Great Success

This will be my final entry for this blog. After another night-long grind, I turned in all of our materials this morning. Piecing the last few parts of the Flash site together was a challenge, but all in all I ended up getting slightly more done with it than I had expected. The store functions like the collection, with "profiles" for each piece of merchandise, and the forums have rudimentary interactivity.

After the review Catie and I received yesterday I suppose we should both be proud of our work. At present I simply feel exhausted, although I am grateful that we succeeded in what we set out to do.

The Junior show went excellently, and I enjoyed showcasing our work. Hopefully the final materials we prepared will be enough to elevate both our grades.

The site is now live, and can be accessed here. It's been a fun an interesting project as well as a learning experience, although at present I'm very happy to say it's over.

The Finishing Touches

Its looking good! Mike's been working hard on the collection page to show all of the features we are hoping to show at the Junior Show. Currently, I'm working on getting the Contact Us fields to work, the Log In, and the personality profiles. I'm having a bit of an issue trying to get the input text to clear once you've hit the submit button. I might have to contact Jeff for that one.

Mike added marks to show which bullets are which as a quick glance option. Making multiples carinas just wasn't going to work for us since some of them had as little as ONE in that particular category. Mike is hoping to do something with the Forums pages. I really don't think we need to get to crazy with it, just show how the page will function through user clicks.

I personally am very grateful that Mike is very Flash savvy since I'm somewhat limited, but I'm doing my best. I screwed up my own copy of the file at one point, codewise, and had to get Mike to resave a new copy of a file for me, so now we have a great deal of files that all have different progress stages, Mike's copy being the grand master. So hopefully nothing bad happens with that file!

We are a little worried that all of our merchandise won't be here ontime. I'm going to see what I can do about tracking it and seeing where it is at or hopefully when it will get there.

So Close...

We are so close! We have made progress. We applied animation effects to panels on almost all the pages and they work smoothly. Mike has been fiddling with the navigation animation on the collection page. Our goal is to show examples of how the different options for arranging the bullets will animate. Unfortunately, we can't show all of them (I wish we could) but that would require a lot more time that we quickly seem to be running out of.

We are contemplating on how to indicate which bullets are belong to a certain category without creating a plethora of carinas and movieclips. Eddy suggested we use subtle text in each of the bullet windows for fast interpretation. Mike said this would be simple to accomplish.

Mike also wants to make the Forums slightly interactive to show their potential functions. This would require a creation of a few discussions. I mentioned that perhaps we could post a discussion of Facebook in order to create potential information without spending too much time creating one for ourselves. Mike would have to create this on his Facebook since I don't have one! Amazing isn't it?

After we get the collection page totally hammered out it would only be a matter of applying those same codes and elements to the Store page. So this step will probably be left for last, along with all the simple, little aesthetics that can be take care of easily.

Mike has created a lightbox feature that will be applied to each of the bullets. Information has not yet been applied to it, but will in the future.

As for working together on the project, we are planning on meeting on Thursday night and working until we are at a point were we feel relatively secure in our progress and we are grateful to have the weekend to work on it. We are almost there! I can almost taste it!

Some Progress

After a short meeting with Jeff yesterday, I got several suggestions on how I might restructure the collection and store pages to avoid some of Flash's known issues with ActionScript. (While I come nowhere near Jeff's knowledge of it, I'm no stranger to AS being extremely picky in the way that it's applied.) Following Jeff's feedback, I was able to successfully resolve all of the problems we were encountering so far.

I also spoke with Eddy at length about how the aesthetics of the website might be improved. I feel the project is currently holding a high "B" status, which I find personally unacceptable. After further consultation with Jeff today, it seems that redesigning the menus (or reskinning them at the very least) will prove essential in being able to animate them without too much trouble. My goal for Friday is to present some new aesthetic options and see what gets a more favorable response.

As I had feared, programming the complex levels of interactivity we had originally planned for the collection gallery isn't going to be feasible. I do believe, however, that some scenario-based examples of what we want the system to do can be effectively mocked up, in addition to keeping the full collection of bullets browsable (as we have it now). I'm still considering how exactly to do this. Catie and I will probably consult on it more Friday. For the moment I have enough to do just implementing some of the changes we've discussed already, and completing work on supplemental content.

On the merchandise side, the hat has arrived, but I'm still awaiting the arrival of the mouse pad. I'll be placing an order for some additional items from Zazzle tonight. We should also consider possible display options for the upcoming show in two weeks.

"Coding be damned..."

After an intensive few days of production in Flash and Dreamweaver, we've more or less gotten caught up to where we planned to be at this point in our schedule. Coding issues are in no short supply as we examine how to move forward with the multiple layers of interactivity we want for the site. At the same time, I feel the need to experiment with some additional animations, if only to present the experience more elegantly.

I'll be meeting with Jeff on Wednesday, at which point I'll address what issues I'm not able to solve on my own before then. That we've managed to crank out a stable working model of the site is significant. Additional work is surely needed, but I at least feel comfortable shifting my focus to other assignments for the bulk of the weekend.

On the merch end of things, we've received a few shipping notices already, although my fear is that the majority of the items will arrive at my home Tuesday afternoon (a day late for the scheduled presentation). To hedge against this, my plan is to mock up some shirts and other items over the weekend through other means, to at least present something tangible for Tuesday.

Ongoing Production

For the time being we've decided to forgo trying to animate the different states of the site menus. It's something we'd both like to see, but it will have to wait for the revisions after submitting the working model on Friday. At present I'm building the pages with multiple levels of navigation. Catie is working separately on displaying the collection images using the Caurina Tweener. Our current plan is to have our respective work done before Thursday evening, where we'll meet up and integrate the collection and store menus into the built pages.

On the analog side of things, we placed an order for some of the merch items we rigged up via zazzle. Hopefully the bulk of the ordered items will arrive in time to showcase them a week from today.

Into Flash

After some experimenting it's become clear that the bulk of what we want our web experience to do aesthetically will require Flash. While we're solid on the design and layout, the obstacle of how to code everything so it works properly is now before us.

One tool that might be useful is the tweener class. Catie has experience with it, so she'll be experimenting on how we might present/sort/animate the gallery of images for the collection and store pages. I'm looking into learning more advance Action Script and experimenting with the more rudimentary coding techniques I'm already familiar with.

Hopefully we can make some major breakthroughs this weekend...