ricardocabellov5.5

Took a while... but it's finally there. I still want to add some extra stuff to be completely happy with it (swfObject and swfAddress) but the base is done finally.

There are some bits of the making of that I wanted to mention...

As you will see there are a lot of images, so the first thing I wanted to do is optimise the loading of images as best as possible so there isn't too much bandwidth consumption for the iikki and neither for the user. I wanted to do a cache of each image, so the user doesn't have to load the same image twice if he goes back to a section he has been before. For doing this, I found the ImageLoader class from Zeh Fernando that helped a lot. This class creates a bitmapData with each image loaded, so if you have to load the same url again, it will check it and if it was loaded already it will reuse the bitmapData one. It also let me have the images with smooth = true, so every image, even the one in the background should look great ;)

While using the ImageLoader class I found the loadingQueue class which lets you create a list of stuff that needs to be loaded with a priority number. In instance, if you go to the print section, all the images will be loading with priority 3, but if you click in a project to see the details, those images will load with priority 1, so they won't have to wait until all the projects images are loaded to start loading. Just so you get it better, the big background image has priority 5. However, I found a 'bug' on this class and had to spend a bit of time understanding how it worked to fix it. If you deleted any of the containers in the queue list, the system stopped completely. I did an small fix and yesterday I sent it to Zeh, seems like he will update official class with the fix.

Talking about the background, the pixelled image is a 10x7 .gif image, it gets generated automatically with the CMS system using the php GD library when iikki uploads a new background image :) That reminds me, I also did the CMS for the site, and I think I finally got it to the point that it is really easy for me to reuse with any other project :) It's a shame I can't show this part of my work tho :P

And, as last thing to mention... as always, I really wanted to optimise the size of the .swf, in fact the original background for the videoplayer was something like 50kb when iikki sent it to me, I managed to get it down to 500bytes. But there was nothing I can do if the fonts that the site were using were THAT big. If the .swf is 160kb, I think 130kb are only for the fonts. Never did a site where the fonts took that much space :)

Anyway, seems like I'm finally getting some projects done. Now I just hope that iikki can use it for a long time :D

EDIT: Forgot to mention something funny. Although I have a MacBook Pro and a Dell Inspiron 6000, I had to do this site with my iBook g4 which made the process a little bit slow (but it was cool to make sure it would go fast on any computer). I had to use the IBook mainly because I have the mbp at work, and this site was a project done overtime, and because the fonts weren't rendering properly under Windows when compiled.