Chromaplex LLC

This platform allows photographers to drop their beautiful photos into tastefully designed pamphlets, brochures, and frames. We built an interface that allows users to customize these designs by adding text, cropping photos, changing text colors, inserting graphics, and more — all within a basic web browser. When designing a site like this, one of the most pressing concerns is ensuring that the customization process is done well: easy to follow, consistent, and seamless.

Since this is an eCommerce site at its heart, we used Magento as the eCommerce core. We know it to be stable and battle-tested platform, which can handle almost any basic needs that a web-store might have. We wrote the product configuration interface from the ground up using pure unadulterated JavaScript and jQuery. 

The user-facing version needed to be fun to use in addition to guiding the users through each page of the product design step-by-step. An extremely lengthy list of features needed to be available and most critically they had to look exactly like the printed version. The final result was a beautifully crafted customer-facing configuration tool that allows customers to insert images, edit text, add their own logos and more.

Jacquard Products makes a high-end dye called SolarFast which is specially formulated to artists to affix custom graphics onto t-shirts and other textiles, using only sunlight. Jacquard wanted to give their customers a way to preview how it would look. Users need to be able to pick an image from their phone, and virtually stick it to the shirt or textile in augmented reality. They also needed to see it in monochrome with their chosen dye color, and tap to move/resize all in 3D and real-time–right in front of their eyes!

To provide Jacquard with the perfect solution, we chose to develop an Augmented Reality (AR) app. Through this technology, clients can hold up their phone to a shirt in real life and see how the shirt would look with their chosen design printed on it. For online customers, they can test various colors and sizes right from the comfort of their own home; brick-and-mortar customers can use their own phone with any of the in-store t-shirts to test out their designs.

The app interface gives the customers complete control over the design. They can upload various images, change colors through the various Jacquard filters, and adjust the contrast and brightness. Once the image is projected onto the shirt, the customers can use a light touch to move the image, a pinch in or out to resize it, or a two-tip touch to rotate it. All of these changes happen seamlessly in the augmented reality created by the app.

Foodalyzer is a quick and easy way to get nutritional information about your meal – just point your phone’s camera at your food and nutritional labels will appear in an augmented reality environment.

Foodalyzer was designed as a proof-of-concept that food items on store shelves could be recognized using AI and Computer Vision. The Computer Vision results needed to be cross-referenced against a database of food items to confirm that they were indeed food. After building this proof-of-concept, the product team decided that the app had real-world value of its own–or would, if we could provide nutritional information about the foods identified on-screen. We discovered that we could do this using publicly available nutritional facts and Foodalyzer was born. The larger project effort is still ongoing.

Foodalyzer is available for free in the App Store- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foodalyzer/id1292784140?mt=8

If you find yourself repeatedly hitting snooze and oversleeping, Squeeze was made with you in mind. The concept is simple: when your alarm goes off, squeeze down your iPhone’s volume button to snooze; release to un-snooze. Since the alarm will go off as soon as your hand goes limp, you won’t be able to drift back to sleep. This allows you to wake up more slowly and comfortably without risking oversleeping.

“Because springing up out of bed immediately is an unpleasant and jarring way to wake up. If you hit snooze you know you’re just going to fall back asleep, and then waking up ten minutes later you’re no more rested, but you are running ten minutes late!”

A startup came to us with an idea for an app to allow users to listen to their own music when placed on hold, rather than whatever music the call center is playing.

In order to reach the broadest possible market we started with an iOS version of the app. We used a high-end audio library designed for DJs and combined it with a VOIP solution. This allowed us to build a custom music player right into the app, that can play music either from the phone itself, or stream music from providers like Spotify and Google Music.

For the calls themselves we built a scalable cloud-based VOIP service that routes calls to 800-numbers via a 3rd party telephony provider. This allowed us to have scalable, industry-leading audio quality and uptime, without having to build out the entire telephony ecosystem ourselves. We found a metered pricing plan that kept costs low, while still delivering a flawless calling experience.

You can check out the app on the iTunes store, or click here.

For their website redesign, Spigit decided to focus on a streamlined user experience — less clicks, more comprehensive pages, and a mobile-first approach to interface design. The site had a strict hard-launch deadline, so in order to speed up the development process we maintained close daily contact with the client as we worked, continuously offering releases for content development and review. We bolstered our development efforts using the latest CSS preprocessing technologies, allowing us to rapidly deploy, iterate, and refine their intricate designs.

Months after its initial release, we’ve continued to partner with Spigit to provide weekly site updates, content changes, and support. Whether your business needs a dynamic team to crunch tasks and hit deadlines on the head, or a dependable partner in it for the long haul, Chromaplex can deliver on all fronts.

http://www.spigit.com

A creative agency approached us with an interesting proposal for a project: How I Met My Dog, a service that partners with local animal shelters and uses canine personality testing to help match dogs with their perfect owners. Our creative partner had already built out the designs for the site; now all they needed was the business and engineering talent to get the app off the ground and oversee its development from start to finish.

How I Met My Dog is a startup with rapidly shifting requirements, so we wanted to make sure that we’d be able to build quick iterations of the app as their business needs developed. To that end, we decided to go with a tried-and-true tech stack that allowed us to iterate rapidly and efficiently while keeping overhead to a minimum. Built on a Laravel backend and a ReactJS frontend, How I Met My Dog uses phpunit for test coverage, vagrant for environment configuration, and AWS for deployment.

Thanks to everyone’s efforts, we launched How I Met My Dog in 2016 and they’ve been steadily adding regions and collecting beta feedback from their users. Perfection being a moving target, we’ve been continuing to help them iterate on the site, improving old features, adding new ones, and addressing the concerns of their users as they come up.

How I Met My Dog was featured in an Associated Press article.

The client needed to create a service for pairing employers with potential candidates based on a custom matching algorithm.

We decided to build this application on the Laravel framework for its solid MVC architecture and to utilize it’s dependency management capabilities (Composer). This project was a team effort, and Composer helped maintain consistency and reliability when working with dependencies amongst multiple developers. Additionally, the use of Vagrant aided this process further and made for simple and reliable production deployment.

For payment processing, we chose to use Stripe. We needed the ability to manage multiple levels of subscription-based payments, and Stripe provided a thorough and flexible system for doing so. It also handled pro-rated subscriptions, trial periods, and one-off purchases with ease.

Due to the complex nature of the application and matching algorithms, we decided to employ thorough Unit and Integration Testing using PhpUnit.

For deployment, we chose to use Amazon EC2 because of its scalability. As this company grows, we can scale-up the server size and eventually move to an automated load-balancer to handle the kind of burst a startup may receive when they hit their “tipping point”.

http://hirenetics.com

We rebuilt Mindjet’s corporate website to better showcase the flagship product, MindManager. To handle international support, we utilized WordPress’s multi-site features, and we hooked into Mindjet’s preexisting eCommerce platform to handle sales.

http://www.mindjet.com/mindmanager

Your Summer Skin is a Magento based eCommerce site specializing in stylish sun protective clothing. We’ve worked with them to improve the functionality of their site, add advanced analytics, and integrate with external shopping aggregators to help drive sales.

http://yoursummerskin.com

We rebuilt Support.com’s corporate website from scratch to match their new design. This project included a massively customizable admin panel where any content can be changed without breaking the layout. They are able to add lightboxes, slide-up forms, configure dynamic content throughout the site, and much more, just through the wordpress admin panel.

The site is also fully responsive.

Sami was built using the CodeIgniter PHP framework.  For such a large-scale project, a solid MVC architecture was necessary for creating robust, organized, extensible code.  Additionally, we had multiple programmers working on this application and CodeIgniter allowed for a modular approach to feature development.

The designs our partner came up with were beautiful, but also fairly complex, and we wanted to make sure we could reproduce them as closely as possible. Similarly to the modular approach we took with the core of the system, we wanted to ensure our front end styles were organized as well. As such, we decided to implement the Compass CSS framework which utilizes the SASS pre-processor.  This way, we could create cleaner markup that was highly reusable, which also paved the way for us to implement a company-specific theming system down the road.

On top of the basics, Sami required some unique functionality which required us to think out of the box. The client wanted to be able to draw on Google Maps in real time: shading areas, adding pins and markers, and so forth. We were able to leverage KineticJS, a bleeding edge HTML5 Canvas framework, to implement all of the control that they needed.

We had a blast working on Sami and think that the end result is pretty slick. It’s not public facing application which makes it tough to show off, but hopefully the screenshots give you the gist!

A theme-based E-Commerce site utilizing WooCommerce.  Built on WordPress.

http://handsfreecarryall.com

A custom template, E-Commerce solution utilizing WP E-Commerce.  Built on WordPress.

http://blood-bolts.com

A CMS driven site for a cutting-edge digital video ad agency. Built on WordPress using a highly customized template.

http://www.set.tv/

Theme based Opencart eCommerce site with custom inventory import and order export functionality.

http://lacedupdecals.com/

CMS Driven WordPress site with integrated dynamic event management

faithhopelife.com//

CMS Driven Business site with blog and custom promotional catalog

http://tahoeunveiled.com/

CMS Driven Business Site

http://www.usajapan.org/

CMS Driven Promotional Site with blog

http://www.usjinnovate.org/

CMS Driven Site using our custom Chromaplex CMS.

http://www.wholehealthconsulting.com/

For Serving Up Style, our creative partner was working with Mollysfund to develop and market a fundraising design showcase. Mollysfund is a nonprofit working to fight against lupus.

To make the event work, Mollysfund needed a custom website where local designers could submit their showcases and others could view them. They had designs ready, including separate mobile and tablet designs which we would need to recreate faithfully. The site also needed to provide a clean interface for Mollysfund to manage the showcases, approving/rejecting, editing, and organizing them.

CMS Driven Small Business Site

http://michaelsimondds.com/

CMS Driven site built on top of WordPress.

http://marinabayrealtysf.com

CMS Driven Small Business Site

http://costinlawfirm.com

Small Business Site with blog and event management. Custom theme built on top of WordPress.

http://www.blisscounseling.com/

Online retailer.

http://www.westcoastproducts.net/

Business Development in the Developing World. Custom theme built on top of our custom Chromaplex CMS. Includes localization support for several languages.

http://www.stratdevglobal.com

UCSF’s Brain and Spinal Injury department needed to revamp their site. They were a special case because the site not only serves as a resource to patients and their families, but also as an information repository for their laboratory scientists and providers. They needed a solution that gave them a secure and protected resource library with patient care guides for their staff to access, as well as user-facing pages which provide information to patients and their families. Most importantly, all of the content needed to be managed by Doctors, Scientists, Researchers and Assistants, so the solution had to be easy to use and intuitive to people with a scientific background.

We architected and built a custom Content Management System, based on our in-house Chromaplex Content Management System with a customized easy-to-use back-end interface designed specifically for UCSF. The interface gave their staff a centralized dashboard, allowing them to update internal resources for their care providers as well as externally facing pages for their patients and their families. We collaborated with a design agency who designed a completely new front-end look for the site’s visitors. We brought those designs to life and integrated them with the new custom back-end CMS.

http://brainandspinalinjury.org/