The success of this event comes down to you – the sponsors and golfers. So from everyone at LaunchDM, thank you and congratulations! Your willingness to be a part of the Scrapple Scramble really epitomizes what caring companies and individuals can accomplish as a group. It’s like a loaf of scrapple – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Scrapple Scramble proceeds will help individuals pay for cancer screenings who could normally not afford them. Our hope for future events is that we will be able to extend Scrapple Scramble proceeds to additional facets of our local community.

We had a little bit of fun again this year as is evident in the official photo album. If anyone has good shots of their own we’d be happy to add them to the album. Feel free to send photos to alvin@launchdm.com and we’ll get those in the loop.

We continue to choose the first Friday in June at Willow Hollow because it coincides with the opening day of the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum’s World War II Weekend at the Reading Airport. From the looks of their site you can pencil-in June 1, 2012 as the date for the 3rd annual Scrapple Scramble.

Our main goal is to strive for bigger and better results every year. We love feedback and welcome your input – ideas to improve the outing, how to get on the sponsor list for next year, volunteer your time and experience to ease our workload, etc. Any comments can be sent to alvin@launchdm.com.

Thanks again,
LaunchDM

LaunchDM recently completed production of a native iPad app design for C.H. Briggs Company, one of the largest independently-owned distributors of specialty building materials on the east coast.

The iPad app works as a sales aid for the C.H. Briggs sales team, syncing with and pulling assets dynamically from their Salesforce.com Content library. The app can also sync with other data objects, such as Salesforce accounts, contacts, opportunities and cases. A system administrator can easily update the content via their Salesforce cloud application, from any web connection and, once their iPads are synced, each member of the sales team will have the freshest and most consistent content on their iPad for customer visits and detailed product overviews. Product orders can actually be placed directly from the C.H. Briggs app before the salesperson even exits their customer’s office.

According to Rob Wolf, LaunchDM’s Creator and Sr. Managing Partner, “We could have engineered this mobile app to pull content from almost any database. C.H. Briggs was thoroughly engaged with Salesforce.com which made the mobile Salesforce application a no-brainer. Within minutes, the Briggs team was trained on how to edit and update content and sync to the new app.”

All user interface (UI) and aesthetic design of the C.H. Briggs iPad app was executed by LaunchDM while all app functionality was engineered and programmed by Model Metrics – top iPad app developers and leading cloud computing services providers headquartered in Chicago, IL.

Check out the full press release.
Check out some of our other mobile capabilities.

Having an image file in a vector format allows us to resize your logo without it becoming pixelated or blocky and looking like stairs.

What kind of file format do we need?

Generally, .eps or .ai (Adobe Illustrator) files are in vector format (but not always). In some rare cases, clients have their logo as a vector .pdf file, which will also work. The following are NEVER vector formats: .psd, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, .bmp, .tif.

If you don’t have vector artwork…

Send us the largest and best quality file that you have. Hopefully we’ll be able to use this file for your project.

Planning for the future:

You should have a vector version of your logo for future projects. The vector version can be used on web sites, letterhead, business cards, billboards, t-shirts, bus wraps, jumbotron displays and anywhere else your logo is displayed. We recommend getting in contact with your logo designer and asking if they can provide you with a vector version. If you can’t get a vector version of your logo, we can create a vector version for you.

Geeky details:

Images are generally stored as a checkerboard grid of pixels, where each square has a specific color.  When you make an image like this larger, each individual pixel gets larger, resulting in a blocky final result.

A vector format stores your logo as a series of equations that describe how the lines curve. When you make an image like this larger, the curves become larger but never get blocky; allowing us to create any size image without a loss in quality.

A lot of companies no longer support IE6 when they’re developing web sites. Depending on what is meant by “support” it’s an understandable fact. But if “support” means not testing for it and completely ignoring it, we do NOT agree with this approach to, and support for, IE6. Your site doesn’t have to look as good, but it should at least work in IE6.

We took a sampling of web traffic data from 4 sites during 2010 and have tried to make some sense of it. We chose very different web sites with very different audiences and traffic volumes to create a reasonable sampling. These sites range in number of visitors from 1532 to 585,734 in 2010 (through 12/29/10). IE6 visitors comprised between 3.88% (our site) and 6.76% (the site w/585k visitors) of traffic to each of these 4 web sites. To clarify, 6.76% of 585,734 is 39,621 visits. No matter how you interpret it, that’s a lot of visitors.

If you have Google Analytics setup on your site you can check specific browser usage by going to Visitors > Browser Compatibilities > Browsers. You can then click on Internet Explorer to see which versions people are using to visit your site.

Industry data/reports show that in November of 2010 (the most recent stats available) 4.93% of web traffic is still being browsed via IE6.

A popular response to “why don’t you support IE6?” is that people can download newer browser versions for free. This fact, by itself, is true. However, one thing to keep in mind is there are many corporations that won’t allow employees to update browser versions. So, if that corp. is running IE6, employees won’t be able to sufficiently utilize a new site that does not work in IE6. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are some older users out there who are slow to download newer things because they are just used to the thing they’ve been using.

The Wikipedia article on IE6 states, “Microsoft now considers IE6 to be an obsolete product and recommends that users upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Many corporate IT users have not upgraded despite this, in part because some still use Windows 2000, which will not run Internet Explorer 7 or above.”

We’re not suggesting that every site needs to work as well in IE6 as it might in newer / supported browsers and we’re not suggesting that everyone should develop specifically for IE6, but we do feel there are still a significant number of people out there using IE6 to consider here. Perhaps it doesn’t matter for your business, but we strongly urge you to do a little bit of research before making that call.

If you’re still using IE6 and would like to make the world a better place, please take a few minutes and download IE8 or the IE9 Beta now. There are also other, non-IE, browsers available for free and they’re Windows and Mac compatible. Two such browsers are Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome – we’re BIG fans of these two.

Cell phone reception was minimal, but the building was equipped with wireless internet which is all we really need to operate LaunchDM most of the time. We work in the cloud!

We departed the studio on a late Wednesday morning and met a few clicks north at Jason’s house to load our gear. From Leesport we headed up 61N to Pottsville, PA and home of the original Yuengling brewery – the oldest operating brewery in America – for the 1:30 tour. It’s an awesome experience – highly recommended. From the brewery we jumped back on 61 for a few miles before hitting 81N for an hour or so until we reached the Endless Mountains region of PA and backroaded it to QHF.

Our days at QHF were filled with getting clients everything they needed while we leisurely worked our way through Belgian waffles, fired potato guns, grilled meats, mountain bike rides, shuffleboard games (a.k.a. longboard), pulled pork sandwiches, tennis and, of course, a few cold Pennsylvania beers in the evenings.

The point here is that there are ways to build and bond with your team off-site without spending an arm and a leg and without ignoring your customer/client base. QHF was great for us. Think about your team, your customers, your product or service and figure out a time and place – an occasional dinner, miniature golf outing, ski trip, whatever – that might work for your group.