Wizard101.comThis was another huge project that involved a large team of people, so there is little on this site that is mine and mine alone. I was primarily focused on javascript and flash development for the site and, for the most part, everything that's Flash on the site is mine. |
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The Slideshow/Filmstrip - This application started off simply as something that
would either play a movie or function as a slideshow. As the needs of the site grew, however, it
slowly developed into a sort of swiss army knife of media display. The slideshow has three different
display modes: slideshow, filmstrip and dual slideshow. These are all the same file, they're just being
initialized with different parameters. To switch between the different modes just requires changing
one parameter. The slideshow will display a series of images, movies or both; with a defined fade down and fade up in between. Example of the slideshow The filmstrip displays thumbnails for all the media loaded into it and allows the user to choose which they want to see. This also takes both images and movies to display and automatically generates the thumbnail for them. Example of the filmstrip The dual slideshow is basically the same as the slideshow except it displays both a static image and a movie for each "slide". Example of the dual slideshow This application had two significant development points in it for me. First, this is the first Flash application I'd created that was resizable. It will automatically move all the elements around to fit any space that it's created in. Second, instead of using xml to dynamically generate the file, I'm using a javascript object to pass in all the parameters. This has ended up making a tremendously flexible tool that loads much faster than having to read in an xml file from the server. Once again everything is generated on the fly so the file size has stayed at a very manageable 20K. I also ended up doing quite a bit of bandwidth testing for how the media was being loaded and really worked to optimize the experience for low bandwidth users. |
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The Marker Utility - The marker utility loads a background image and allows the creator to define the
placement of any number of markers. These markers will load in creator defined thumbnail images and text to
display for the marker's rollover. They markers can also be defined as a link when clicked. Example of the marker utility. This utility was a lot of fun to make. It automatically figures out where to place the thumbnail based on where the marker is on the stage so that it's the most visible all the time. This, like the slideshow, is also resizeable. It wasn't a tremendously difficult utility but it was my first forray into doing an actionscript 3 project, so it took a little longer than usual (about 3 days). I am now a huge fan of working with actionscript 3. |
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Background Animations- little random goodies around the site to try and add appeal.
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