Caterpillar Progress Launches

I’ve been working on this one for the last few months. This is my first use of SWFAddress which is pretty slick, though we’re having some issues with URL redirects and frames that we have to use in the live environment. It works great in my testing environment though!

This as a deep and complicated site. Here’s what’s in there along with some of what I learned.

  • I created a custom photo gallery/image viewer (in the Great Rivers and Madagascar sections) which loads images, and when they are viewed, compares the dimension ratio of the pic to the viewport to determine how the photo should be resized and animated.
  • The video player is a re-skin of the FLVPlayback components. The designers put an empty spot on either side of the seek bar handle which was a trick to figure out. The solution was to use blend modes to erase the necessary area.
  • The text is loading via XML because we will be updating the site later with other languages.
  • I learned a lot about encoding videos for Flash using Quicktime Pro and On2 Flix Pro to get things done.

Update: Added a few languages

Update 2: Added a few stories and changed the menu navigation. The menu is no longer a global piece that drops from the top. Now you have to return to the menu page.

Technologies used:

  • Flash CS3 / AS2
  • SWFAddress
  • SWFForceSize
  • On2 Flix Pro for FLV Encoding
  • XML