I’ve just done some design/illustration work a pitch for my friends over at http://www.caffeinehit.com/. All going to plan there could be 10 different mini games to be designed and illustrated, all to be developed in CSS3 and HTML5.

Just finished a 4 day stint at The White Agency, working on another AS3 dev job for CBA.
A nice sraight forward job, although client changed there minds as always on a couple of key issues, it was a straight forward good job. It was realistically my first job using Flash Builder, as I migrated from FDT. Really Coooool.

I recently completed a short stint at ‘The White Agency‘ in a flash dev role, building a ‘Credit Card Selector Tool’ for Commbank . I actually came in to replace another freelancer who built the intro carousel, apart from that I built the rest. The actual build time was around 10 days. It was released in two stages, the second stage included the video guide as well.

Taking over from another developer always results in a few extra days in development, often and in this case it was quicker for me to start from the beginning rather than try to use existing code.

You can view the project here, as long as it is online.

After a year and a half of telling people I’ve been building this site, we finally had the AIAM100.com website and exhibtion launch party on Friday night at Cooee Art Gallery in Lamrock Ave. Bondi.

Australian Indienous Art Market top 100 (AIAM100) is a website show casing the top Australian indigenous artists based on their market performance in the secondary art market. Over 130 profiles compiled by Adrian Newstead give the user a detailed view of each artist. Market Performance results are supplied by Australian Art Sales Digest (AASD), these results allow the AIAM100 to calculate the AIAM100 index and rank each artist accordingly. It also provides the overall health of the industry, for example the peak in 2007.

Adrian Newstead at the opening of the AIAM100 website and exhibiton

Ruth Hessey & Adrian Newstead

Being completely built in Flash I see this website as being a RIA rather than just a website. I know I know, it’s not the normal site to be completely built in Flash, and it raised numerous challenges along the way, especially regarding text layout, formatting and resizing (which are basic things we take for granted in developing an html based site). 50% of the site is it’s cutom built php based CMS, along with an extensive database, allowing AIAM administrators to easily publish new artists profiles.

Although i’ll still be working on adding a few more features it’s a great feeling to get AIAM100.com site live into the public.

I recently just finished the ‘People’s Choice Award’ web kiosk application for the NSW State Library. The purpose of the app is to allow the public to vote on their favourite from the Moran Prizes exhibition.

The screen cast shows the general flow of the app, it was relatively siple and includes a back end admin to display user data.

Last week I completed another little stint at the White Agency, Sydney. The brief was to create a little simple flash game that could be played through the opera browser on the Wii console. It was for a company called Sirtex Medical Ltd. and they wanted to create the game to highlight there medical technology in treating liver cancer with radiation.

The aim of the game was to kill off the cancerous tumors by injecting the proprietory Sirtex radiation spheres in the quickest time possible, using the Wii remote you needed to have find the right blood vessel and inject the radiation.

Responsible for the game development and helping with design it was a rather enjoyable little project, as it was educational in the process. The game is going to be the key part of their exhibition which is expected to be displayed at a number of medical expos in the future.

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.

I’ve just finished off a little project for CBDigital a small video production company. The project was a multi-media DVD containing over 40 presentations and discussions on spinal research and development for the SSA (Spine Society of Australia) an abnormal sort of client, but seemlingly familiar in the way that I have spent a lot of time with orthapedic specialists and had numerous x-rays over the past 15 months.

The project intself has taken roughly 50hrs flash development time, also included a day of layout and design. Built with AS3 it was the first time I have incorporated FLV’s in a project since using AS2. To be honest it was a breeze working with the flv using net connection and net stream… just loved it, listening for cue points worked seamlessly and I have fallen in love with Custom Events…. shit I sound boring! HA.

Well the other good thing about this job was it was running locally so no bother really with pre-loading, although there is still a time delay on loading images so loading still needed to be taken into consideration. The project as always had the additional functionality added towards the end and the job is done and dusted all alterations can now be made in the xml, something the client is more than happy to do…. unless more functionality is needed. NO WORRIES.

Anyway good fun job as it went smoothly and the client as always was happy!

L.