My new portfolio site – williamdady.com
Posted by Will | Filed under Adobe Flash, Personal, Web
Over the last couple of weeks I have slowly been putting together my new portfolio site, williamdady.com, which has been long overdue. The site was developed in FlashDevelop and Flash CS4 using the PureMVC framework.
I had a very specific design goal from the beginning to maintain a modular structure, something that PureMVC was a big help at pulling off. Sections are segregated into their own SWF’s each with an accompanying background SWF which in-turn contains multiple background images.
The main shell, the top-most parent SWF, is responsible for the layout of the modules as well as controlling the navigation. I utilized BulkLoader in the shell to handle the loading of module and background SWF’s as a pair. I’ve used BulkLoader a few times now and I it’s a really handy tool which all AS3 devs should have in their library.
In order to pull off the ‘liquid’ layout I created my own layout class called ‘UISprite’. UISprite uses a parent-child structure where a change in position or size of a UISprite instance will cascade down through all of it’s children and it’s children’s children. Inspiration for UISprite comes from the way the Flex framework handles it’s component layout, for example UISprite has left, right, top and bottom properties for positioning relative to a parent as well as percentage based positioning. I may post the class here at a later stage.
Overall I’m happy with how the site has turned out. I feel there are a few areas where it could use a little work. It is currently lacking a proper contact page which I hope to add sometime in the future. I had also considered adding deep-linking via SWFAddress but decided against it as it is not yet dense enough (or high-traffic enough) to require it.
I hope you like it and I would love to hear your comments or suggestions.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Looks great! If I had to nitpick I would say the background image should scale proportionally and not stretch when the dimensions are changed. I was actually surprised the site looked so good, most flash developers aren’t so great with the design side of things. It made me look at your About page and I noticed you are a designer as well. Keep up the good work!
August 18th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Congrats William it looks very nice and clean and your portfolio work it’s great.
Cheers!!!
Dave
November 21st, 2009 at 2:18 pm
How did you intergrate the bulk loader with puremvc?
December 1st, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Militia, I’m simply using a proxy to handle the BulkLoader integration. I have a command which triggers a module loading on the proxy which in-turn dispatches notifications for loading progress and loading complete.