Madfrog Designs - One Leap Ahead Of The Competition

2 Ans – Part 2

Julien — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:36:51 +0000

In addition to the ton of stuff she already received for her birthday the previous weekend, we had planned to take her for a long weekend to the beach in Wilmington, NC. And what a trip it was! It couldn’t have been any better. The hotel was awesome (8th floor, 2 pools, the beach next door) the sun was out everyday and the ocean was actually warm. Olivia didn’t like the beach much. She was scared of the waves. But she was fine playing in the sand with seashells.

The hotel had 2 pools. One heated inside pool and one outside by the beach. No wave there! So we got the boats out and splashed all day.

To top it all, there was a fair right next to the hotel. Olivia saw it the minute we walked in the hotel and asked to ride a little train. We waited for the next evening and rode the train, planes, horses, pigs, deers and chickens until we ran out of tickets.

Finally, after checking out and before hitting the road back home, we stopped at the aquarium to see sharks, turtles and exotic fish. Olivia left with 2 plush seahorses and a snake bracelet and Noelle and I with loads of pictures, 2 bags of sands(!) and plenty of good memories. We’ll be back next year!

2 Ans – Part 1

Julien — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:45:19 +0000

I’m not sure there’s a child more spoiled than our little one. Though I’m sure all parents say that. Nevertheless, Olivia got spoiled for her 2nd birthday and it wasn’t even quite her birthday yet. Since a big chunk of the family was gathered at Noelle’s parents, we decided to jump the gun and celebrate early. There were chocolate cupcakes with a candle each, funny pointy hats, confettis of many colors, balloons shaped like cakes and butterflies, a mountain of presents and a bunch of cameras all pointing in the same direction, the star of the show: Miss Olivia aka “Birthday Girl”.

Fun at Tweetsie Railroad

Julien — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:20:50 +0000

All winter we’ve been telling Olivia that as soon as the weather gets better we’ll take her to a great amusement park in Boone called Tweetsie Railroad. Tweetsie differs from other theme parks because first, the majority of the rides are for young children, but also because it has an old steam-engine train going around the park. And Olivia loves train stuff. The good folks at Frogman Interactive not only gave me an extra day off, but they also paid for the tickets . Despite the rain after noon, it was an awesome trip filled with train rides, cowboys and Indians, cheese mines, boats, planes and goats to pet.

Very Surry

Julien — Sun, 30 May 2010 18:06:37 +0000

After a few months of hard work at Frogman Interactive, we just published a new website for the Surry County Tourism Office in North Carolina. What began as a rather small project compare to the more complex websites we usually build, became an intense and robust website from which I learned much especially from a CMS standpoint. In the end, we ended up with quite a large website and I can’t deny that I’m pretty happy with the result.

The website features:

A jQuery-driven navigation
An interactive map fully built in AJAX based on Joel Sutherland’s jQuery Plugin for Zoomable, Interactive Maps
David Desandro’s jQuery Masonry to reorder floating columns horizontally then vertically.
CSS Browser Selector: a small script allowing to write specific CSS for different operating systems and browsers
Intellogy CMS fully implemented in PHP and XML
A Twitter module

Click here to visit the website.

XHTML/CSS

W3C

AJAX/jQuery

Intellogy CMS

House Addition

Julien — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:13:49 +0000

Our house was getting too small so we decided to suck it up and add an extra building. I wish house additions were as easy as the one we actually put together in a couple of hours Saturday morning. Olivia’s birthday is coming soon and Noelle found her a nice playhouse to put in the yard. So Friday night after work, I picked up Mike’s truck (our neighbor) and drove to Hickory to pick up the house. It barely fit in the truck, but after a good half hour fastening the set with ropes and bungee cords, I managed to bring it back home without losing too many parts.

Olivia spent the whole weekend in it going up the ladder, sliding down the slide and performing many monologues in a weird ancient language.

“Chocolate” Popsicle

Julien — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:06:25 +0000

It feels like not too long ago we were still running the heat in the house. Now, as the temperature quickly rises and Olivia has traded her winter Pooh hat for a pair of shorts, it looks like another type of refreshment has been introduced: Homemade chocolate (well, carob actually) popsicle.

Pooh Hat

Julien — Sun, 16 May 2010 20:13:30 +0000

Even though we tried to keep Olivia away from Pooh and Elmo, it looks like both managed to find their way to her. It’s almost summer, but Olivia loves to go dig out her winter clothe and parade around with gloves, scarves and hats. This is her Pooh hat:

More Bunny Cookies

Julien — Sun, 16 May 2010 19:22:42 +0000

I had these pictures seating on my desktop for weeks and never got a chance to upload them on my site. Well, better late than never. Olivia got to meet the Easter Bunny for the first time. Well, it’s actually the second time but the first year she was too young to remember or even care. She had a lot of fun finding eggs throughout the yard. She liked it even better when she realized there were chocolate chips and cookies inside.

Frogman Interactive

Julien — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 11:12:14 +0000

We’ve been quite busy at Frogman lately. However, despite the many projects we found some time to launch the Beta version of our website. There’s still much to do including landing pages for all the top navigation elements and social networking links on the blog, but we’re happy with what we have now based on the feedback we received and contracts we got signed.

The Frogman site reflects the type of work we do for our clients. In addition to building dynamic content such as interactive maps, 3D floor plan renderings and virtual tours, we believe that video testimonials from satisfied customers tell a story much better than a marketing pitch. Our Case Study section is a prefect example of this philosophy.

The website features:

Flowplayer playlists to showcase testimonials videos in the Case Study section
A fully customized Wordpress blog
Various jQuery-driven dynamic modules, including Colorbox
CSS Browser Selector: a small script allowing to write specific CSS for different operating systems and browsers
Simple Pie implementation pulling relevant posts directly from the blog in non-dynamic pages
A Twitter module

Click here to visit the website.
Note: Resize your browser window to see how the different layers of bubbles in the background interact.

XHTML/CSS

W3C

Wordpress

AJAX

Flowplayer

Simple Pie

Bubbles & Bye-Bye Mullet

Julien — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:24:16 +0000

Olivia being a good country girl grew the best 1 year-old mullet in North Carolina. There was too much “party in the back” and not enough “business in the front” so it had to go. But we still found time to blow a few bubbles beforehand.