Recent work

Last week I finished the Pixillion Session Flash site for Pixillion as my second full flash project for the company.  In building this site I have continued to develop my skills as a Flash developer and learn better ways of working to build sites like this.  My methodology was definitely better this time as my development time was shorter and the overall product is much tidier and more refined.  Planning the project prior to production was the first change I made and it definitely made a difference, as aspects of navigation and control could be planned out effectively ensuring the build was successful. In building this site I have also taken the step to using imported classes, in particular, TweenLite from Greensock.  I have previously resisted using these as I felt that the standard inbuilt Tween class would be more inkeeping with the work.  However classes like this help to aid rendering and performance greatly, and often allow for much better refined functionality so I felt it was about time I started using them.  It is something many professional developers do, although I would like to extend my knowledge further to be able to build Tweens of my own. Another import I used in Sessions was the Flickr API which has enabled me to learn how to develop Flickr elements into my projects.  I was quite impressed with the import classes provided as they were very functional and easy to use and it did not take me long to get a fully functioning Flickr section working.  This has therefore developed my skills further enabling me to make sites more functional in the future by connecting to outside source of information.  I also used video for the first time in this project which was an interesting learning curve. I built a video player using the Netstream class which enables video to be streamed from your server to the user using progressive download (buffering).  I chose to use this rather than the inbuilt component as it allowed me to have greater control over the video and elements of the player.  Overall I am very happy with this project and am looking forward to it going live for the first time once the Facebook version is also complete.
As well as this I have also done some development work on FoxyVineMusic, a flash site built previously that needed updating for a client.  This was an interesting challenge as I had to take someone else's code and adapt it for the purpose.  It also helped me to understand various elements of professional Flash development that  I may not have known before.  This site was structured using a set of swfs that were nested within each other and the entire site was built using OOP.  I already knew this was important and have begun to use it in my own productions but still have not converted fully.  Also the site was left on one singular frame, which was achievable due to the nested swf approach.  I can understand why people use this approach, particularly in large sites but I currently still prefer my method of using one swf with a frame per page.  Once I had got my head around the structure and the processes the changes were easy, I even added pagination with a couple of hours :).
Renegade was back again this week too. I had to make a couple of tweeks to the site before it goes live, although a lot more tweeks had been made before that as the site was a little 'free' for the users i.e. they were putting images in that were the wrong size and it wasn't dealing with them.  I will remember this next time templating comes up as it is easy enough to fix and makes the site much more usable from a user perspective.
Its gone a bit quite now for the last few days and to fill the time I have been working on Openroots, a personal group project that was set up by Will and Gav.  It is a tutorial and informational site for DAT students, but I won't say any more. Been busying myself with learning to understand CCS3 transitions and media queries.  I can't decide which I prefer at the moment; fixed or fluid sites.  Fluid sites annoy me because the percentages can be a bit difficult to work with, but fixed sites are no way near as adaptable.  They say fluid is the future but from what I've seen here at Pix there isn't much proof of that yet.  Although I would rather be working on a real project it has been quite good to get my head around some of this new front end stuff for a change, keeping up with the times kind of thing, even if none of it is actually accepted by W3C validation at the moment.
Its the placement seminar at Uni this Friday, it'll be good to see everyone again and talk about what we've all been doing.  I seem to write enough so hopefully I can fill 5 minutes ok.