I dont usually do flash applications, but i was approached with a particularly difficult one.... and i cannot resist a challenge.

 

I was required to build the whole CD ROM to function of a local machine, loading in xml files for sections, sub sections, sub sub sections and full view elements. The application had to be in both English and Greek and there were other sub menu functionalities including tags, supporter and sponsor area, history area, main controls to change language, stop and start the music etc.

 

As well as a structure like this, I decided it would be nice to include a physics elastic type navigation, so when the user moved the mouse around, the navigation would also shift around based on the position of the mouse, this also meant i could put far more elements in sections and sub sections as the physics stretch distance was based on the width and height of the elements in that specific area, so when you moved the mouse up, the navigation would smoothly shift down, to the left, and the navigation goes smoothly to the right.

 

The whole application was built with scale and monitor size in mind, it would auto read the size and go fullscreen without resizing any elements but using numbers and math to position everything.

 

Anyway, lets have a look.

 

Introduction screen

Main menu screen in Greek.

Main menu screen in English

A sub section, with the back navigation to the left and there is also an optional section introduction.

Another sub section, and as you can see because of the large thumbnails, the physics elastic navigation comes in particularly useful.

Sub section Introduction text open, the elastic physics stops at this point and the element will settle to the middle so the user can read it without problems and the whole thing moving around.

This is the listing view, the last level before you start to see the actual pieces as full images.

Now we are in a full view, and each image has other properties including a tag system that I coded into the application and also supporting text (Title, type of object, description. You also have the option to hide the supporting text element so only the title shows.

Another full view. This time It is the Olympiads of Greece in the 1906 Olympics.

A full view, this time notice the zoom plus button to the top left of the black box. They required that on certain collector pieces they would be able to zoom it and shift the whole thing around.

The zoomed view, showing a zoom out button on the top left. The user could click and drag the whole zoom around and read the intricate texts.

A cinematic view that would black out the elements behind and auto cycle the images.

The key tag elements worked in both English and Greek. Initially I had the issue of having to scan through all entries that were loaded in each time the user clicked on a tag. To overcome this as I knew it was a CD ROM that would never have its contents changed i created a read first and store method. I would load up all archives (including subsections etc) and run through an initial phase of cataloguing the tags and their relationships. This meant that clicking the tag would have a very fast look up method without having to load everything and parse on runtime.