Flash tutorial site revision 2

BillyBoy wrote on 9/23/2004, 10:36 AM
Now using a fixed size Flash presentation rather that a forced full screen to avoid the scaling issue which made text too small for people using lower resolutions. Text should now be acceptable for Netscape Firefox, Opera and IE (Microsoft) browsers at both 1280x1024 and 1024x768 settings.

Go to http://www.bb-video.net/

Click on test-3 link

Try clicking on the Glossary button, while some key words aren't entered yet, many are. For example try entering the word color. There's a minor bug that puts a semi-transparent box over the tutorial text, haven't got to fixing that yet and once you click on Glossary you can't close it yet so you'll need to use the Glossary feature last or reload the site to clear it for now.

Comments

skibumm101 wrote on 9/23/2004, 1:12 PM
I think your going in the right dirrection. I am using Firefox 1.0 PR and my laptop is running at 1650x1050. The look is much more profesional then the first version. I would still like to see a text version link on the frontpage for slow speed conections, and i am glad you took out the sound. iIl always hate flash sites that have sound enabled. makes my next door cubicle budy wonder what i am doing over here. It was a little slow on bringing up the initaial page on the CC tutorials. I kept clicking them wondering why there was no content, but i just needed to wait for them to load. I am on a DS-3(work with a datacenter). My recomendation would be to add one of your "loading" scroll bars to your page, to make sure people reliaze that somthing is happaning. Especialy for the slower connections.

Also i prefer pages that scroll down as oppoed to seperate pages. The reason for this, is it is quicker for me to find information that i need to lok at agin by scrolling up or down as opposed to selecting a different page. Once agin this is my prefrence
apit34356 wrote on 9/23/2004, 2:53 PM
BB, the site is really looking good.
winrockpost wrote on 9/23/2004, 3:01 PM
a lot of improvements BB,
By the way virtual Billy is not near as good lookin.
Good luck
spacesounds wrote on 9/23/2004, 5:49 PM
Much better than the last rev I saw a week or two ago. The content is impressive. BUT, get rid of that virtual guy. It's cheesy and cheap looking. Also, (as recommended last time) hire yourself a designer! A student who works for cheap will be fine! Also, the load screen progress bar in the beginning is cut off - it says "... loade" with the "d" cut off.

For some inspiration, here's one of my sites (NOT to be confused with the other "university" sites):

www.datastorageuniversity.com

Sign in as "consumer" <username>, and "consumer" <password>. That'll save you some time. It's done COMPLETELY in Flash. Click on the icon in the lower-right corner (campus). That takes you to the labs. Check out the Digital Imaging, Digital Video and Digital Audio labs especially. The labs are very basic - geared towards the novice. But they're VERY COOL!

This might be an unfair comparison, since the site had a budget in excess of $1m, but it should provide some inspiration!
JasonMurray wrote on 9/23/2004, 7:40 PM
Much better, there's less stuff getting in the way of your content now.

The Glossary window needs to be either larger or (probably harder to do) resizeable. Draggable too would be nice. With so much screen space to play with, why confine the glossary area to such a small space?

Glossary also needs to be dismissable (ie, a close button). And, if I enter nothing it says "enter one or two" in the top-right box (as this area seems to be a status indicator, perhaps its best located at the bottom of the glossary box like a standard status inidicator). A way of listing everything you've got in the glossary at the moment would be good.
rique wrote on 9/23/2004, 8:19 PM
By the way virtual Billy is not near as good lookin.

Looks like one of those creepy Heaven's Gate cultists.
BillyBoy wrote on 9/23/2004, 8:35 PM
My original intent for "virtual Billy" was to use my own features ( I know scary) which is possible then embed them in the Poser model. It sounds simple enough, but in practice you need to have two images of yourself one square on and the other a perfect 90 degee angle side shot. If you're off even a single degree on either the distortion renders the attempt next to impossible.

For now virtual Billy looks fairly close to how I looked about 10 years ago. I know its a little cheesy, but its my sense of humor.
apit34356 wrote on 9/24/2004, 4:11 AM
actually biilyboy, you should use about 6 photos at different angles,(same focal lenght), and use imagemodeler to stitch your image together as a 3D model image, then import it into poser.
routerguy99 wrote on 9/30/2004, 10:58 PM
Great Job,,, Now I know what you were talking about,, Love it
nickle wrote on 9/30/2004, 11:48 PM
I use a resolution of 1024x768 on my 17" crt monitor because some of my programs want it. that way. I prefer 800x600 so I can read the small print. Your site tells me to use a higher resolution.

One thing I like about Firefox is <control + or -> to enlarge or decrease the font size. Which of course doen't work on your site.

However, at 1024x768 everything looked good and worked fine and I could read the text no problem.
Good work.