I’ve just finished the design and development of a flash based kiosk app for the State Library of NSW 100 Exhibiton. Originally I was contacted by Mental Media to do the job.

The app was fairly straight forward in process, providing the public the ability to vote on their favourite exhibiton item, view favourtie exhibiton item, complete a survey and enter a draw.

All data is saved into a mySQL database and the library staff can access a admin page to download the various data as CSV files. I had some fun with PHP merging all the tables to provide a simple usable table for the non-technical staff.

The app is running continuously for 100 days, so it was seriously important that there were no memory leaks. Flash and no memory leaks can be a time consuming effort…. At the end of the project I did encounter a memory anomaly where the memory seemed to jump 5MB every time an image was displayed on screen, although I was loading the images from memory. It turned out it was due to the fact I added a drop shadow to the image at runtime…. therefore flash somehow needed to reprocess that shadow area as a new image. This turned into a problem when I couldn’t access it, even by removing the filter, it still kept it in memory. Quick solution.. got rid of the drop shadow.

This is a model I recently built in Maya. As I’m fairly new to Maya it took a couple of weeks (part time). Modelling Lego is very satisfying, and a good place to learn modelling techniques, it helps when you can use their instructions for reference… MUCH FUN!