March 2011

Shellfish: the king’s favourite dish

Content is king: it’s a dogma all communication professionals (some more for appearance’s sake than in true faith) adhere to. It’s not the most inspired of openings, I admit, but please bear with me… At B·U·T we do a decent job at dressing the king in various royal outfits. One of the many ways we achieve that is with Adobe Flash. It gives content a slick and flash-y (poor pun, I know, my credit is running out here) look, it is widely supported and works both online and off-line. But the more royal king content’s looks, the less approachable he becomes; or simply put, Flash content is not easily accessible by the content owner for customizing, editing or translating. To remedy that, we’ve built Shellfish.

What is Shellfish? It’s so many things I’m not sure where to begin… It’s not a ready-to-install software that comes in a box, although it’s the closest we’ve come to making one. No, our work is tailor-made to the needs of the customer, so it doesn’t fit into a uniform box. Even when making suits-to-measure, however, a tailor uses patterns he can be creative with.

Our toolbox

That’s what Shellfish is for us: a toolbox for building custom Flash content in a uniform and much quicker way than on-the-fly Flash development. But why am I telling you this…? Your Flash-built tool or presentation will take less time to deliver, so will any changes or updates you’ll surely require afterwards. The content is dynamic: so whenever pages are added or titles are changed, the menu, table of contents or breadcrumb trail are automatically adapted.

Your editing and translation tool

I confess: those points are still fairly abstract to customers, but Shellfish is not just a toolbox for development, it’s also a toolbox for customers to edit or translate their content. To continue the tailor’s analogy: it allows you to change that fancy, yet slightly outdated checked tailor-made suit into a fashionably striped one. And we tailors wonder why we never get rich…

This innovative aspect of Shellfish recently earned us a Platinum European Seal of e-Excellence. The seal is awarded by EMF, the Forum of e-Excellence, a network of various stakeholders in the digital economy, like associations, large companies, research organisations, public authorities, etc. 

Shellfish harnesses the flexibility of Flash to build presentations, e-learnings, database interfaces, digital signage templates, games or any other interactive application online or off-line. Typical examples are the translation and editing capabilities Shellfish added to a sales tool we made for Daikin’s Seasonal Inverter, the company’s newest intelligent cooling and heating technology for small businesses.

“Shellfish is an excellent concept”, Dirk Dhont, DENV Consulting Sales Support at Daikin Europe confirms. “It allows our affiliated companies to make the text changes and even entire translations themselves online. There’s no more need to send e-mails back and forth for any change, whether it’s a thorough text review or just a missing comma somewhere. When everything is done, we just let B·U·T know and they export a new online and off-line version that we can download and go to work with.”

This is one typical use where Shellfish saves customers from the devastating choice between PowerPoint or Flash for presentations. They’ll go for PowerPoint because of its editability, but they’ll end up with 15 different versions - some completely messed up - of what is supposed to be a uniform communication tool. They’d go for Flash because it’s designed by professionals and it’s easier to include interactive tools like calculators. If only they could edit and translate its contents… Well… they can!

Your data management tool

But Shellfish capabilities go well beyond the classical presentation. Gates uses it to manage language versions, local variants and all player and game data (including e-mail management follow-up) for their racing game that is used both online and at trade fairs. You can play the game here.

Erwin De Boeck, Internet Marketeer at Gates especially appreciates the modular approach that Shellfish made possible. “In a single online management system, we can adapt game settings like the language version, introduction, duration and prizes depending on where and when we want to use it. Using the same interface, we can download the data of all players. Shellfish does a perfect a job at all of this, it’s fast and very easy to use.”

I could go on for a full series of articles by showing off other features like the cue-point management to easily synchronize voice-over with animation, but the nerd-level of this article has peaked well too high already. Anyway, even without knowing the intricacies of their relationship, I hope I’ve made clear why Shellfish and Flash are our favourite couple: they make a splendid apparel for the king, and give power to the users!

Follow the tutorials: http://www.but.be/shellfish