Pilot CSS and Flash fashion

Since my twitter widget escapade I have been working on a couple of projects, one css based, the other a flash website.  My first project was more work for Helastel and involved me working on putting in template css to make a elearning system for bristol ground school look as identical to the print out designs as possible.  This provided some interesting challenges as the html content was being generated from the inDesign files and so elements were ordered in a way that could not necessarily be altered.  This meant I had to go through and keep notes on what templates would be needed on what pages based on the content and write up the required css to style the templates to the inDesign documents. 
My second project is a flash website for a fashion company that I am building by myself.  The designs have been provided to me.  The website is based around images of high quality and so requires a lot of use of loading techniques to get the images in. I have programmed the swf to use XML to parse in the image locations and then load them. So far this has worked ok but I am currently only running the file locally and so the loading of the large images is an unrealistic representation.  I cannot currently find a way to compress the files as they are loaded either which does not help in terms of the file sizes.  The images can be reduced in size but preferably not too much as the quality of the images still needs to be good up close.  This is probably the most tricky element of this project to master as it is something I havent tried before and have very little knowledge about. Similarly my methods of handling memory usage are not particularly refined so I am having to try and work out the best ways of keeping memory usage to a minimum as I go.  I think if I was to start this project again it would also be better to plan out my approach in terms of what actionscript classes etc I need and what they should do before trying to build the project in its entirety as I am now going to have to go back and develop classes from code I have written which I would not have to do if I had realised at the start.   My methodology for this project therefore is kind of messy and so I hope to improve this in the future based on what I have learnt.  There are still a whole variety of new elements I have yet to incorporate in the project also to make it viable for the web.  This includes SWFAddress and SWFObject javascript and actionscript that makes the swf work alongside the browser more easily.

Twitter API, Jquery, AJAX, javascript, html, css, YUI grids and 1 widget

For the last week or so I have been busy working on an individual project to create a twitter widget that displays a twitter list in the classic twitter scrolling style. This project was given to me as more of a self development project rather than having any end game, which is really good and I have learnt a lot. The title of this blog kind of outlines basically what the project has required, and in typical development fashion the scope creep has been pretty lengthy.  Along the way I've had a couple of other small flash pieces to work on but this has been the main focus of my time.  The project has gone through many various stages over the past week and a half and now consists of both a working scrolling interactive twitter widget, and a generator webpage to provide the twitter widget to other users open source, probably eventually under a creative commons license.  The twitter API probably saved me on this one, making it really easy to get twitter data which I could then manipulate.  Im glad there was no OAuth issues either as this would have been particularly tricky to deal with.  It was really good to properly get to grips with some of the main jquery functions as it is a very powerful javascript addon, and the more comfortable I am with it the better.  Most of the javascript I worte was standard javascript though which is great as it means I have gathered more understanding about something that I can use to improve my personal work in the future.  In doing this project I have also been able to develop some design skills as I have produced all of the assets for the twitter widget creation pages.  This was only small but it has shown to me that my understanding of how web design works has already improved from the work I have been doing on my placement. I have now uploaded the twitter page to my webspace so that it can be used but am having a few compatibility issues between browsers (no surprise). From doing this I have learnt that I should probably work more in stages rather than one go.  If I had tested my application on all browsers throughout the project any main problems that occurred I could fix as I went along rather than having to try and work it out afterwards when there is a lot of code to look through.