A selection of motion graphic and animation projects storyboarded, animated and developed by Red Minnow Interactive.

Creating a good business name can be a complicated process. As anyone who has ever been on the search for an available URL can attest, trial and error play a key role when concepting a company name. Checking online if the URL is available is the first hurdle followed by trademarking; there’s a lot of back and forth.

From the beginning we knew the word ‘red’ had to be included, and we tried multiple naming conventions. We’ve always loved the color red for its strength, energy and boldness; the characteristics were good and it connected to the feng shui fire element which we thought had good meaning and structure. Now that ‘red’ made the mix we needed a connecting element, perhaps even basic building blocks of our environment. Materials and minerals seemed like a good direction to take. Which is what lead us to… wait for it… Red Mineral. There it was, redmineral.com. We quickly purchased the domain which luckily was available. Genius!

The next morning though, when we tried to recall what the new company name would be, we hit a bit of a mental snag… redelement, redrock, redsand, redpepper, redpebble…good lord, less than 8 hours had gone by and we couldn’t recall the name! It was pretty obvious that red mineral was not such a great name after all, but then it hit us: redminnow.com. We literally jumped to see if the domain was available, of course it was, and ‘bam’ the rest is history. Or so we thought…

Not a week had gone by when we received a phone call, and the man on the other end was interested in purchasing redminnow.com. Wow, this was pretty amazing, here we were a week into ownership of this domain name and already we were getting offers, what are the odds? Heck, how many more could we expect? We could be a millionaires just on domain name purchases, this could be a whole new line of work for us. We could see it now, the sign outside the office would read “brilliant business domain names”…well that name needs some work, but you get the idea.

Intrigued as we were by this offer, it felt a bit to early in the process to let the name go for a few bucks. Sure, we hadn’t done anything with the domain or even started the branding process, but the road we’d traveled to get to this point felt right. Letting the name go felt wrong.

Of course we were intrigued by the call and how it was that he too wanted the name. As we continued the conversation, we learned he was calling on behalf of a creative firm in Nebraska. Apparently the company he worked for–out of professional respect I won’t divulge the agency’s name–was planning to do a re-brand and wouldn’t you know it, red minnow was the chosen name. They had already developed a logo, letterhead and all the collateral marketing pieces, but they forgot one of the most crucial elements: they forgot to purchase the domain name.

Certainly we could empathize, and wanted to give this matter a bit of thought before making a final decision. We exchanged contact information and agreed to speak in a couple days to make a determination. Once off the phone, we contemplated for a moment before making the following internal agreement: “If this Nebraskan design firm produced amazing communication graphics and interactive work, the kind of work that spoke to our creative soul, then we would sell them the name.” As their website loaded in the browser we got an immediate gut reaction, and a decision was made: red minnow was spawned.

How about multiple days without it, because a construction crew crushed the main line while excavating a new housing development next door.

For the millions of digital-dependent families counting on those precious buried cables to continuously push a digital signal into their 60″ plasma, the thought of no cable for a few days can be an epic nightmare.

This scenario could have been diverted, if that damage-causing construction crew had been using Utilisphere. What’s Utilisphere? Utilispere is a cloud-based asset management solution specifically tailored to the energy and utility industries. It’s used for correlating data of the location and status of underground pipelines, electric lines and telecommunication lines.

But why read about it, watch the video we produced instead.

SQLite is a self-contained, relational database management system. The entire database is a single cross-platform file that can be packaged with a mobile app. So, it is not a separate process that is accessed from the client application, but an integral part of the app. SQLite is probably one of the most widely-deployed database engines, and chances are good that the browser you are using to view this blog post utilizes SQLite for bookmarking, cookies, etc.

To create and manage our SQLite database, we used Lita, an Adobe Air open source SQLite database administration tool. If you have ever worked with database administrator tools before, learning Lita is very easy. The following images show he easy it is to create a SQLite database using Lita:

Figure 1: Creating the database

Figure 2: Creating a table

Figure 3: Creating the table structure

Figure 4: Entering Data

Figure 5: Testing query statements directly in Lita

The code to connect to the database in Flex/ActionScript is fairly straightforward and does not require the use of any middleware programming language:


private var sqlConnect:SQLConnection;
private var sqlStatement:SQLStatement;

private function errorHandler(ev:SQLErrorEvent):void{
// error handling
}


The SQL query statement in ActionScript is the same as what was tested in Lita, ( Figure 5), which makes it incredibly easy to test queries in Lita first and then pull the final SQL query statement into Flex and paste it into the ActionScript code.

The app that we produced for our client has some very complex queries, but SQLite handles them well and has been a fantastic solution for this kind of issue. It also has performed well on the iPodTouch, iPhone and iPad. Our client has been very pleased with the local database solution and we will use it often in other projects.

There were several websites that I discussed in the presentation, and I thought it would be good to have them all listed here for anyone who wanted to visit them so you don’t have hunt through the presentation for them.

Our game, Galaxy Grab, was first available for purchase on ActiveDen as a Flash component that designers could reskin to create their own game.

To register to become an iOS developer: developer.apple.com
The iOS Provisioning Portal: developer.apple.com/ios/manage/overview/

Flash to iOS tutorials:
–tiny.cc/iOStutorial
–tiny.cc/adobeIOShelp
–http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/packagerforiphone

Gaming techniques:
–8bitrocket.com

Flash Optimization :
–moock.org
- gskinner.com/blog
–tiny.cc/adobeMobileOptimization

Comparison chart between Android and iOS and what native functionality Flash supports:
•tiny.cc/comparisonChart

Galaxy Grab video on YouTube: youtube.com/RedMinnowInteractive

Thanks again and let me know if you have any questions.

We are very excited to announce that we have just released our first game on Apple’s App Store! The game is called Galaxy Grab and it runs in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The game is a race against time to grab astronauts and their friends and get them in their spaceship before time runs out. It sounds easy, but each level has more of them to save and they are moving faster!

This is a Flash-based game that we originally developed for ActiveDen and then retooled and compiled for iOS devices. We are working on Android and Blackberry Playbook versions once we have those development environments set. The ability to create an application once and deliver on multiple platforms is enormous. When developed properly, an application can be created in Flash and released to the desktop, the web and multiple mobile devices with just minor changes, mainly only compiler settings. No other platform has that ability.

The next few blog posts will be about elements of the Flash to iOS development process and some of the pitfalls we encountered, so you can hopefully avoid the same issues. Here is a list of some of the topics:

• Why you want to avoid Flash’s Fullscreen mode
• Creating an application to run on many screen sizes
• Scaling game play based on the host system’s processing cababilities
• Surprising things that work from Flash to iOS apps
• The iOS development process (this will be a long one)!

If you have questions or suggestions of topics you would like us to cover, please comment back to let us know!

Jesse Schell’s talk about the future of game design as it invades the real world is just astounding. If you do experience design of any kind it’ll be the most valuable (and entertaining) 25 minutes you’ll spend all week. And you’ll receive 1000pts.

Columbus Heat And Vent Softball Team

With the backing of Columbus Heat and Vent, the recreational Co-Ed Slow pitch softball team “The Ducts” needed a logo to represent the heating and venting world they reside in, as well as a rough-and-tumble image to intimidate their opponents on and off the field. Red Minnow had a great time sketching out some concepts and finalizing the following design.

The End Result

I’m sorry to report the softball season ended with a blank spot in the trophy case, we’ll get ‘em next year.

Go Ducts!

The Astronauts Need Your Help

The astronauts and their buddies are floating around the galaxy trying to get back to their space ship, but they need your help. Grab and drag the flying astronauts and friends to the space ship before time runs out. Every new level has additional pieces to collect but the time to complete each level remains the same.

The Real Story

We have just released our first flash based game on ActiveDen. Galaxy Grab was developed for Flash designers and developers that might need a game for their projects. It is a Flash Component that can be quickly and easily customized using the component inspector window.

Transform Galaxy Grab Quickly

Every element of this game can be customized to meet your needs. Perhaps you want the scene to take place in a park setting with butterflies, lightning bugs and dragonflies buzzing around and the user must capture them and place them in a jar. No problem, just replace the elements and a new game is produced in an instant. It could not be easier to transform Galaxy Grab into your own game. Still not making sense, no problem, each movieclip has a guide layer with instructions to make things as easy as possible.

This is an extremely cost-effective and fast method to add a game to your project or web site. All code is included so developers of any skill level can change the game-play as they like. Best of all, it is priced to move at only $12

This is one of many flash based games that we are planning on releasing, please join our newsletter the Red Report and we’ll inform you when the next game is released.