Matrix Software Blog

Ralawise

2012-02-09T13:37:00.000Z

Ralawise are one of the biggest distribution companies of promotional clothing & leisurewear in Europe. They supply over 1850 different product lines to a vast network of UK, Ireland and Europe-based customers. Ralawise’s clients vary enormously in size but each business specialises in decorating clothes by embroidering or printing motifs and messages on to them before selling them on to their own clients - usually companies, sports clubs, schools - in fact, anyone that requires clothing that features some form of corporate branding.

Matrix CMS will be used to manage product text, images, colours, sizing and pricing from inception to publication in web and print. This marketplace is a familiar one for Matrix with systems already installed in BTC Activewear and Falk & Ross.

Sealey

2012-02-07T13:21:00.000Z

Sealey are one of the UK’s leading suppliers of workshop tools and equipment, providing the best products, best value and a service that is second to none. With over 30 years experience in the industry their tools and equipment are primarily for use in an automotive environment; however, the range is so vast that it covers a wide range of markets and applications.

In line with Flowtech, whose custom we acquired Q3 last year, they previously used the LinkUP! system.

This marketplace is a familiar one for Matrix with IQ Supplies, Draper and Silverline all existing users of Matrix CMS.

Aldridge Security

2012-02-06T13:24:00.000Z

Aldridge Security Limited is the largest security wholesaler in the UK & Ireland and has over 60 years experience in the industry. With over 14,000 different products in stock from 230 suppliers available from their London and Manchester branches, the Aldridge portfolio includes Locking, Ironmongery/Hardware, Access Control and Key Cutting products.

Aldridge is the largest distributor of Yale, Chubb, Union & Evva products in the UK and one of Silca's largest customers in the world for Key Machinery and Blanks. The company also offers a variety of deals and promotions in conjunction with a comprehensive customer support package including brochures, catalogues, leaflets, price lists and supplier literature. Matrix CMS will be used to help generate this literature more quickly and efficiently.

New system per day...

2012-02-05T13:08:00.001Z

For the next 4 days we're going to announce a new client every day. Most of them have been pinched from under the noses of our competitors and obviously this amount of client acquisition is not be sneezed at and it snot a small achievement. Right we're run out of nose puns... hang on to your hats.

New Blood Required

2012-02-02T17:29:00.000Z

We're hiring again, not because anyone has left... YOU NEVER LEAVE MATRIX! most staff have worked here man and boy, or man and old man. No we're hiring again because we're very busy.... job description below...

We are a well established Knutsford, Cheshire based software company. We write cool data-driven visual design and production systems for print catalogues and websites, which are used by some very well known companies in the UK and Europe. We are a 6 person team who are all coders, and we work in contemporary modern offices, in a beautiful town, in a relaxed coder friendly environment. We work primarily on Macs but also on virtualised PCs as the software we produce is cross-platform.

We're after a talented all-round coder who is comfortable developing both font-end and server-side code. We would like you to have a good practical knowledge of JavaScript programming or alternatively an excellent grasp of C++, Ruby, PHP or similar and the ability to transfer those skills. You should also be familiar with relational database management systems and be able to cook up a database schema with ease.

We want the sort of person who will be excited about building desktop-calibre functionality in a browser, like the beta software in these videos from our blog:

http://vimeo.com/20238796
http://vimeo.com/20364707

You'll be working fairly autonomously, and dealing directly with our clients. You'll manage your own projects, from specification to installation, allowing you the freedom to create great code, but with the security and backing of other prodigious programmers in our small team.

Key Responsibilities

Work on our next generation desktop-class browser-based Catalogue Management System
Develop, modify, debug and otherwise support existing installations of our desktop software
Implement desktop-class UI elements in JavaScript, HTML and CSS
Develop server-side code and form based interfaces in 4D procedure language
Deal directly with clients and problem solve over the phone and in person

You Should:

Have very strong all-round programming skills with excellent knowledge of one or more object-oriented programming languages
Have commercial experience of developing business systems, desktop software or highly interactive web sites
Be confident designing and building SQL relational databases and interacting with them through APIs
Be self motivated and able to set your own goals and work independently
Be able to communicate effectively with clients as well as techs
Have a desire not to be another cog in the machine

We Will Be Impressed If:

You have strong object-oriented Javascript programming skills
You know your cutting-edge HTML5 and CSS3 (Canvas, WebGL, WebSockets, CSS Transforms)
You have a desire to work with the latest web application frameworks like Cappuccino and SproutCore, or you already have
You have worked on software through the complete development life-cycle from conception to on-going support

Don't Bother:

If you think making a rollover menu is JavaScript programming

January Sales

2012-01-19T16:57:00.000Z

December was a great month, with orders taken from Sterling and Delphi equating to what was until recently 3 months worth of sales.

Fast forward to this year and it's only the 19th of January and already we've doubled the sales figures for December with a further four systems!

Three of these systems have been pinched from under the noses of our competitors, so at the moment we can't divulge the names of the new clients, but rest assured as soon as we can tell you (and them) we will.

Matrix do Sterling work

2011-12-22T14:31:00.000Z

Founded as a printing company in 1990, Sterling has grown into a highly successful creative communication group, employing over 150 staff. Their headquarters in Kettering handle high end print, production and fulfillment. There are also new media and design studios in Kettering with additional offices and design studios in Edinburgh and London.

They have bought the Matrix CMS system to help streamline their catalogue production work.

Delphi

2011-12-16T14:26:00.000Z

We have acquired Delphi as a client...Delphi is a leading global supplier of electronics and technologies for automotive, commercial vehicles, operating in over 30 countries.

They intend to use Matrix primarily for product information management and to allow data management to take place over many sites and in many languages.

Xmas Cards

2011-12-06T16:57:00.001Z

Well by now most of our customers should have received their Christmas Cards from us. As usual we've gone for a Robert Sabuda designed MOMA card, which everyone loves but can be a pain to sort out.

First of all we order them from the US and it's sent by US Mail, which is possibly the only national postal service worse than the Royal Mail. So that takes weeks.

Then we get a message off the post office to say they've got an item for us but HMRC have slapped on a £70 VAT bill and also they want an extra £20 for the hassle. So we pay the ~~extortion money~~ reasonable charges.

Then we have to bully every member of staff to sign them. That takes several weeks.

Then we print the envelopes trying not to let the printer eat any because there are no spares.

Some poor soul licks the envelopes shut. Or should I say "Sthmum thpoor thowl liks the enthelopes sthut"

They're weighed at the post office (after the great "Why do I have to pay excess postage for your Card" disaster of 2007)

Shoved in a bag, shoved in a post box...And relax.

Anyway if you got a card, it's because we love you. If you didn't it's because we love you (just not as much as the others)

Steel City

2011-11-14T15:26:00.003Z

We really like Sheffield. We like the people, the grittiness, the restaurants on London Road, the music*... and now we like it because it's a mecca for Matrix clients. Starting with Maplin Electronics (alright that's more Rotherham) we then acquired Insight, followed by Go Outdoors and now we have the agency Grays Associates.

With an increasing number of agency customers and an increasing number of Sheffield clients there's a kind of inevitability to this client acquisition, but that's not to say we're taking it lightly. We've already set up two client's data for them, with more on the way!

* ABC, Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Pulp, Heaven 17, everything on Warp records, but not Def Leppard... sorry lads!

Bad 80's music puns on website continue...

2011-11-10T11:57:00.005Z

Having installed a system in Germany with pan-European language translation and with our propensity for bad puns in titles, we've added a news item to our CMS website.

Not wanting to sound like Basil Fawlty or Stan Boardman we avoided the obvious routes for the pun. Don't mention it but I think we got away with it! http://www.matrixsoftware.co.uk/news/falkross/

More News updates

2011-11-08T11:55:00.000Z

We've got new news about our Unicode version of Babelfish at http://www.matrixsoftware.co.uk/news/babelfish/

News update

2011-10-19T21:20:00.000+01:00

You lucky blog readers get stuff early and already probably know all about this, but we've just put a slightly more professional news item on our CMS site...

http://www.matrixsoftware.co.uk/news/next/

We have a winner!

2011-10-17T08:42:00.000+01:00

Calm down dear!... it's not the septuagenerian film director, foodie and insurance peddler, but we have finally, after a long and arduous search, found a person to fill our job vacancy. The lucky recipient of "a desk at Matrix" isn't called Michael either but Nathan.

Still hiring

2011-09-26T21:39:00.000+01:00

We are a well established Knutsford, Cheshire based software company. We write cool data-driven visual design and production systems for print catalogues and websites, which are used by some very well known companies in the UK and Europe. We are a 5 person team who are all coders, and we work in contemporary modern offices, in a beautiful town, in a relaxed coder friendly environment. We work primarily on Macs but also on virtualised PCs as the software we produce is cross-platform.

We're after a talented all-round coder who is comfortable developing both font-end and server-side code. We would like you to have a good practical knowledge of JavaScript programming or alternatively an excellent grasp of C++, Ruby, PHP or similar and the ability to transfer those skills. You should also be familiar with relational database management systems and be able to cook up a database schema with ease.

We want the sort of person who will be excited about building desktop-calibre functionality in a browser, like the beta software in these videos from our blog:

http://vimeo.com/20238796
http://vimeo.com/20364707

You'll be working fairly autonomously, and dealing directly with our clients. You'll manage your own projects, from specification to installation, allowing you the freedom to create great code, but with the security and backing of other prodigious programmers in our small team.

Key Responsibilities

Work on our next generation desktop-class browser-based Catalogue Management System
Develop, modify, debug and otherwise support existing installations of our desktop software
Implement desktop-class UI elements in JavaScript, HTML and CSS
Develop server-side code and form based interfaces in 4D procedure language
Deal directly with clients and problem solve over the phone and in person

You Should:

Have very strong all-round programming skills with excellent knowledge of one or more object-oriented programming languages
Have commercial experience of developing business systems, desktop software or highly interactive web sites
Be confident designing and building SQL relational databases and interacting with them through APIs
Be self motivated and able to set your own goals and work independently
Be able to communicate effectively with clients as well as techs
Have a desire not to be another cog in the machine

We Will Be Impressed If:

You have strong object-oriented Javascript programming skills
You know your cutting-edge HTML5 and CSS3 (Canvas, WebGL, WebSockets, CSS Transforms)
You have a desire to work with the latest web application frameworks like Cappuccino and SproutCore, or you already have
You have worked on software through the complete development life-cycle from conception to on-going support

Don't Bother:

If you think making a rollover menu is JavaScript programming

Salons Direct

2011-09-12T17:53:00.001+01:00

Salons Direct are one of the UK's leading stockists of professional hair & beauty supplies. They've decided to use Matrix CMS to help produce their catalogs and manage their website.

Flowtech

2011-09-05T10:37:00.001+01:00

Matrix have taken on Skelmersdale based Flowtech as a client, replacing their existing LinkUP! system with the Matrix CMS. Matrix will provide a repository for all product information, images and graphics to help manage their multi-language catalogues and websites

Google Catalogs

2011-08-17T09:43:00.000+01:00

If you want a tablet based catalog then the new way to do it is with Google Catalogs. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-catalogs.

Of course to get your text and images into the Google Catalog system, you'll need some kind of management software to handle the images, text and workflow. Luckily we have an App for that!

Warra Lorra Lollies!

2011-07-06T09:29:00.000+01:00

"An army marches on it's stomach" as Napoleon once said, and an army of programmers likes caffeine and sugar.

One of the nicer ways we keep our army of programmers happy, is feeding them with lollipops. We currently have a selection of Chupa Chups lollies and, for the programmer with a more discerning and sophisticated palette the king of fruit flavours Vimto.

If you're coming down to our offices, please feel free to pinch as many as you want (except the Vimto ones… they're mine!)

Matrix invade Europe

2011-07-01T17:38:00.001+01:00

Having installed a Matrix CMS system at Falk & Ross' UK subsidiary BTC, we're pleased to announce that we've been asked to install a system for BTC's parent company Falk & Ross.

Falk & Ross are Europe's largest distributor of promotional clothing. They have offices all over Europe and will be creating catalogues using Matrix CMS in a wide variety of languages including; English, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Czech and Dutch.

The system will be distributed all over Europe with management taking place in Germany, product management in the UK, translation in various countries and page design in the Netherlands.

Nixie Clock

2011-06-27T11:56:00.000+01:00

There's a theme emerging on this blog, I know... Here at Matrix we have a "thing" for cool electronic clocks. We've built several Nixie Clocks over the years and already have one in the main office, but we recently got the opportunity to get a clock built using ultra rare B-7971 nixie tubes. These massive glass tubes were made in the late 60's to display the stock prices in the New York Stock Exchange and are able to show both text and numbers. Only 25 of these clocks have been made so far and we have number #008.

This clock sits in our board room and allows us to time meetings, or more importantly check lunch times, since it's also an unofficial canteen!

Rather than waffle on trying to explain what it is, you can click this link to see a video review by a bloke in Minnesota called Brian... MOD-6 7971 Review

Huey & Dewey

2011-06-14T16:37:00.000+01:00

When I was a kid I used to read a comic called 2000AD, and in this comic was a character called Judge Dredd. Set in the "distant" 21st century, he had a cool motorbike and cool laser gun but the vision of the future that grabbed me was "Walter the Wobot" a domestic robot that vacuumed Judge Dredd's apartment.

Well it's the 21st century, we don't have stupid big motorbikes in the office, we don't have laser guns (more's the pity) but we do have a pair of domestic robots here at Matrix... Huey & Dewey*. It's a human thing to start anthropomorphising mechanical things when they start doing human like tasks and I've just realised that I'm the only one who calls them Huey & Dewy *blush*.

The one on the left "wakes up" at 7am every morning and hoovers the office, before returning to it's charging base when it's power is low, the right hand side one is filled with water and floor cleaning solution, which it then uses to polish the floor and suck up the dirty water.

You may scoff, but we've got two robots!... and it's the 21st century.

* Named from the robots in the classic film Silent Running

Waka! Waka! Wipe your feet

2011-06-10T09:18:00.000+01:00

We already have an arcade cabinet in the office, (which we'll no doubt show in a future blog entry) and being geeks when we saw this door mat in a shop whilst on a business trip to Amsterdam (not THAT kind of business trip to Amsterdam) we had to buy it.

Next client acquisition is Next

2011-05-27T13:40:00.000+01:00

It's spring so for some reason the new clients come thick and fast at this time of year...

In what has become the worst kept secret in catalogue software history, we're proud to announce that we've acquired Next as a customer. In the unlikely event you have no idea who Next are, they're a UK retailer with 550 stores, 55,000 employees, a turnover of £3.4bn and gross profit of £1bn. In short they're big as is this news.

They've decided to get Matrix CMS to help manage their text, images and workflow to make their Next Directory catalogue and provide data for their website.

We're Hiring!

2011-05-12T11:16:00.000+01:00

I could give some long laborious description of what the job entailed and what we do, but you can work that out from our website. But if in essence you match the following criteria;

1) You fancy working in a nice office in Knutsford
2) You want to be left to do cool things and just do your job without someone nagging you or hanging over you
3) You can program something like what is shown in the videos below using javascript

...E-mail us info@matrixsoftware.co.uk with a CV.

I'm expecting lots of people to match (1) & (2) but suspect (3) will be the major stumbling block

Monks & Crane

2011-05-06T14:08:00.001+01:00

We're proud to announce that we've taken on Monks and Crane as a client!

Monks and Crane are a subsidiary of the multi-national Würth Group of companies. They provide product distribution and a range of services to meet the needs of industry such as Maintenance, Repair and Operational (MRO) services and the UK distribution of products from other subsidiaries of the Würth Group.

Wisteria Hysteria

2011-04-27T13:28:00.004+01:00

One of the quirks and benefits of working in picturesque town like Knutsford is that you have weird things like wisteria growing up the front of your office. This relative of the pea was just a twisted mass of twigs until we came back from Easter break and has suddenly burst into thousands of purple, pendulous petals.

It's a long way from our office in Didsbury which had a damp patch growing up the front and you were happy to come back from Easter with the windows and doors still intact.

The best bit is when you come into work in the morning, if the air is still, the perfume is amazing. It dissipates quickly by mid-morning, wether this is caused by a change in air temperature, sunshine or just a steady procession of smelly programmers walking past we haven't worked out yet.

Salfordian Telephony Experts

2011-04-11T14:20:00.000+01:00

Sounds like the name of a Fall song, which given that this company are 1200yds from Mark E. Smith's local pub seems very apt.

Nimans are the UK's leading telecommunications and data distribution specialist for telephones, telephone systems, headsets, audio conferencing units, integrated systems, structured cabling solutions and all ancillary products.

Operating from a purpose-built base at Agecroft Business Park, Salford, near Manchester, they employ around 200 staff as part of a growing business which is currently generating almost £60 million in annual turnover.

Nimans have created several catalogues externally in recent years, but it soon because apparent that it would be cheaper and easier to manage all the data for their catalogues and websites in one single system and create catalogues internally. After looking at the different packages on offer Matrix CMS was selected as being the most proficient and cost effective solution.

"It's great to acquire Nimans as they're the biggest telecoms distributor in the UK" says Matrix MD, Nick Speakman. "Plus as a bonus, they're local, really friendly and a great bunch of people to work with"

Great night out for a great cause

2011-03-26T13:40:00.000Z

The football loving members of Matrix went to the amazing Manchester Museum of Science and Industry or MOSI last night to a dinner to help raise money for FC United of Manchester's new ground. It was held in the new "Revolution" room at the museum amongst the exhibits of 100 year old Manchester built Avro aircraft and early Manchester built computers.

Justin Moorhouse (Potter's Tiger in Phoenix Nights) was compare and United legends Wilf McGuinness and Martin Buchan were there to regale us with their anecdotes. A great night was capped by raising over £25K, to help FC United gain their own ground and continue their award winning community work.

In typical Mancunian style the aim is to show how you can have a fan owned club that is run as a not for profit co-operative organisation. As the birth place of the Labour movement, the co-operative movement, women's suffrage and trade unionism, we're a bolshy lot... but as has been said for the last 200 years "What Manchester Does Today, The Rest of The World Does Tomorrow!"

We've "got" Go Outdoors

2011-03-24T20:20:00.000Z

In line with blogging stuff months before we do proper news, with proper pictures and the grammar checked and stuff... we bring you the breaking news that we've acquired Go Outdoors http://www.gooutdoors.co.uk/ as a client.

Go Outdoors are the UK's biggest outdoor specialist with over 30 stores. They recently secured a position in the top three of the Sunday Times Deloitte Buyout Track 100, which ranks private-equity backed companies by their profits over the past two years.

Cool new Whiteboard

2011-03-09T08:40:00.000Z

Much like the Page Grid in an earlier post, we've had a "whiteboard" in the CMS for many years now. It's a very divisive feature, with clients either loving or hating it.

It was developed after we were shown a queue of buyer's assistants all chatting away, Pritt Stick, scissors and old catalogues in hand, waiting to use a photo copier. The resultant "brief" would be dumped in front of a designer and they'd have to find the images, correct the text and generally try and make a silk purse out of the photocopied sow's ear.

Anyway we used to use a plug-in called "4D Draw" and then we started to write our own from scratch for web browsers. This version supersedes both those and unifies the client and web versions. It's got loads more functionality than we're showing here in the 6 minute video, but this gives a flavour of what we're doing. It's ironically getting close to InDesign or Quark in a browser.

Like last time it's running in Safari on a Mac but will run on any platform and any modern browser. Also like the last demo this functionality will appear in the first "live" system soon and should be rolled out into other client's builds in Q3 this year.

CMS Whiteboard Demo from Matrix Software on Vimeo.

Cool new page grid preview

2011-02-28T10:46:00.000Z

We've had a grid of pages in the CMS for about 10 years, allowing you to view pages visually either in single pages or double page spreads. The previews are updated whenever someone touches a page, either in the page planning within the CMS or in InDesign or Quark. This provides a "live" management overview of the pages and also allows easier navigation. You can also drag and drop pages to repaginate them.

This traditionally was done one way in the client application and a completely different way in the browser. However now we're merging more and more functionality and by using "web areas" in the client we will have the same code running in both.

Pages can be assigned a section, print section, designer, product manager, repro house etc. etc. and this data is now displayed dynamically in the grid allowing for a live report of pagination, colour coded by whichever data you choose. You can also filter pages by user defined values. Finally you can "collapse" the page view to remove the preview and provide a more spreadsheet like view.

Anyway watch the movie, it's all very cool and it'll do a better job of explaining what can happen than I can...

This functionality will appear in the first "live" system soon and should be rolled out into other client's builds in Q3 this year.

CMS Page Grid Demo from Matrix Software on Vimeo.

It's what we do!

2011-02-21T17:03:00.002Z

With light grey walls and dark grey wooden floors in a January light, it became quickly apparent that the new offices were a little too stark (or Starck?) plus the austere decor was acting like a big reverb unit.

The solution to both problems was to adorn the walls with massive canvases representing what we do. We've had six done;

A fashion shot for all the clothing catalogues (JD Williams, Otto, Boden, Express Gifts, Cotton Traders, BTC...)

A rainbow array of pens for stationary (Office Club, Spicers, Advantia, Integra...)

A colourful resistor for electronics (Maplin, Rapid, Oyyy, Insight...)

A glassy bright red screwdriver for tools (Draper, Toolstream, Teamvise...)

A high-tech carbon bike for cycling (even if we only have one client, Evans, but what's not to like about a cool bike on a white background?)

And a kaleidoscopic porcelain bowl for auction houses (again only one, Christies but we need nice striking images)

The office has maintained it's modernist cool, the walls are brighter and more importantly we can talk on the phone to clients without sounding like we're ringing from the bottom of a deep well. Hopefully when clients come round they'll look at the seemingly random collection of images before making the connection that all these diverse things are handled in our software.

We love our "Word Clock"

2011-02-18T09:36:00.000Z

We've been in or new offices now for just over a month and everyone who walks in says "Wow!... what's that?" when they see our Word Clock.

It works by receiving a radio time signal from an atomic clock in Frankfurt so it's always the right time and of course as you can see it spells out the time in words rather than numbers. It took a while to realise that the four dots in the corners indicate the extra four minutes after the time spelt out. So in the example above it's actually 21 minutes past 9 because the first dot is lit up.

It has a light sensor in the back which checks the ambient light and dims or brightens the LEDs in the clock to match. It's glowing a lot in the photo because my iPhone isn't the greatest camera in the world but in reality it's crisp and sharp and can be read from 20-30 feet away.

You can find out more about them here... http://www.qlocktwo.com/

First Post

2011-02-17T20:59:00.000Z

Hi,

Welcome to our blog. The intention is to use the blog to showcase stuff we're doing, tell you what's going on in the company and generally fill the gap between, not telling you anything and it going onto the website.

Hopefully we'll be posting some cool videos of new developments soon.