Here’s the presentation:

A few resources that are mentioned:

• Firefox Extensions (including Firebug)
• jQuery
• Slide Examples
• MegaMan Sprite Animation

Note: this is an updated talk on the workshop I led two years ago

This one, however, changed daily for 9 days. Here’s the sequence:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

Sunday:

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday (The flames flickered ever so slightly):

Friday – Monday:

Now, once I finished that final graphic Dan approached me and made a funny request. He wanted a special little violent ending for himself. The thought of a custom final header for a few sketchy people sounded fun…so I obliged with this header that showed for a mere 5 people on campus:

In addition to the internal alteration of the header, I did another alteration on the login page for the Tuesday and Wednesday before as well as the Thursday of Thanksgiving. My pal, the turkey, showed up in place of the random image. Here he is:

Overall, the header was well received be the campus feuling my desire to come up with something nifty for the coming holidays! A special thanks to Ken, Zach, and Dan for giving good content suggestions and allowing me to bounce ideas off them!

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A few resources that were mentioned:

• Firefox Extensions (including Firebug)
• jQuery
• Slide Examples
• MegaMan Sprite Animation

Using some snazzy CSS easter-egg functionality combined with some PHP, we can dynamically alter the look of the portal and target customizations to the entire campus, groups of people, or individuals. On Halloween, we customized and targeted the entirety of our user population with the following header theme. We changed this:

To this:

The Halloween theme was a surprise to the campus and received a number of good reviews and comments! The theme didn’t reduce the portal’s functionality, it simply gave it a nice candy coating to add a little flair. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the layout (which is actually made up of 7 images). Due to the excitement around the Halloween theme, the campus can be sure that more are coming!

As I mentioned before, targeting the entire campus is doable along with targeting groups of people and individuals. Needless to say the targeting capabilities of this can be exploited by…well…by me. And I’ve had some fun exploiting it, too! Here’s a couple of fun ones that I targeted at specific users:

This header was targeted at my manager, Ken:

This one is targeted at Dee:

Here’s one that I targeted at Dan and Zach:

Fun times. So far, Dan, Zach, and I have some pretty sexy ideas for what can be done…ranging from minor tweaks to the logo (similar to the goofy ones I did above), to fully customized headers (like the Halloween one), all the way to full blown themes that customize a larger portion of myPlymouth. I look forward to getting creative with what I can draw and implement.

Topics:

• My Background
• My Project Background
• Application Design Process
  • Analysis
  • Language Selection
  • Database Design
  • Interface Design
  • Development
  • The Sweet Stuff
• Industry
  • Where it was
  • Where it is
  • Where its going
• Stuff I’ve Learned
• Suggestions

I must say that Team Fluffy Bunny rocked the house until both teams were merged into one as more players joined in. A total of 19 games were played in 7 hours. I ended up sucking majorly halfway through the day getting no more than 2 kills a game (and often 0!).

Of all the players, though, Cliff shined through as the 1337 pwnz0r making all the n00bs cry in pain with his mad paintball skills. The rest of us did well (kill counts coming soon, perhaps), although Al, Ted, and Erich tended to last the longest in the later games…jerks.

We worked together, we killed together, and we died together…heck, there was a bit of team-killing going on to help us along with the dying part :) All in all, the day was a blast! We’re hoping for more numbers the next go-round…if you haven’t tried the sport, give it a go. Its an adrenaline rush…and; you get to rain paint down on your friends until they beg for mercy. What more could you ask for?

Luckily my wife was there to document some of the games with her spiffy new camera. Check out the gallery here. Here’s a few sweet samples:

Create a navigation page (similar to a DVD menu) that allows the user to choose from at least 5 buttons/icons/links. Four of these icons should send the user to 4 separate animations (complete with sound). The 5th icon, when clicked, should send the user to my blog BorkWeb.com. At the end of each animation, give the user a navigation menu allowing them to view the other animations or return to the first screen. The 4 animations should be more in-depth than what we did with the previous Flash lab and can include graphics from other sources (i.e. you don’t need to do all the image creation right in flash…you can get pictures or make your own in Photoshop). Here are some animation suggestions:

• Two balls that bounds around a room, bouncing off of each other.
• A presidential spoof
• A kid being attacked by a giant mosquito
• A monkey dancing across the screen
• ….be creative

You can add to the above requirements to suit your needs (but don’t detract from them). Have fun with this one. Here are some suggested sources for learning about more complex Flash animations:

• Here are some simple tutorials at W3 Schools
• Flash Kit has an awesome set of tutorials on a crap ton of topics

Now, in order to create the menus and navigation; stopping and starting movies and playing from various locations needs to be done with some ActionScripting. Here are a few resources to get you started:

• ActionScript.org has some great tutorials on ActionScripting
  • Here’s one for looping backgrounds
  • Here’s one on working with variables
  • Here’s one on drag n’ drop
• Here’s some documentation very similar to the Java API
• Check the help in Macromedia Flash (the application for simple start() stop() and loop() commands for controlling the movie)

And don’t forget about the quiz next Tuesday (4/11)