The Yardistry Design Tool that I mentioned in my previous post is out! As I mentioned in that post, it’s been implemented using Flex 3 and Papervision3D and stands out where applications that leverage 3D in the browser go, especially in terms of the complex tooling it brings into the browser.

Here’s the direct link to the tool: http://designer.yardistrystructures.com/.  Select the ‘Custom Design Tool’ and get started modeling your outdoor structures.

A slightly technical aside: All the 3D part shapes that you see in the tool were created in popular 3D applications like Google Sketchup and 3DS Max and imported into our tool using our custom import utility so that we could apply rules to the shapes so as to work in the tool. Yardistry had these parts designed and available in the Sketchup format and we brought them in without them having to do anything special to make these shapes usable in the design tool.

Jane was the primary analyst on the Yardistry project and I was the primary architect/designer for the design tool and we are both based out of Toronto. Our development team is based out of Bangkok and they recently celebrated the completion of the Yardistry project and sent us a pic. They did such an amazing job – mad skills!!

This also makes me think about how we have got our development processes locked down. We were very agile with very quick short cycle times. At the same time, we were able to communicate and track requirements, design and development milestones for this fairly complex application between Toronto and Bangkok seamlessly and without compromise.  As with almost all of our projects, we used Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) for  managing and tracking development and bug tracking. It helps that we have a lot of VSTS and process expertise in-house so that we were able to leverage VSTS to the full extent possible.

We have an excellent team to begin with but we are able to leverage tooling such as VSTS to make a distributed team a non-issue – and in fact make it an advantage.

Congratulations to the team!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 3:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.