toytopia

Recently launched my first real freelance project: Over the last three month I was working at jvm/next in Hamburg to give a great car a decent webspecial.

The main difficulty was to get control of the video files. While the .h264 codec is superior over On2Vp6 in file size and quality it’s getting very lousy when it comes to playback control as  we had to get over a small but noticable start delay in the .h264-encoded video files. Together with Lennart Kruse, who is employed at jvm and Benjamin Herholz, another very experienced freelance guy, we finally had a good flash team that managed all those difficult tasks.

Enjoy!

A small first step into the freelance world. Uta Hansen Management relaunched their corporate website and got a flash startpage featuring an image gallery with a nice sliding effect.

I recently decided to leave my employed status at interone worldwide behind and prove my skills in the freelance world again. While the rest of september and the whole month of october are reserved for leisure and business preparation, it will all officially start off in early november. Stay tuned for more news to come.

Just a very beautiful startpage application. You can drag and zoom the island around and even gain some information over the little hotspots. Visit the site on various times of the day and you’ll notice some difference.

See it!

The BMW X1 is different and so is the accompanying multimedia special. It is much more interactive than most of the other specials we made for BMW as it targets a younger audience. Highlights are a small visualizer with fancy color spray on effect, a dynamic filled flipbook and the seamless integration of the ClipBox-Module that was developed during the preSOC-Phase.

There was a core team of 2 developers temporarily supported by a freelance developer. As the lead developer I again choose the PureMVC-framework as the foundation of the application. And again I wasn’t quite satisfied with it for certain reasons. Hopefully I get time to write about that later. For now I’m just happy to have finished the project in time and creatives as well as customers are happy, too.

See it!

BMW goes social media: I’m really happy to announce the launch of my first facebook application. The application was developed to support the other marketing activities for the brandnew BMW X1. As this car will be promoted also via Twitter, Youtube and of course Facebook.

Lucky for me the Facebook As3 API was released just as I started setting up the project. So we didn’t need any PHP wrapper solution to use the features of the application API. So our PHP backend was build on a minimum of Facebook-API constraints.

For the frontend part I used Flex with PureMVC. On the backend part we choose the Zend Framework as it includes the Zend AMF library which is now officially supported by Adobe.

See Clipbox application!
See BMW X1 Fanpage!

After the multimedia special was successfully launched, MINI wanted a visualizer module that fits in as much as it can in the current webspecial. Both visually and technically.

So give it a try and the special will just flip around showing a full featured premium visualizer module on his “real” backside. The visualizer includes a heavyweight domain model with conflict solution logic. The decision was made to impelement this logic on the client side in Actionscript to sidestep the currently used remote configurator interface as it’s  – plain said – just very slow.

All exterior and interior images were prerendered as dynamic generation would be too slow for a good user experience. That makes more than 6000 static images in total. Lucky we had machines to do this render job for us ;-)

See it!

For the last couple of projects PureMVC was my application framework of choice. Although I don’t think it’s all perfect, I am quite satisfied with it. This said I’m keen to use other frameworks to have a better base to evaluate them against each other. Maybe I’ll give the famous Cairngorm a try in my next flex project.

In addition to the MINI Cabrio online special I was also involved in developing a small widget.

For development the Yahoo widget engine was choosen as it doesn’t require any admin rights from the user to install it on his system.

All the scripting is done in basic JavaScript, so I had a short journey back in the days of the good old prototype-”classes” common in Actionscript 1. Which felt quite funny by the way.

The developer kit comes with some basic development tools such as simple debugger and a complete API-reference.

Get it!

Just a very nice winter special for O2. Small but beautiful. What I especially like is the surrealistic artwork of the city scene.

Only two development highlights to mention: Flint Particle Engine was used to let it snow and Tweener again proved rock solid for creating the smooth parallax scrolling in the main city scene.