Our Thinking Flex Application for the Allyis.com Redesign

An integral part of the redesigned Allyis.com site, the 'Our Thinking' section was intended to highlight Allyis' ideas, applications, and insights on the company's technologies and business processes. To support this goal the design included an interactive application featured on the 'Our Thinking' homepage. The application needed to showcase individual topics with introductory information and links to additional resources as well as support video playback within the application.

As the sole developer on this project, Ben worked within the Flex framework to create both the User Interface from the designer's mock ups and the application functionality based on the the functional specifications. During the initial stages of development Ben worked closely with the designer to flesh out nuances to the interface and user interactions. To create the elements of the UI he borrowed graphics from the mock ups in addition to creating other elements from scratch, such as vector graphics, in Adobe's Flex and Flash programs.

Working on the application programming, Ben succeeded in making the code organized while also including enough documentation and comments to allow individuals to easily pick up and modify any part of the application. It was especially important that non-technical personnel be able to make changes to the content without their needing a great deal of application specific knowledge.

Ben architected the first version of the application so that content changes were accomplished via a simple XML layout containing the information for each topic. In version two of the application Ben leveraged the SharePoint web services to pull the data for each topic from an externally managed SharePoint list, allowing the content to be edited through a web interface which was faster, simpler, and easier to manage.

Flex, ActionScript, Flash