Yes, it’s true. I’ve resigned from position as Senior Developer for odopod. I really enjoyed my time there and I learned a great deal from both the partners as well as my colleagues – and I wish them all the best.

I just found myself increasingly drawn to my freelance work, as well as my various personal projects – most of which sit unfinished (including this website). I’m excited to have a chance to revive some old stuff, and introduce you to some of things Kiala and I have been busy dreaming up these past few months.

I’m very lucky to know a fantastic group of wonderfully successful people who have been able to provide me with steady work so far, but I’d always love to hear about new projects – you can reach me @ dane@doesnotvalidate.com.

I’ll be updating this site with my most recent launches – like this project that I worked on with the guys over at Instrum3nt for DC shoes, and the new Odopod site.

I’ve got some really exciting stuff happening in the next few weeks, and I’m very optimistic about the future. Thanks to everyone who helped get me here.

This is one of the first projects I worked on with STRUCK over a year ago for laminate floor manufacturer Pergo.

While we were busy building the site – Pergo was purchased by another company, and we were never sure if the site was going to see the light of day.

Well today it finally launched.

The site is written on this massive .NET e-commerce engine and I was in charge of all of the backend programming work, as well as managing the .NET + AJAX + Flash integration points.

URL: http://na.pergo.com/

URL: http://www.nemohq.com
AGENCY: Nemo
ROLE: Technical Architect, Wordpress Integration
TECHNOLOGIES: Flash, Ruby on Rails

It seems simple, but one of the most troublesome tasks is to get a Flash fly-down (or drop-down) menu to reliably collapse when it sits over non-Flash content. Some browsers (IE) have trouble recognizing the change of control from the Flash Player application instance to the browser. For that reason Flash won’t always read when the mouse has moved outside the bounds of the Flash Player… worse still – it just receives no notification at all, which means that if you’re relying on Flash to read when the mouse has moved outside the bounds of the navigation – you’re out of luck.

Over the years I’ve come up with many tricks to help deal with this – some more effective than others. Today I found the best solution to date. It’s not 100% effective, but it’s much better than any of the other options that I used.

I decided to try using the jQuery hover method to detect when the mouse leaves the Flash’s containing DIV element in the DOM.

The AJAX code looked something like this:

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$('document').ready(function()
{
    $('#flashNavReplace').hover(
        function()
        {
	    //rollover functionality here
        },
        function()
        {
            getFlashMovie("flashNavReplace").jsCloseNavigation();
        });
});
 
function getFlashMovie(movieName) 
{
    var isIE = navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1;
    return (isIE) ? window[movieName] : document[movieName];
}

and then the Flash side uses some code like this:

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import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
 
/**************************************************************************
* 
* CONSTRUCTOR
* 
**************************************************************************/
public function TopNavigation()
{
    //setup the JS callback
    ExternalInterface.addCallback("jsCloseNavigation", jsClose);
}
 
function jsClose():void
{
    Logger.log("CALLED FROM JS");
    //close the nav
}

This works for me pretty much all of the time… I can break it if I really try, but it works great for normal usage.

Congratulations to the entire NVIDIA team here @ odopod on the success of the Speak Visual site on being featured in F:E:D, StyleBoost, and being chosen as the FWA Site of the Day.

URL: http://www.electroluxappliances.com/node58.aspx
AGENCY: Struck Creative / DDB-NY
LAUNCH: January 2008
ROLE: Lead Developer

I relied heavily upon Arthur Debert’s Bulk Loader to create this video and audio heavy media site. Media files load in the background and you view other content, to create as seemless an experience as possible.

URL: http://www.usedcarambush.com/
AGENCY: STRUCK Creative
LAUNCH: July 2008
ROLE: Lead Developer / Technical Architect

This was the last project that I worked on at STRUCK before I left for NEMO. The site is built entirely in ActionScript3 and I personally built the Papervision 3D powered van interior, and the media queue and streaming system.

URL: http://www.rebusfarms.com
AGENCY: Freelance
LAUNCH: August, 2008
ROLE: Lead Developer
TECHNOLOGIES: Flash, Python + Django, XHTML + CSS, jQuery

AGENCY: STRUCK Creative
LAUNCH: NOT YET LAUNCHED
ROLE: Lead Developer + Technical Architect
TECHNOLOGIES: Flash, C# .NET, AJAX

Built a Flash + AJAX powered front end on top of a commercial eCommerce engine to give the Pergo laminate floors website a fresh look. I spent a lot of time on the Flash + .NET communication layer, as well as re-writing the user account system and checkout process to work with Pergo’s specific needs.

URL: http://www.electroluxappliances.com/node98.aspx
AGENCY: STRUCK Creative
LAUNCH: January 2008
ROLE: Lead Developer
TECHNOLOGIES: Flash

Built a simple dynamic slideshow-like app for the Electrolux Experience section of their website. I had a lot of fun on this project because I had a chance to play with tile-based image presentation, and ended up using the open source ModestMaps project to do all of the tiling for the Kitchen Gallery.