I am very proud to brag about my small part in helping develop this beautifully designed and infinitely resourceful website, the new www.massgeneral.org. Though I had nothing to do with the design itself, I absolutely love it. My role was Flash Developer. Basically, if there’s a flash animation on the site, chances are I spent several hours pulling out my hair figuring out why something wasn’t working right.
Finding the flash pieces on this huge site might be a little bit like an easter egg hunt, so let me try and point out some of the larger ones:
- First, there’s the home page, of course. This animation has been hard-coded using primarily timeline animation, and the original prototype included some nifty parallax movement but unfortunately these first run images didn’t support it. Hopefully next time they want to update their leading image I’ll be able to get my hands on foreground and background images and show you what I mean.
- The second flash piece on the site you may encounter is on the home page for the Centers (Heart Center, Cancer Center, etc). This animation loads from an XML file, making it easy for MGH to go in and load their own images and copy and links.
- The most complicated flash widget I’ve ever done is The Patient Experience (check it out on the Cancer Center page). It also loads all it’s data from an XML file, includes 4 different types of slides including an audio slide, automatic thumbnail creation, etc. …and was a pain in the ass to debug.
- And then… deep in the site somewhere there are multimedia players: video, audio, and image slideshows. I made those too.
This was the largest project I’ve worked on in a developer role, and it was also my most challenging. Big thanks go out to MGH for their kindness and patience as I struggled and learned a lot throughout this last year. Also HUGE congrats go out the the entire development team, each of whom took on whole new challenges to create this very complex site.
