Flash Assignment Progress #4

lol@deadlines.

My depression has been playing quite a fun game with me. So much in fact that I've completely overshot my personal deadlines to finish this project.

It's now the 30th of November, and I've only just finished my Introduction Animation. Yeah, that bad.


I've also discovered a problem that could arise from making the site fully in Flash. For some reason or another, the site isn't auto adjusting itself (I changed the publishing settings and checked, it's treating it as it would on my native resoultion).
I had a photoshop image which I made to be the background once the introduction was done. It's set to the same resolution as the Flash file (1024x768). Now, ff I view the site as a Flash SWF, naturally it comes out fine. The background takes all of the space as it should. When I view it as an HTML however, the background takes up only the center, leaving a really large noticeable black border around 200 pixels on each side.
The site IS auto adjusting for different resolutions, the components in the site aren't. As they've been developed for a smaller resolution, they may turn out too small of bigger monitors (which is bad, considering the background is an image).

It was probably a bad call in the first place to make the resolution that low, but I'm going through a website creation learning process. My old assignment from last year (making a website in dreamweaver) taught me a lesson in thinking about the user: - not everyone is going to have a resolution similar to yours. It's a simple lesson, yes, but one I completely overlooked, hampering the experience on smaller monitors. Fair enough the university screens now hold a bigger resolution, probably better than my own. Then again, it's not just about what works on my/uni screens, in theory it's a wider base than that.


It's also put me in a bit of bother about the background. It's about three shades of light blue. Before that, it's black. So effectively, I have a black border on a light blue background. It doesn't look tasteful at all but most of my introduction stuff has been designed on the basis that the background remained dark for their lifespan.
The quick fix was to just increase the length of the photoshopped background. There's still a border, because I didn't increase hte length to a ridiculous amount. I don't want to end up developing for 1440x900 monitors again and run into the same issue I did last year. I don't know how badly it will impact those on smaller resolutions, but for now I'm just working on getting it finished and working. Bug fixes and tidying can come later on.

I'm now hoping and aiming to finish by Sunday at the absolute latest, documentation and all. I'd still be working on it now, but my brother is sleeping in an awkward place and as I have no desk, his feet are dangerously close to the power jack of the PC. I just abandoned what I was doing for the sake of my data.

It's also snowing. Maybe I'll be able to take another day off to do what needs to be done, legitimately this time, and maybe squeeze in a little Fallout 3 to keep me going.


That is, if Univeristy does decide to close this time... either way, depends on how it looks in the morning.