Dissatisfied with what was out there, we also built Thrive Mail, our own electronic mail campaign management software. It now delivers millions of messages to New Zealand and around the world every year.
Identifying a need, we compiled a comprehensive database of New Zealand tourism operators, along with tools to maintain and share that information: we called it TourismData.
When we need to, we build. When we don't need to, we integrate.
Our development philosophies
Here are the principles that guide us as developers:
- Recognise and respect cool technologies from other vendors, and integrate with them
- Think about the best solution to a problem, design and build it properly, and with a long term vision
- Commit to ongoing development of our technologies, resources, and skills
- Think about applications as a community of inter-related tools rather than as stand-alone solutions to individual problems
- Figure out the simplest application that addresses your business problem
- Speak Human
- Make it hard or impossible to make "errors" — just guide people gently
Beyond the desktop
Right about now, people are changing the way they use computers. People are reading email on their phones, laptos are sitting unused, Point-of-sale software can run on an iPad. Information is going mobile, and it is breaking out of the standard 1024 x 768 dimension web site. We are interested in taking your information and delivering it to users when they are on the move. The mobile web is changing constantly, and we are keeping up to date with rapidly shifting practices and standards. the best practices. Here are some things we are thinking about:
- Mobile information access
- Public information sharing
- Getting your files, wherever you are
- Finding the information you need when there is too much information
- Adding information as an assistive overlay to your life
- New media as conversation spaces
Because the world is changing, we are building the tools now we will need tomorrow.
Connect with us!