Three Flash Applications
The three case studies below are different startups I worked in over the years that utilized the Flash platform as a key part of their technology. I've watched the platform grow from a simple animation tool, to the FlashBuilder application platform it now is. In each case we pushed the platform to it's max and made it do things it was not necessarily designed to do. In each case I played a pivotal role in discovery and defining features—and how those features where implemented into the existing feature set.
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Social Networking Widget Authoring App and Timeliner App SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS FROM NOVICE TO PROFESSIONAL
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These days there are a plethora of full-blown web apps built on the Flash platform, and one of those apps was a widget authoring environment by Mixercast. The User Experience challenge in this case is making it simple enough for the casual user to be able to create something quickly and easily, while still including enough capability for the serious creator to do something more complicated and full-featured. In this case the Flash environment was well in place before I was brought on and it did an amazing job of merging many different types of media in a single experience. I was initially hired to use the tools to create more compelling experiences, but soon found myself designing and creating specs for a new white label video timeline application that would eventually be used to create video mashups for partners such as Google, CBS, YouTube, South Park, and many others. I was also involved in creating functional specs for the next generation tools which were essentially a migration from AS2 to AS3 infrastructure. We used google.sites for all documentation which I have since used for many other collaborative projects. An example component I designed and spec'ed for engineering was a Trivia component. A quick Hi-fi moch-up using Flash that serves as a wireframe, use case, engineering spec, and demo simultaneously. I chose to actually use the client creative for POC. Another advantage to using Flash in this instance is that all of the assets wher basically engineering ready. Traditional documentation was generated later, but this was a great way to communicate the essentials to the engineering team in India. |
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The Blend Mediaworks SynchroMedia Application Technology SYNCHRONIZE ANYTHING ON THE WEB TO A VIDEO, AUDIO, OR BROADCAST
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When I was first hired on the company was called NewZing and the basic idea of the technology was to synchronize media on the web to a video via framesets. Because it was a JavaScript engine and JS has changed so much since 2002, there are no working examples. This was another perfect candidate for using Flash as part of the end user experience. Within about 6 months we were essentially embedding video into Flash—this was before Flash video existed. Basically we wrapped a video embed with multiple Flash embeds and targeted content to load and animate through the multiple Flash embeds. The synchronization was so accurate across all the wrapped embeds that we could fly graphics seamlessly from one embed to the other. When Macromedia finally introduced video in Flash, their samples/demos looked suspiciously like our Cisco ExecNet, which we happened to include in our funding pitch to them 6 months prior. One of the real challenges with this technology was balancing the interactive qualities with the state changes over time. Flash is not particularly built for playing backwards or jumping around in time, especially back in 2001, and required a state engine to manage all the assets sharing the stage over time. For on-demand experiences it was handled by tying all the UI elements to a single key time keeper so pausing time would pause it everywhere. It really got interesting when we where doing a synced webcast to a live TV show such as Silicon Valley Business or Food Network shows. In that case we had a slider which moved forward with the show in real time (we had the entire online time script) and could be moved back in a Tivo sorta way to view the recipe and then click resume time to re-sync with the broadcast. The whole experience could then be made available as an on-demand experience. |
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The Solopoint Internet Appliance Application THE ULTIMATE PHONE KIOSK IN YOUR HOME
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Back in 2000 (before smart phones) there where several products, like 3Com's Audrey, and the Netpliance iOpener deemed Internet Appliances. Network Appliances were essentially a dumbed-down computer designed to be a terminal to browse the web. When I was hired on at Solopoint the vision was very similar to the iOpener which consisted of a static, flat HTML driven interface. The biggest difference between ours and the others, was the addition of an IP phone. Flash had just updated to Flash4 so there was finally a real programming language and the opportunity to create a kiosk-like experience. The vision of Solopoint soon changed to use Flash for the front end UI, which opened the door to some interesting UI possibilities. Animations on this demo at the device level were kept simple to accommodate the slower processing speeds of the device. Although this was a demo, the basic module architecture was ready to be plugged-in to a back-end infrastructure. The content was all dynamic via .xml and Macromedia Generator. Generator templates were also used to create customized advertisements from a host of templates. Generator with ColdFusion was the solution for dynamic content for Flash back then, but it would have been easy to upgrade the modules to the dynamic methods now used. Solopoint's business proposition was to get an ISP like AT&T to offer the device for free when signing up for a broadband connection. The entire experience would be managed and controlled by the ISP including all the advertising (sorta like AOL). Advertisers could easily create a full screen ad and target it to very specific areas. For example a Pizza Hut might target a 5 mile radius around a specific restaurant. |