Topic: Portfolio Site

This doesn't sound too exciting - "woohoo, another portfolio".. but bear with me.

http://www.scottschiller.com/

I was working on an OO-style animation library a while ago, involving window, event, action and other objects - where something like:

with (addAction(someWindowObject)) {
delay = 100;
center = true;
method = maximize;
sound = 'maximize';
onComplete = doSomethingElse;
enqueue();
}

would grab a predefined "window", and tell it to move a certain way (via predefined method call ie. "maximize", or specific parameters ie. "moveto" with x/y/w/h coordinates etc.) A sound and 'on complete' event can be attached as well, for firing other events if needed.

Each action is then added to a queue, which is fired after all desired actions have been queued up.

My saying for the last several years has been to have a site "like Flash, but without the Flash." .. I think I am very close now.

The code as it exists right now works, but is not very well organized - (to be fixed..) and there's a lot of debugging stuff strewn throughout - consider yourself warned There's some funky stuff though in passing objects around, and I get the feeling I probably messed up some references here and there (variable scoping etc. could likely be better.)

I'm using XMLHTTP to load additional content at the moment, so it'll break in browsers that don't support it (and Safari 1.2 until I fix my code.).. but it works nicely in IE and Mozilla at this point. My main site, http://www.schillmania.com/ uses the same technique but has a backend "framework" to provide a templated 'static' copy of the site for browsers that don't have XMLHTTP etc. (This is what I'm going for with the portfolio one also.)

I should mention I've been reading some recent threads on JS pong, etc. and the math involved in that (25 liners etc.) - there is some amazing talent here.. this is about as complex as my math skills get, making a "tween" animation library

Thoughts?

(Edited by Scott on 06-23-2004 22:09)

Don't have much to say about the page, except that it is very impressive!

Only critique that I can come with is that the body-text could use some more padding/margin. The lineheight could also do with a little increase to make the text easier to read.

The little 'T' button in the lower left corner should come with a little expanation, there is no way to know what it does now without trying it. Changing its color to either blue or yellowish might also be a good idea, that way people would notice it easier.

Again - great work!

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"
- the Golden Ratio - Vim Tutorial -

Good comments, thanks. The content still needs to be fleshed out, as does the layout itself - I'm working on it That whole bottom area was going to have more stuff in it originally, but I ditched development on that section as a trade-off for the main areas (nav and portfolio content, etc.)

There are some quirks when you resize the browser window at times also, but I think overall it's fairly smooth. This is probably one of the most incomplete pieces of work I've put up, but it has been in development (on-and-off) for so long, I figured I'd get better motivation to get it done if I put it live and worked from there.

(Edited by Scott on 06-24-2004 00:43)

Scott:
Superb work! At least in FireFox on a Mac. Safari doesn't seem to render anything but a pale blue background. But what I saw in FireFox was spectacular.

I'm dazzled.

^^^
That's interesting.. Are you using Safari 1.2 or an older version? I was looking at it with 1.2 on a test box at work and it was OK.

(Edited by Scott on 06-24-2004 16:16)

Ah. Correct. Older version at home. Works great at the office, Safari v. 1.2.2

Superb work.

One small thing in FireFox Mac (latest build I think) - in the photo gallery (which I LOVE), the little preview that appears when you mouse over an icon appears near the cursor momentarily and then scoots to the top left of the viewport. In Safari it doesn't do that - it stays more or less centered over the current image.

I am really blown away by your work. Very fast, very smooth. Congratulations on this achievement.

Thanks.

Re: the photo viewer - http://www.schillmania.com/photos/35mm/ :
The thumbnails are actually supposed to hover and follow the mouse around, I'm trying to use a more advanced DOM event handler assignment method that's giving me some trouble on a few browsers.

It seems to work under IE:win32 and Mozilla, but mousemove() seems to fail under Opera, ie:mac and Safari. The idea is when the viewer's finished (eg. properly working,) it'll be a downloadable component people can use on their sites.

"The thumbnails are actually supposed to hover and follow the mouse around"

Interesting. I sort of thought maybe that was what should happen, but since the "captions" do that already I thought maybe you had the thumbnails is a static position so they wouldn't collide with the captions.

^^^
(I think I fixed the thumbnail issue.)
The tooltip shows up in a position slightly right of the mouse cursor, so I offset the thumbnail position by 20 and -16 (x/y) or so. This way it sits above the tooltip.

wicked again! Now I can truthfully say I'm a fan =) Go Scott go.

Better than the last that had some flickering issues here and there with the mouseover stuff. Class act there man.

Great work and design. As always.
Design wise, the only thing I regret is that the 2 panels of the middle column do not completly disappear when there's no content in them.