UWindsor

I recently finished up a project for the University of Windsor, hereinafter referred to as UWindsor. It was actually a very smooth project and I liked my team immensely.

If you know of me as a Flash Developer (or have read previous posts of this blog), you'll know I love using XML as a way of handling content. Thanks to a heads up from Alex Davis, I've started using XPath in Flash. Jen deHaan has a nice little article here explaining it's usage. It really is a time saver. No more looping through childNodes yourself.

Anyway, UWindsor wanted a site to pull in prospective students by showing them the university from the student's perspectives. Using testimonials from current students gave a voice to the site that would have been sorely lacking otherwise.


You get to the site from an email from UWindsor, since they control the url, we added in their first name as a greeting using base64 encoding and decoding. In this example, aGFuZGJhbmFuYQ== becomes handbanana.




The two guides, are equal on the main page. once you select either path "The School" or "The Scene" that guide increases in size, reinforcing the path you chose.





It was apparent early on that users are used to picking what they want when they want it. So we provided users with a video gallery of all videos used in the site.





This is what the photo asset looks like and it's xml node that triggers it.





This is what the text asset looks like and it's xml node that triggers it.





This is what the video asset looks like and it's xml node that triggers it.

Like Always. Like Never Before.

After a long absence from my blog (with good reason, imo), here's my latest project.

Like Always. Like Never Before. is Saturn's newest tagline. In our effort to provide something that embraced this concept, I was approached to build this. It's still under production (as large scale projects of this nature usually are) with phase two fast approaching, and various enhancements coming along.



The one word that really describes this project is dynamic. Whether from the xml substructure to the auto-thumbnailing, the section builds to the titling of each object, there's very little prebuilt that isn't simply code. Just how I like it.






mp4 screen cap here

Enjoy.

FLV's

Found out an interesting thing while trying to find the duration of an FLV today. (at the eleventh hour, of course, somebody wanted a progress bar)

Fuel's blog

Good ol Flash Video Encoder slaps down some nifty metadata.
__ns.onMetaData = function(obj) {
trace("FLV duration: " + obj.duration + " sec.");
trace("FLV videodatarate: " + obj.videodatarate + " Kbit/s");
trace("FLV audiodatarate: " + obj.audiodatarate + " Kbit/s");
trace("FLV creationdate: " + obj.creationdate);
}

personally, creationdate came back undefined, but duration worked just fine.