Yoeran Luteijn » showcase

CMI: Exposed

Yoeran — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:44:28 +0000

CMI Exposed is up and running! Langzaam vinden meer en meer projecten hun weg naar de showcase voor CMI studenten. Geweldig om te zien dat het echt gebruikt wordt en hoe het met echte data gevuld wordt.

Kort samengevat draait de showcase om het tentoonstellen van toffe projecten gemaakt door studenten binnen het CMI-instituut van de Hogeschool Rotterdam. Zo kunnen zowel huidige als toekomstige studenten, maar ook bedrijven en andere geïnteresseerden een goed beeld krijgen van de opleidingen. Deze showcase heb ik ontwikkeld tijdens mijn stage bij Syndicat.

Ik wil je hierbij dan ook uitnodigen om het zelf uit te proberen;

En bekijk ook even de bijbehorende pagina’s op www.hro.nl;
- Communication & Multimedia Design
- Mediatechnologie
- Technische Informatica
- Informatica

A case about the CMI Showcase

Yoeran — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:19:18 +0000

I’ve come a long way with the CMI Showcase app since my last post. And I thought it would be cool to make a small reflection and overview of all the things I’ve learned while working on this project. A bit like a small business-case, specified to development.

This project asked various AS3 techniques to be applied:

Finite State Machine
Custom XML requests
Image / Video loading, resizing and smoothing
Custom scrollbars
Flash optimization
Various mouse + movement interactions
Embedding symbols and fonts
Animations (coulisse effect, layers)

Some of the most interesting/educational techniques (in my opinion):

Finite State Machine: The showcase is build up in 4 different states. The banner-state, search-state, list-state and detail-state. Using the Finite State Machine method helped building the different states separately. Each state controls it’s own entrance and exit and deals with their own children. So it helped making the application structured and clearly divided. This method is close to programming Artificial Intelligence and inspired me to do something more with it.

Custom XML Requests: The showcase gets it’s data from an external API which is developed by In-orde. The API needs an XML request to return the correct data. I made a class with which one can easily compose and send a request. It was great fun to learn how well XML works in Actionscript.

Flash optimization: I didn’t know much about what Flash can and can not handle. The showcase deals with lots of text- and imagedata and heavily relies upon smooth animations to make the experience complete. So it was a good exercise to keep the complete showcase as smooth as possible. During this process I learned a lot of little tips and tricks to aid in achieving this.

Finite State Machines

Yoeran — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:58:26 +0000

Last week I started on a new project. It is going to be a showcase application build in Flash. The showcase will be implemented on the website of the Hogeschool Rotterdam under the sector CMI. Work from CMI-students will be available in this showcase.

It’s a great project to work on because I get to dig in to all kinds of techniques and because I get a lot of freedom. Interaction wise I get to solve all the details which I love to think about from a technical viewpoint. Technology wise I get to work with OOP structures and Finite State Machines.

Finite State Machine is a design pattern close to programming Artificial Intelligence. It says that every object can have it’s own state and the actions accompanying that state. Every state has specific actions when the object enters or leaves the state. I found it very interesting to think about how to apply this technique and got me inspired to make something with it. So in my spare time I’m going to try and build a small flash-app where creatures will live in and evolve themselves. Let’s see how that works out!

I also think that FSM as a design pattern could be useful to use when thinking about Interaction Design. During an interaction one will find itself entering and leaving various states of it’s flow. When you define these states and think about how these are entered and left you would be able to orchestrate the flow in a different way. I’ll try to make an infographic out of this sometime. I’m quite interested in how others see this approach and if they think it’s useful or not.