HP Print Studio is an internet application that allows users to easily create professionally designed home printing projects customized with their own text and images, and it was the first project I completed at Resource Interactive, marking my transition from a lone-wolf to a team oriented developer. I won’t lie and say that the project was in any way easy- as the quote clearly demonstrates, I didn’t have the slightest clue on how the application would finally be assembled, though I really wanted to take a shot at it. It’s not that I was unfamiliar with the language; It was the fact that the application so tightly integrated visual design, interactivity and application functionality that it couldn’t be classified as either visual or functional: It was both. Without going into too much detail, it rewrote my own understanding of what a true Rich Internet Application is: An integration of experience and functionality so seamless that it becomes its own category.

The challenges within the project itself were many and varied, and on account of our client agreements I cannot go into detail on how it was assembled. Even so, I learned many valuable lessons about team environments, of which I wanted to highlight a few.

Arrogance will get you nowhere

It’s a team, leave the ego at the door. This is more difficult and profound than you might imagine, because independent contractors have to justify their existence and value to the project, and that breeds a certain type of arrogance, independence, and Not-Invented-Here I-Can-Do-It-Better attitude that is destructive to a team environment. Established habits like this are hard to break, and I’m glad that this was the first lesson I learned though I’m still not perfect in applying it.

Expertise plays an important part

From the technical leads Kris and Tommy to our Project Manager John to our fantastic CRMs Kim and Traci (and all the developers and QA people whose names I’m not sure I’m allowed to mention), everyone played a part that was absolutely critical to the project. As a cocky independent contractor it’s easy to downplay the worth of Quality Assurance, Business Analysts and similar positions because their duties sound easy and secondary to the main development effort, and I never took the time to understand exactly how valuable expertise in each of those domains is. Yes, I can do it, but not only can they do it better, they make my job much easier by doing it.

It’s safe to rely on others

When you work in an environment where human resources makes it a point to vet every candidate for job expertise first, and management is not only engaged, but invested in developing and encouraging personal growth initiatives, it is safe to assume your coworkers know what they’re doing. This is practically unheard of in the freelance space, and it caught me by surprise when I encountered it for the first time. Once I realized that I couldn’t get enough, which in retrospect probably annoyed the living daylights out of my coworkers and co-developers (until I got over the newness of it all).

Freelancers: Buyer Beware

Contractors and freelancers are incredibly expensive, and 9 times out of 10 don’t have the skills they claim to have. If there is no relationship between you other than an easily terminated contract, the value to the contractor isn’t the long-term viability of the project, but the ability to get a large project onto their resume so they can charge more next time around. This leads to fraudulent claims and resume padding, so if you are hiring someone who’s got quite a bit of freelance experience on their resume I highly recommend you verify their level of contribution first.

When building large datadriven applications in flash that nevertheless require a rich user experience, I have often encountered the challenge of applying a series of event-triggered animations to an arbitrary number of dynamically generated movie clips. In response to this, I tore apart the flash provided TransitionManager and built my own animation management class, the BehaviorManager

This package, which you can see in action controlling pretty much every interface animation of this portfolio, allows me to rapidly apply a series of prepackaged behaviors to any movieclip on the stage, sending it on its way to do its thing and to check back with me when it’s done. It greatly simplifies the development of extremely dynamic websites.

Effects you see in action here: ScatterBall, ProximityGrow, ProximityShadow, Shadow, Move, Fade and Scale.

Carnegie Mellon Qatar wanted to increase exposure of their undergraduate program, so asked us to host an essay contest to solicit interest. The winner of this contest would receive a full scholarship to the undergraduate business or computer science programs offered there, while runners-up would receive a half-scholarship.

All entrants would be placed on a map of the world, and their ideas made public after the last submission date of the sweepstakes. Not only this, but each person would be allowed to customize an avatar to represent themselves to the world.

The solution was a hybrid of DHTML, Flash and .Net. The map piece and the data queries were Flash communicating via autogenerated xml with a database backend, while the avatar generator allowed selection via javascript and a preview paperdoll object built in Flash.

Crowncastle is the largest owner of transmission towers in the United States. With their purchase of American Tower, they were interested in reimagining their rather outdated web presence and offering conversion opportunity for their software package: CCISites. As always we presented them with several design options (My preferred version, visible here wasn’t selected) and then moved to production.

This was my first real .Net 2.0 project, and I dove in with gusto. The learning curve wasn’t exactly fun, but with prewrapped sitemap management and some simple menu routines (I wrote my own menu frontend renderer) it went well enough. Thinking of a page-based environment as an event-driven application came easily, but in the end such things are better handled in AJAX where the entire application isn’t still hamstrung by the page metaphor.

In retrospect, the .Net application framework is great if you’re simply intersted in basic fucntionality, quickly. Once the complexity shifts from “site” to “application”, the advantages quickly evaporate.

The IPS-4 is a gas monitoring device built by Ametek corporation, and I was contracted to build a flash-based administration interface that would be hosted on an embedded webserver.

This application was built around an MVC core engine that communicated with the device via XML-RPC on a recurring tick. Views into the data model were built for each page and section, and the interface elements were subscribed to said data views using the Binding/Dispatcher classes provided by Macromedia.

Carnegie Mellon’s School of Information Systems Management was consolidated recently from a diverse set of degree programs that were haphazardly distributed around the college. Due to a previous relationship with the MISM program there, we were asked to build the website for the program.

Technically, there’s nothing phenomenal about this site. A little ASP, a lot of CSS, quite a few templates, a bit of javascript… what’s really impressive is the effect it’s had on applications. In conversations with Andy Wasser after launch, he confided that while other Information Systems programs were seeing a steady decline in applications, the ISM program was seeing a steady increase. Now while this is largely from international applications, it’s nevertheless a welcome change.

Davey Award Winner: Best Online Promotion Landing Page

As Elliance moves from a pure service organization to an increased reliance on our marketing automation package Ennect, we were looking to add new functionality onto the underlying base engine. We developed ennectSweeps, an easy to use sweepstakes application, and I was tasked to build the landing page for the initial marketing promotion.

This was my first opportunity to work with our newly hired designer, Ed Shin. To be completely honest, he was a joy to work with. He understood how Flash preferred vector graphics and gave me complete authority of the motion design. After two days of transferring graphics from Photoshop and Illustrator to Flash and quite a bit of tweaking the animation, I came up with the piece you can see here.

Elliance’s website was due for a rebuild, and usually what happens is that our CEO tasks our designers to really go out on a limb with it. I, as the producer, had to figure out how to put it together, and with tabs sliding all over the place I can’t say it was particularly easy. Fact was that our previous website was bloated with little devices and content blocks, and we needed some way of making them contextually accessible without clogging up the page.

This site is built in ASP Jscript, with a hacked version of moo.fx running the various page interface tabs. Some AJAX was included for the contact form, and special consideration was taken to make sure all of our analytics packages properly recorded all potential interface interactions.

For the record, while figuring out the UI animation was fun, I really don’t like the design

The original version of this site was built by Kashif Zama in 2000, who went on to join Mars Interactive in Chicago

In 2005 the Pittsburgh Regional Council decided it might be time to update the content of the site, and I used the opportunity to sneak a few interface enhancements into the design. To be completely honest, I completely rebuilt the application from the ground up, turning what was an application based around runtime swf loading (normal development practice in ’00) to a single controlling file that loaded an XML configuration and streamed flash encoded video as requested by the user.

After all was said and done, we still came in under budget and time, even though the AR never realized that I’d rebuilt the entire application from scratch. Whether that’s a document of my skill or a testament to our pricing methods I really can’t say, but I think the final product really speaks for itself

Davey Award Winner- Best Design for a Bank

First Commonwealth Bank is a regional bank based out of Westmoreland County that was starting a serious marketing effort to establish themselves within the greater region. We were contracted to do the website, but rather than hosting it ourselves were asked to produce a series of easy to use templates and devices for our clients. It turned out that they were one of those rare customers that not only appreciated our work, but understood enough design to stay true to the original pieces we provided for them.

Most notable in this site is that it’s built entirely around reusable devices styled in CSS, something that you can’t really see without digging into the code a bit. The project allowed me to really solidify my own methodology for content segmentation and seperating of markup so it would be easy and logcial to other developers.

Abreon was an interesting company to work for, in that it was entirely driven by the sales force. This usually meant that the project was overbudgeted, overscoped, and set on an almost impossible timeline, but I’m not really someone to back down from a challenge.

This particular e-learning project was built for the Omnicom Media Conglomerate to assist in their adoption of Sarbanes Oxley controls for their IT group. In the process of building this particular package I put together a content display engine that would allow me to build e-learning packages at a much faster rate, something that would have benefitted me quite a bit had I remained with the company much longer

In essence, the engine took two xml files. The first of these was a template file that described a series of page layouts that included access to anything in the library as well as external resources and text assets. The second of these was the content file that mapped particular blocks of content to a particular template, and sequenced them into a single e-learning module.

This engine was then connected via the event model to a fully compliant SCORM controller that interfaced with the LMS into which the package was loaded. It also included (for those true Flash Geeks out there) an extension of the TextArea component that could render HTML tables, as well as a list renderer that handled both ordered and unordered lists. With a bit more work I would have had my own web browser built in flash.