February 2008 Archives

I’ve had a pretty interesting past few days. One of my classes is Basic Interaction Design where we learn how to ideate, prototype and build interactive systems. Today was the final delivery of a project. They’re done in teams of three and my team for this project was pretty awesome. Over the past few weeks, we worked on persona and scenario design, wireframes and sketches, and so finally the time came to learn how to put it all into a working Flash thing.

I hadn’t opened Flash ever until a month ago, but I was hoping this program and course provide me an opportunity to learn about Flash in the form of actually doing something with it, versus “dry” training. So when time came, we somehow worked it out so that I did most of the Flash work, even though I marked myself as not having much prior experience. But I’m used to learning things fast.

So over the past weekend and past few days, I found myself immersed in Flash and working with crazy architectures and timelines four or five levels deep and putting it all together. We had done all of the concept work with teammates and came together to propose some UI designs and the final UI was somewhat of a mix of our individual work. In the end for the final-final thing, it worked out so that they provided me the artifacts and things like static Illustrator screens and text copy, while I put it in Flash.

The last few days were especially awesome. I worked on the thing Sunday night from 9 until 3am in the morning. On Monday, I got up at 7 to go to classes. At 3pm, I was done with classes and fortunately didn’t have much other immediate work to do, so I could immerse myself again into the project and prepare for our agreed 8pm meeting. The three of us sat together until 2am and it was mostly a work session where we just agreed the final deliverables and the things that go into it and then proceeded to flesh everything out and integrate.

I wanted to do work around transitions in Flash to make static Illustrator “screenshots” into a coherent flow. This meant that very quickly I had to learn things about multi-level masking (which you can’t do… but you can nest movies and have masking in each) and sort of learn on the go about what’s the right way to organize things in a scalable manner.

I had a little time to walk home today. And my walk from school to home can easily include a visit to the local Apple Store if I just take a small detour, it’s located conveniently midway . So I figured why not drop by the store and play a bit with the new MacBook Air.

In short: yes, it is a very very nice machine. I liked it a lot. I’m not going to buy it for myself, but I can recommend it to anyone who does not need a supercomputer like me.