Live: NikeGolf.com
Tonight we launched NikeGolf.com, a full site redesign for US, Canada, and Europe. I’m proud of our team and the countless hours that were put in. There were some incredible obstacles we overcame and this is the largest project I’ve ever been a part of, spanning at least two years of planning and five months of all-out design and development phase, which could easily have lasted a year by itself. I led the Flash Development team on this project and I’m very happy with how it has turned out and I’m glad I’ll now have a chance to catch up on sleep, friendships, and books. See the site here: http://www.nikegolf.com (officially live at midnight PST, March 1, 2010)
If Microsoft Windows Code Were Real
Sorry Windows users, this is just too good to pass up. (via)
I do love good math humor, or perhaps I should say, OOP humor. To those of you who don’t understand C++ or OOP, I am sorry, but just know that this is a 10 on the 1-10 funny scale.
END Footwear And Papervision3D
Last week at work we finally launched a site on which I’ve been working on off and on for about three months. The site is a hybrid site for the new shoe company END Footwear. The homepage Flash piece includes a wall of selectable video clips rendered in 3D space using Papervision3D. It was a very fun project to work on, and I’d love it if you all gave it at least a quick glance. :) www.endfootwear.com
And if you’re interested in additional technical descriptions of the site build, also check the post at the Summit Projects Flash Blog here.
Like A Six Year Old On Christmas
Two of the Flash developers from Summit made it down to San Francisco over the weekend for a Flash conference called FlashCamp. In our geek world, free software is the equivalent of Christmas for a six year old.
Exactly what this Monday needed.
Also, run-on sentences from this marvelous writer always make Mondays better.
Golf Research Day
The team here at Summit that works on NikeGolf.com took an afternoon off work to play some golf in celebration of the upcoming project we’re doing on the site. Of course I couldn’t leave the camera home. As it turns out, we don’t golf so well, but the carts sure are fun..
Thats our creative director, Tom in the driver’s seat, and world-renown css developer Jeremy (of beer and donuts fame) on the left. We obviously spend our days working indoors.
Perks Of The Job
This week at work, all the members of the team that worked on the Lego Indiana Jones video game website were given a free copy of the game. We built that site back in April and May and actually had all five of the members of our flash team involved, not to mention Eddy the designer and the project and account managers. It was a great time developing that site and was the first full scale site I had a hand in building after starting here at Summit.
The LucasArts people were super rad throughout the extent of the project and are even more super-rad for hooking us up with copies of the game. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, however, because I’m in the midst of mantrip preparations. Sometime next week I’ll find the time.
Meanwhile, if you have an X-Box or Wii you should check out the game. And read what I had to say about the game back when we launched it by clicking here.
Last Week’s Project Launch
The past week has been so busy for me that I almost forgot to mention a big project that we launched last week at work.
The project is what we call a micro-site, or a subsection of a larger site. This particular micro-site is the redesign of the athletes section on NikeGolf.com. If you’d like to see it live on the web you can either click that link and click the “Athletes” button at the top, or click here to go straight to the athletes page.
I’ll keep the description here short, but if you’re interested in reading more, I also blogged about it on the Flash blog that myself and my fellow developers co-author.
The Athletes section features a 3D carousel displaying the many tournament wins achieved by Nike Athletes this year. It also is built to accept many forms of media (video, images, wallpapers, etc.) and a list of particular athletes’ Nike equipment. All five members of the Flash team took part in the project and pulled it together to meet a very serious deadline. I might also mention that the 3D rendering on the carousel section is true 3D rendering, and in ActionScript 2, no less. For those who don’t know much about Flash, thats not an easy feat.
I’ll try to keep posting as we launch more and more sites that I’ve had a hand in developing. (More 3D stuff on the way, this week I’ve been working with Papervision.) Its been one of the best experiences of my life working at Summit and I’m particularly proud of the NikeGolf Athletes section, as I had a major hand in its core structuring and development. Its been one of the first sites or micro-sites that I’ve had this major of a role in developing at Summit.
Flash Player 10
For some of you who know me well, you know that I work in the interactive web industry. My official job title at Summit Projects is “Flash Developer”, translating to a job description of basically integrating cutting edge web design and the object-oriented programming (OOP) of Adobe’s Flash Actionscript language(s). I love my job for many reasons, but I’ll save that for another day when I feel like talking more about it.
As Flash developers at Summit, we spend a lot of time looking into the future and whats coming up in the industry. We’ve been experimenting some with 3d rendering and some other crazy stuff. One site (recently launched) that implemented a 3d platform called Papervision3d was this one :: winngrips.com
THIS IS REALLY COOL: Another great example of 3d in flash, and it uses Flickr photos as well. (not built by us) :: taggalaxy.de
I won’t take the time right now to explain what parts of the site make use of pv3d, but take some time to check out the awesome-ness of the site.. and kudos to Abe and Lucas on having done the majority of the design and programming on the site.
Ok, so the point of this point was to talk about the NEXT flash player thats coming out, one that I’m very excited about. Currently, they’re on version 9 (out about a year ago), and the buzz has started about version 10. There’s even already a public beta out. Included in version 10 will be lots of new features as the Flash team at Adobe starts to really dig in to building a better app. One of the particular new features will be native 3d support, removing most of the need for external engines like papervision3d or away3d. Also included will be drastic improvements in supporting text and textfields, something that has been much needed for a long time.
Here’s a video from the Adobe MAX 2007 conference about Flash Player 10, code named (for whatever reason?) “Astro” ::
Site launch at Summit Projects
Today at work we launched a site that was one of the first major projects that I had a large role in building. So far work for me here in Hood River has been a lot of small odds and ends, site bug and maintenance work, and providing support on other big projects that have been going on.
The Lego Indiana Jones video game by LucasArts required a new website before its release in a couple months and Summit was given the contract for the job. As a member of a flash team of 5 programmers, we all decided that this would be one of our first major steps into the Actionscript 3 world, one that requires a bit of rethinking and rebuilding some of the core code libraries that we use. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about in terms of “actionscript”, “flash”, “core code libraries”, or (haha..) “internet”, don’t worry about it, its complicated, and way too much to explain now.
With this site being as large, ground-breaking (for us), and deadline laden as it was, all 5 members of the flash team took it on. I’m very proud to be a member of the team and to have come out with the first major website release that I have had a considerable role in building. The site can be viewed at http://www.lucasarts.com/games/legoindianajones. Cheers to the whole crew at Summit, especially the rest of the flash team and the designer, Eddy Tofslie.
This site has also gotten a lot of attention already, within the first couple days of being launched. Here’s a couple links:
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