References
This is a selection of online projects I have majorly contributed to or entirely developed myself. Especially the later ones are products of my work at Liip, Switzerland. Click on the banners for redirection to the specific project.
2007
Iconomix :: Flash components for modules
As Liip’s head of module development for the Swiss economy platform iconomix, I was in charge of turning elaborate designs into interactive screens. Since many screen elements repeatedly appeared e.g. in online lessons and multi-player games, we turned them into reusable and extensible flash components to simplify our work. With the release of the iconomix platform at the end of October 2007 Liip had produced a whole load of custom components including all kinds of buttons, scroll-bars, displays, sliders, containers and even small applications wrapped in components like a ranking list or a dynamic chart display.
Head of module development for the iconomix platform.
Development of over 30 flash components including graphical procession.
Iconomix Module: “Railgame - Arbeitsteilung und Handel”
In this flash based module of the Swiss economy platform iconomix, the participants will play in two groups against each other trying to build the largest possible railway system. For this purpose, they can choose to produce iron and wood elements that vary in production time. To improve their output, they can exchange products in a trading pit. The game itself runs on a Red5 based engine and can be supervised and controlled via a specific flash based client called “cockpit”. While the Red5 extension and Flash communication was being programmed by my Liip colleagues, I was in charge of implementing the game client itself and the control element.
Development of the Flash based multi-player game client.
Development of the Flash based control element.
Iconomix Module: “Pitgame - Markt und Preisbildung I”
Being another Liip developed iconomix module, “Pitgame” is supposed to teach the basics of pit trading: The game host prints a set of cards, each of which display trading information, and distributes them amongst the players, who have to find ideal trading partners for achieving their given deal aims.
A flash based control element allows generating a set of PDF-cards (via a Java service) from an eligible trading product and an amount of players. After card creation, it launches a game client that offers various tools, such as charts, to evaluate the players’ deals.
Development of the Flash based control element.
Iconomix Module: “Score More - Öffentliche Güter”
“Score More” is, yet, another flash based module, developed by Liip, in which the participants play anonymously against each other. By contributing points to a common project and receiving shared points in turn they try to optimize their reward. Moreover, the game offers different variants of playing, that, additionally, allow punishing and rewarding the fellow players for their playing behaviour. The group members are shuffled at round start to guarantee anonymity. The game runs on a Red5 based engine, as well, and can also be controlled via a “cockpit”.
Development of the Flash based multi-player game client.
Development of the Flash based control element.
DILPS slideshow editor & viewer 2.0
For the ZHDK’s picture database, DILPS, Liip developed a flash based editor to compile and store slideshows and a counterpart tool to watch them. The DILPS database is being internationally used by universities all over Germany and Switzerland and these new tools were supposed to offer a smooth and intuitive access to the database.
Each of them has been developed as an online and offline version running on both Mac and PC. While the online versions use Flash Remoting for server communication the offline versions use mdm ZINC to implement hard drive interaction.
Besides programming the editor and the basic functionality of the viewer, I was in charge of developing a complete AS3 oriented component framework that allowed more control over the data management combining a data component with a MovieClip instance - altogether a pretty complex and sophisticated object oriented project.
Since the project currently undergoes some final debugging processes, version 2.0 has not, yet, been released on berliOS. If you wish to take a glimpse at the current build, please contact me personally.
Project management
Development of a complete AS3 oriented component framework in AS2
Development of the Flash based editor and parts of the viewer using Flash Remoting and mdm ZINC
2006
Architect Michael Josef Heusi
As one of my first todos at Liip, I was set up to implement a microsite for the architect Michael Josef Heusi using our “home-grown” OpenSource CMS, FluxCMS. Since the FluxCMS is a PHP based application, which wraps all content into a DOM-XML tree, I had to dig up all of my slightly dusted XSLT-knowledge to get the whole thing up and running. After a good portion of CSS and a hint of JavaScript I was finally able to file the mission under “accomplished”.
Implementation of a given design in FluxCMS using XSLT and CSS
H&F Industry Data
When H&F Industry Data asked me to suggest improvements for their homepage, I was surprised to find their one year old homepage CSS-less and absolutely incompatible with Firefox. So the mission for my last freelance project so far was clear: relaunch the page in (Firefox-proof) CSS and tuck it all into a CMS that provides a good piece of intuitive usability at low cost.
The open source CMS Typo3 4.0 did the trick: it’s output wasn’t strict HTML 4.0 (some extensions are annoyingly old) but the Templa Voilà extension allowed easy content-design mapping.
Page relaunch with Typo3 and CSS
Thoma, Lay and Buchler architects
The new homepage for the three architects, Thoma, Lay and Buchler, marks the very beginning of my career as a flash developer. Although I had to learn the perfidies of Flash’s asynchronism the hard way, I was finally able to create a solid infrastructure that allowed easy content updates via XML. And even today I like looking at the page with all its smooth fades adding to the decent design.
Object oriented implementation of a given design in Flash AS2
2005
Petra Heisler - graphic design
For Petra Heisler’s new website, I created a slim and fast PHP based framework to quickly pull up microsites. It simply exchanges snippets of HTML content depending on the chosen category and subpage and comes along with basic extensions such as a news or guestbook plugin. I’ve reused the framework for a bunch of sites back in Trickreich days.
Development of a PHP framework for microsites.
Last update: December 2007
