Still working on a detailed functional design for a content management scheduling system. Having torn my hair out trying to find some pre-built components to barstardise I resorted to designing it all from scratch.

Often when designing a user interface one may turn to Powerpoint for wireframes, Visio for flow and logic diagrams or even HTML to mock up a simple prototype. I decided to shun all these options in favour of flash…

Initially it seemed like a fairly bad idea since things like drag & drop, frame control and scrolling windows are all a little complicated thanks to ActionScript 3.0’s attempts at being a proper programming language. Luckily I soon brought my Flash 5 skills into the 21st century as I juggled event listeners, mouse events and sophisticated function calls.

The tool basically allowed an editor to select spots on a page, then choose an item from a pool of content, schedule it and then edit or modify their settings as and when necessary. To start with I allowed the user to drag content directly from the pool onto the page. This was very usable, but tricky to do technically without heavy customisation on some JS frameworks such as MooTools or Scriptaculous. In the end I settled for a simple overlay system to let users select spots and content.

Within a day I had a reasonably complete interface (with a bit of smoke and mirrors) and I was able to review the design with stakeholders before moving onto the next iteration. The core look and feel as even overhauled twice before settling on a workable arrangement.

Once done I will add in an example since I think it’s useful to see what can be done in a day even by someone with limited experience with flash and actionscript (still managed to rack up nearly 500 lines of code somehow)l. Ideally in projects with experienced flash integrators, a design mock-up like this could be turned into the finished product thus saving valuable development time.

If I get a chance I will update with a list of tutorials for all the components I used to get the crucial bits and pieces in place.

Started working to integrate Brightcove video players with a third party ad agency today. Should be done pretty quickly so there will probably be few points of interest for me to bang on about here. Still, this kind of thing is relatively new so any problems I encounter are probably worth documenting.

The Brightcove tool is pretty impressive and has a slick flash interface, but is let down a little because it is not that flexible. Not to matter though… A few clicks here and there and I should have some ads popping up where people least expect them to.

The original system was set up by me before christmas by writing a 3rd party ad translator to integrate ads. This tool is still relatively new so not all ad providers have integrated their systems with Brightcove and so you need to work with the Brightcove API to get things working. The process was a little complicated and my hopes that things would just work were not realised. The silver bullet in this case was to use Adobe Flex builder instead of Flash to compile the actionscript SWF file. Once I did this, all worked perfectly. Another issue was getting crossdomain.xml files in place on both the client and 3rd party sytems. Flash is none too forgiving when running scripts between different places but it does not always visibly complain either. Needless to say, 3 months on and ads are still not getting served. Not great but a perfect opportunity to change provider and monetise some of these videos.

UPDATE
Got ads working pretty easily thanks to Acudeo’s tight integration with Brightcove. For some reason though, the ads fail in IE6… But who uses that browser now anyway, well, only all the people who are most likely to be idiotic enough to click on the ads in the first place probably. Fix due soon I hope.

 

Content good enough to eat should be managed properly

Content Management System Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

In trying to document here all the various technology/craft related nuggets of productivity i have been responsible for over the years I have decided to release the Content Management System cake based on a custom build I was involved with at AOL. There are plenty of geeky impressive cakes around, and this one is certainly not one of them, but I did spend a while putting this together a couple of years ago. I am probably most proud of using skittles in the top right-hand corner as colour-picker icons. It was the inspiration behind the whole thing really.

I wasn’t sure about actually baking the cakes themselves that make up the finished product, since I wanted everyone to actually eat it. I used blocks of iced madeira cake from Tesco and then added the various sugary accoutrements.

I am planning on making an executive dashboard later this year and hoping it will be a little more impressive than this. Its quite difficult to fill a cake of this size with useful content when all you have to contend with is chocolate drops, sugar twirls and the odd cola bottle.

Busy Busy Schedule

A good usable interface is the holy Grail of all good web applications. Sites like Google and Flickr amongst others have excellently designed sites with good use of the latest JS and AJAX technologies. For mere mortals the only option to achieve similar levels of usability is to use the various JS frameworks and toolkits such as Scriptaculous, MooTools or Dojo.

Going one step further it would be useful to make use of tried and tested components built using these frameworks for integration into the site. Examples of these include calendars, drop-down navigation and forms. This way the only task is to integrate the components with the back-end system and customize to meet all the requirements.

Today I was looking for a scheduling component. Basically a calendar but with the ability to have multiple instances for each module on a page and the ability to drag items onto the calendar and resize for various time periods. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that anything even close exists. There are plenty of calendars but not any that would meet these requirements.

I am going to do some more investigation and see if something can be built. There seems to be a number of Flex resources that might be suitable and I will try and get them working. Integrating a Flex application could be much more tricky. It is going to be a long 3 weeks ahead of me.

UPDATE
I investigated all methods and given the simplicity of the requirements it would just take too long to integrate any of the components available. The Flex example (pictured) certainly holds the most hope for this sort of things. Lets hope some developers push forward the development and add in some additional features. Then it might be worth integrating it into some real systems.

What it would look like if I got too close

I bought a new ADSL router at the weekend. I am not that impressed, but it will have to do for the moment since there does not seem to be anything better around. Rubbish.

I got a Belkin N+ (F5D8635) mainly on the basis of fairly sound reviews and a feature that enables you to plug in a USB hard drive so that you can share media such as music or films across the network. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work as expected, more on that later.
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Clarkson on the shores of squalor, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Usually brown signs direct you to areas of natural or historical interest, in the case of the Welsh Harp, this could not be further from the truth.

Although a little off this blog’s topic, I randomly went to see if this reservoir and nature reserve could be walked round since I often see boats and people milling around it when driving past on the North Circular. It was probably the least inspiring place to go ever. There were more empty cans of stella kicking around than on a landfill site and the level of general waste was quite unexpected.

No-one seemed particularly put off by all the rubbish embellishments lining the footpath. There were plenty of families having picnics and children playing around the water’s edge. I would imagine the reservoir is a breeding ground for a whole generation of alcoholic wildlife tuned to the taste of dregs from the world’s least finest breweries.

I did not manage to walk around all of it, as it gets a bit boggy in places according the various tired notice-boards. I wonder if Brent spent less money on resurfacing pavements pointlessly and more on these kind of recreational areas, Brent would be a much more appealing place to live. Perhaps they can just replace the Welsh Harp brown signs with directions to the borough’s best kept pavements and leave the the birds to their dregs.