Archive for category Portfolio
Magic Eight Ball with the Raphaël JavaScript Library (1.5.2)
Posted by sosuke in JavaScript, Mobile Development, Portfolio, Website Analysis, Websites on April 12, 2011
Wrigley’s Magic Weight Ball is my first project using the Raphaël JavaScript Library and it just went live. I used Raphaël JS version 1.5.2 which you can download from GitHub. The project requirements came through as only being an iPad version that responded to a shake event. Getting to use a new technology for a front-end project where you only have to support one resolution and one browser is an excellent opportunity to try new things. I knew in the back of my head that they would want a non-shakeable static version as well but they just didn’t ask for it yet. Internet Explorer still came into consideration when I was evaluating technology solutions because I was certain it would come up eventually.
When I saw the Nissan Leaf site I was blown away by the heavy JavaScript animations being used. It really reminded me of the early Flash animations and sites in a way. The Hacker News submission I saw the site from pointed out that the animations were being handled by the Raphaël JavaScript Library. This was still fresh in my mind when I got this project so I loaded up the Raphaël demos pages in a ever browser I test on, IE6-9, Safari, Firefox and Chrome and they all worked! This was the library for this project.
I finished up the iPad version of the site http://content.theknot.com/sitelets/magic-weight-ball/ipad which requires iOS 4.2 or higher and was pretty happy with the results. It responds to a full shake event to give you another tip, the tip will bob lightly in the water when moved a little bit and the tip orients to the iPad. When the tip is touched it provides a little modal with more details. The site even supports landscape and portrait viewing.
About half way through developing the iPad version the email I was expecting arrived. “Oh no!” they said, “We need a static non-shakable version for desktop users to visit.” I was already prepared though. When I though about a desktop version I first defaulted to Flash but I wanted to give Raphaël a try first. With a IE6 PNG alpha transparency fix and a small work around for IE to get the Raphaël image src it was up and running on the desktop.
You can visit http://content.theknot.com/sitelets/magic-weight-ball/ to see the result and if you happen to hit the page in an iPad you will get a slightly modified version that still responds to the shake events, always giving the best experience possible.
The weight ball interface itself is a series of 3 layered PNG images. The top most image is a 24bit eight ball and the rest of the tips, triangles and back black images are all 8bit PNG images with the a properly picked matte color. The total site size was reduced as much as possible and the designers loved the look. I reduced the number of colors where ever possible and used a pattern dither, it really seemed to look the best even though it bumped up the file size a bit.
For this animation interface the Raphaël JavaScript Library was a perfect fit and I was able to provide a cross platform and cross browser experience that I was very proud of.
DiveIntoThePool.com free online dating site launched!
This main page is practically a launch announcement site at this point. It’s been a long hard road to launching DiveIntoThePool.com and I’ve so far met all my goals I set out to when beginning development on the site. It was in a language I’ve never used, ASP.Net in C#. On a platform I didn’t know, Windows and IIS hosting. It gave me more experience in designing database driven applications and I started completely fresh on MSSQL as well. It’s been over a year and a half since I started this and I feel so great having designed, developed, managed and launched this project finally. Now the fun begins. From here on in I’ve got to use everything I know about SEO and marketing techniques to promote my new website as I refuse to let it become dormant as I’ve seen so many dating sites do. I’ve setup a blog for the site as well to talk about things that are specific to that project. You can follow the project on twitter, Facebook or MySpace too! Let me know what you think of the new site or if you create a profile!
Weddingtracker launched!
Posted by sosuke in Flash, Portfolio, Website Analysis on June 14, 2008
Weddingtracker launched on June 12th around 2:30PM CST and it has been about 8 long months of development and battle to get it out the door. With over 18,000 lines of code, over 400 files and 64mb in size this has been by far my most complicated Flash project ever. You can see the 13 template files in action on the Weddingtracker sample sites page. We did not design the sites so be sure to look past the front-end user interface when continuing through this post. I want to detail some of the finer points of the production and elements that I am happy with.
The entire project was coded using ActionScript 3.0 and the underlying framework that was used was PureMVC for Flash CS3. It was very stable once we got comfortable with working in its rather verbose arena. Each of the components that made up a users website existed in external files. Template layout, page type content, template colors, menu types, custom media display files and embedded font resource files. All of this makes for an extremely extensible code base that will allow for much more complicated designs without endangering the underlining controller code that sets up how the user interacts with the different pages.
All of the colors and text formatting are loaded in from CSS files that are defined in the initial XML file loading process. These CSS classes are accessed by the different page type controllers when they format themselves. Placeholder movieclips are used in the template resource files to define the location and size of the page type elements. The first class in the CSS files defines a list of used embedded font files required for accurate rendering. These font files are loaded from external SWF files and then registered to the Flash application for usage on embedded TextFields. Many of the ideas that made up this runtime font loader came from this post Runtime font loading with AS3 Flash CS3 not Flex.
I think that this code base is a great start to what could be an excellent product with some more attention to the design and user interface components. I expect to be working on it for the next couple of weeks for post launch issues and into the future when new templates are designed. All of the work over the last 8 months will be extremely helpful when it comes to fixing bugs or making improvements in the future.
I wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped code this impressive project and see it through launch. Susannah was with me in development from the very beginning and the project would not have launched without her help. Andres and Hal came in at the end of the project and worked two weekends in a row to get the template css and skin files setup for me while I finished the components and Susannah worked on custom template elements. I am already looking forward to my next major project but needed to reflect on over half a years work and a successful launch. Congratulations to everyone who worked on this project in the .NET development, all the HTML and CSS work and thank you to the IT project manager for being there from beginning to end of the marathon project.