Well, I think I made my foray into soft-porn last week by helping out with the launch of a free online magazine called Monkey (not work safe and broadband required!) :)
It's been a grueling week to say the least (the phrase "work your fingers to the bone" must have been coined by a developer as I'm literally missing several layers of skin from the tips of my fingers as I type this!) We made launch with an initial version that went live in the early morning and a much more stable update that followed it a few hours later (before I finally expired and had to sleep after programming for 26 hours straight!) NOTE TO POTENTIAL CLIENTS: I don't normally do this, it was a favor to a friend and, no, I'm not interested! :)
I'm proud of the astounding effort the development team put into it, literally working round the clock in the last week in a development cycle that apparently lasted less than a month.
Personally, I think we got the core functionality spot on but, as always, there is definitely room for improvement and optimization. With more time on our hands now that the pressure of launch has passed, I'm looking forward to polishing off the engine so that it is rock solid. As it stands, the magazine is a great example of how Flash's integrated support of video can provide possibilities that are simply not possible with Ajax. It's not exactly the kind of magazine I reach for off the shelves of my local bookstore but I believe that Monkey will be a huge success (especially if the stats in the first few hours after launch are any indication.) And, I have to say, there's something to be said about getting paid to look at beautiful half-naked women that just borders on what most men would consider a dream job! :P
The Just monkeying around. article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Nice, you got Jack Bauer beat by two hours! As always, great job.
Veeeerrry good! My first impression was “this won’t work…” I just read the entire mag and by about the 3rd page was completely comfortable with the style. I can imagine where the additional tweaks are going but I think its very cool and can see that engine being rolled out quite a bit.
Good work dude, get some sleep, come back and join us in the land of the living ;)
Dan
Very web 2.0. Now I’ve got one more thing to get between me and productivity ; ]
Nice work man, but I see a bug on page 34 under Firefox 1.5.0.7 visualization. I’m from Argentina and the blonde girl is hot!…
Hey AML, can you tell me what you see. I can’t seem to reproduce any issues with page 34 on my machine. Thanks!
When I turn the page, it has the right size but then it resizes to something like 15 px less than the other pages. I can send you a screenshot if you want. Just email-me
Actually due to changes & issues along the way it was basically built in 2 weeks.
Thanks for all the great work :)
Niqui
Thanks for the great work guys! Can’t wait to have some time to go through various points of the project and polish the edges. Although something tells me it’s going to be a bit like polishing a dodecahedron ;)
One thing though…
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“As it stands, the magazine is a great example of how Flash’s integrated support of video can provide possibilities that are simply not possible with Ajax.”
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I would have to say that flash’s integrated support for video have provide possibilities that would not be as easy in other web technologies. After all you can display video through Quicktime and other video playing plugins. Which Ajax would easily be able to insert into the DOM.
I feel the main advantage of using flash here over other technologies is the animation of the page turning, which I have to say rocks!!
Well the next issue of Monkey is going live as we speak… Hopefully we won’t be here to 5 am this time!
It was great working with you guys – although next time we stay up that late, having eaten pizza, I think we should be watching movies or playing poker rather than coding!
Agreed?
Tom
Ps. Sorry about Rob…
next stop ‘vivid entertainment’ ;)
i have some errors while flipping the pages : (
here are some screens
http://przemiana.ovh.org/aralmonkey/