Taking Action...

This past week I have found myself wading through a sea of actionscript. I was assailed from all sides by onEnterFrame()s, button.onRelease()s, movie clip parameters, and a multitude of variables of all types. It was great! Actionscript has proven to be one of the most rewarding things I've gotten out of my education. Having some computer science background, and being able to tie that in with my love of design, complete with a dash of interactivity... well, it's just about the coolest thing you can do in this field. I've put together three things lately-
An interactive flash header for a website: This header has a series of buttons, that upon being clicked, will bring up (with a pretty fading effect) a picture and a link. Also, if left idle, it will cycle through the pictures periodically. That feature was actually an afterthought, and it was nice to see that my code was modular and adaptive enough to allow for it with the introduction of only a single additional function, and a few lines into the main code.
The second project I made was an interactive floor plan map. This one was substantially simpler, and changes some dynamic text and an image in accordance with rollover events.
The third project is of course my portfolio, which is now several hundred lines worth of code. I am happy to report that the navigation is now working quite nicely. The user can use buttons to go where they want to, or use the "edge scrolling" system, where the position of the mouse controls the navigation. I hope to make both run a bit more smoothly, and I think the code is clean enough that it shouldn't be a problem.
Well, I must be off to class. Until next time, aufwiederschreiben!

Work has been interesting this week. On Tuesday, I designed built and coded a piece in Flash for [EDITED]. It's an interactive map for their "[EDITED]" display, in which you can mouse over different parts of the map, and images and and description will appear. I'm happy to say that the actual coding went very smoothly, which is a relief, because I haven't done much actionscript in the past several months. This is additionally relieving because my entire portfolio will run on actionscript!
Wednesday was less fun, as such, but also interesting. There was a mad dash to get a huge amount of content onto the framework we had built for it before the end of the day. The work was somewhat tedious, but being there for the final stage of the development process was pretty cool. I also got to dig into the CSS a good deal, which was kind of neat.
Work on my portfolio has slowed down a bit due to stresses at work and in other classes, but I think I will be able to pick up a lot over the next week. Hopefully the update I bring you then will be more thrilling!