Category — Theory

Well, the title is a little misleading. It’s not about a wonderful new presentation or a new technique, but a little saying I came up with to summarize my design/development process. Now, the next answer, what am I designing? I am rebuilding my blog in Flash as the front-end and keeping Wordpress as the back-end. This is something I have been meaning to do, and as I told the guys at AKQA I was going to do it, I thought I might as well do it and get a major project in my portfolio :)

When researching the internet I found that one of the best ways to get data from Wordpress, is to use the XMLRPC method. The actual implementation of this will come in another post, but thats the way I’m doing. I will also be using this set of classes for all the Wordpress/SWF communication.

The Planning Process.

I first started with a basic function diagram on the wall, in which I came up with 7 different files and listed all the functions within them. After that I fired up Microsoft Offive 2007 Visio and created a more complete diagram with function names and descriptions in them. Here’s the finished diagram in Visio.

The main trouble I had with the design/plan process was that I kept thinking I was making the backend as well so I kept adding in things like ‘Add Post’ but obviously, as it’s just a template, it’s not needed ;) So there you can see what functionality will be in the template, but all implimented in Actionscript 3.0. This doesn’t include the transitions, layout and stuff like that, but that is all to come.

The whole process to me a few hours with gaps in between and a heavy dose of relaxing music. It’s not fully complete as it’s late (I’m writing this at 1am ;) ) so I need to properly check it and proof read it tomorrow. Please let me know if you see anything wrong with it let me know!

Before I crash out I thought I say a little about the title. Plan, Prepare, Present basically translate into Design/Visualize, Code It, Go Live. Now you have probably worked that out but I thought it was quite cool so, well, there you go!

Good Morning :) Harry.

After having a discussion with my IT teacher about the GCSE course, my views on the course have changed severely and I wondered if anyone out there had come across this at all?

The main thing is that the whole course is about the documentation. You could write a text document as the final product, but write about it and how you created it loads and get full marks. This really annoys me as the writing (documentation) part of it is rubbish. It is so boring, telling the world via word how you managed to launch Dreamweaver and create a table for the layout, how impressiveJ. The whole thing about Flash, 3D and everything I am interested about is that fact that I can just go at like a bull in a china shop and just experiment, see what happens, expect the unexpected (most of that randomness comes from accidental errors). No be stuck behind writing about how to use Away3D.

The course, in my view, only covers one aspect of IT. So, all it is really testing you on is how to write up the documentation on a project. They don’t care what the final product looks like, acts like or things like usability levels etc. Now the boring ones (and probably the thinkers out there) will be saying, “Well, you write about it so they know you understand what you are doing”. This seems pretty stupid seeing that they don’t actually care about what you are doing in the first place.

Maybe it’s just me, but the whole thing seems a little pointless (only in some aspects). I don’t really know if professional studios document their process a lot, or not much. I am assuming they do so that maintenance is a lot easier. Imaging a complicated flex app, like the new eco:Drive app (great article in .net) . Passing this over to someone with no knowledge of how the app works or what is uses, or requires. This is where I can see documenting the process comes in handy, but the focus is on the output of the main product. With the IT GCSE, they don’t care about the finally product.

Now that’s out of my system. I feel so much better, now to top it off, anyone fancy buying me a MacBook? J He he.

Harry.