Merry Christmas
I’ll be signing off until after the Christmas season, so wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. See you next year.
Damn.
Have been told we have to go landscape for this, so instead of coding I’ve been re-thinking the entire layout.
I thought I’d post these, a couple of non-digital sketches for the digital label. On Monday I start coding wireframes of all the ideas.
Navigation swipe thing.
Hello.
So I made the thing I posted a sketch of yesterday. I’d post a picture but it’s boring to look at, the motion and interaction make it fun. Anyway, I think it’s a winner but I have a horrible feeling people will find it too new-school. So I’m going to create a simple app that uses it and I’ll publish it here, so I can get feedback.
Cheers.
Tablets have small screens, and when real-estate is expensive, you have to build smart. So I decided to take gestures, old school buttons, a system that tells you where you are and where you can go, and roll it all into one GUI component that looks cool and is DDA compliant. And by DDA compliant, I mean developed with people who face life with various mental and physical challenges, not from a list supplied by your local branch of InfoRUs.
I coded this beast up today, and then at the end when it was done, I realised it was a shoddy piece of crap. I hadn’t thought it through, I hadn’t drawn it out. So I decided to start again tomorrow, following the plan that evolved during the evening, shown above. I’ll get a basic one done tomorrow so I can test it with a range of people, then I’ll add the social sauce.
Talking of special sauce, I found a place to host my stuff so I can share it, links to follow.
I’ve decided to start re-creating some of my favourite GUI elements from various sources in Flash. As well as creating my own of course. The first is the iPhoto Event Preview, where you move your cursor over the little pane from left to right to shuffle through the images contained within. I wanted to show a video of this working, but I can’t seem to screen capture the Flash Player.
The class loads the assets from an XML you declare when creation an instance of it:
var pane:PreviewPane = new PreviewPane(RequiredSize, LocationofXML, CornerRounding);
for example:
var pane:PreviewPane = new PreviewPane(300, “myxml.xml”, 25);
Your assets will be loaded from tat XML and placed into the pane, automatically scaled and masked. A MouseDown event is set up ready for whatever you wish to do with it. This is the first iteration, and can only load images. The next one will include video and SWF loaders as well as shadow and highlight effects (optional).
The class uses Greensock’s LoaderMax, taking full advantage of the XMLLoader and ImageLoader classes, and I wanted to thank Jack for his help getting this class written.
