Announcements

This is the Web site for IDIA 610, Programming Principles for Information Design, a core course in the Master of Science program in Interaction Design and Information Architecture.

Class E-Mail Addresses.

10-01-04

Please see the announcement regarding the special project we will be pursuing during the first half of October.

Among other disorienting surprises, I've been invited to speak on Saturday, October 9 at a design conference on game development, and so will miss class. However, CLASS WILL MEET and I expect you to work on your special projects (see above). I will ask Yoram Chisik to be available as a Flash consultant.

As you can see, the lab on Object Orientation is deferred for two weeks. If you haven't read the assigned section of Makar yet, you can hold off for a while.

9-27-04

I've seen the "gapping" problem some of you noticed in the online version of the Scene Scroller project for Assignment 3. In my tests, the gaps appear unpredictably, but much more often in the early minutes after the movie is loaded. Eventually they go away. This suggests the problem is not in the animation code but rather in the image reassignment, which requires an additional transfer of a JPEG file from the server. The lag may be caused by slow data streaming. If this diagnosis is right, the answer is to pre-load the ten background graphics.

Here's a game I built a few years ago using the scene scroller, but with the alternative technique in which all the graphics are present at load time. The object file (.swf) is much larger than it would be without the graphics -- 67 kb -- but everything is ready at the start. You shouldn't see any gaps in the scenery.