Work

Here is a sample of some of my work from within the last year.
Please contact me for services/rates. Email: raz@wizardelraz.com

Project: EcoGuide
Client: Yellow Pages
Agency: Flux Inc
Role: Flex Development
Completed: June 2009

EcoGuide started within the realm of Flash, however, within the first weeks of the project it became clear that in order to fulfill the advanced gui requirements it would have to be moved to Flex. This wound up being a fantastic opportunity for me to explore Flux Builder more in depth that I had ever previously been able to, and really try build beyond the boundaries of the software, which isn’t always as easy task in the Flex world. This project was also my first experience working with Amfphp (PHP remoting for Flash), hopefully something I will have the opportunity to work with again, service browsing makes talking to a backend so easy!

Flex Builder will put watermarks on its Data Visualization tools unless you buy its Enterprise Edition, given the choice we just decided to build our own. Here’s my PieChart class in action, you can find the code for it on my blog.

Epilogue: Learned a lot about the Flex Framework, banged my head against several walls trying to get the component set to do things past what it was built for, cursed Adobe a few times for seemingly making it impossible to override anything (somebody got really trigger happy with the private keyword) and finally found peace with myself when the delegate I created for my custom ItemRenderer was working the way I had told it to. Overall, Flex Builder is a fantastic tool, but still has lots of room for improvement.

Project: Splash Home Page
Client: Splash Marketing
Agency: None
Role: Flash Developer
Completed: August 2009

I was approached about the Splash website redesign on a Friday afternoon, and it sounded fairly straight forward, but there was a catch, it needed to be live by Monday Morning. Two days and several energy drinks later I ended up with what you can now see by visiting http://splashmm.com. I even managed to work in swfAddress (enabling the use of the browsers forward and backward buttons) which I’ve been hoping to put to good use for a while. The final site has several sections and an image rotator that displays images based on what subsection of the site you are looking at.

The most challenging part of building any website is finding a way to let clients update it. The guys at Splash had requested a way to add and remove the images displayed on the site without having to modify any XML files.

Solution: The header reads in files from a directory on the server and parses the image categories from filenames. This makes is as easy as uploading and deleting images from within a specific directory, awesome :]