The site itself is just a single page using jQuery to update the content. I could have used a fully featured CMS, but for a project of this size it didn’t make sense. The biggest thing was creating a site quickly and make it simple to tweak the design. While doing updates is not lightning fast and does require some technical knowledge, it takes a lot less time than setting up a CMS with way more features than are needed. It is the second site I have designed, and while I am not a professional designer, I think I can create something that is simple but still has some stylish elements. Plus it is fun to design something from the ground up, even if I don’t create the best looking site ever.

I had not built a video player in Flash before this project, turns out it’s pretty simple. The basic Flash components work well and make it simple to stream video. The media player was built to handle both audio and video playback in a single player. It just made for a better user experience. Although I suppose we could have had all the audio files encoded as the soundtrack in video files, but our solution also makes it easier for On the Boards. Since Flash doesn’t support audio only playback through the FLVPlayback component, we used the FLVPlayback component for video and the standard Sound object for audio playback. The interesting bit there was coordinating the two so they didn’t overlap when switching media and making all the controls work for either audio or video. We ended up making all the controls not know about either playback controller. They raise events which are captured by our main class which knows what the active playback component is so it can then relay the button command. This chain of events also works the other way around, for example when the player needs to buffer data before continuing playback. It also makes it simple if we ever needed to add more playback controllers, not that I can think of any at this point in time, but you never know.

One thing we discovered while developing the media player is the FLVPlayback component doesn’t always raise the Buffering/Playing/PausedStateEntered events when those states are entered. Makes it difficult to properly handle those situations when you don’t know you are in them. Turns out if you use the StateChange event and check the event state, you always know what state the FLVPlayback component is in. No idea why that happens, but if you find yourself building a custom video player, keep that in mind.

Edit: Turns out On the Boards found this post and linked it on their blog. In the interest of providing some more details I wrote another post to compliment this one.

I just spent the most of last Thursday trying to get some content to fade properly in IE with help from Chris. It still doesn’t, but it works well enough. When something seemingly simple takes up an entire day to make work in one browser, I’d consider that technology not quite ready. Even using jQuery which is supposed to make all the browser differences not such a big deal, and it does a great job at that for the most part. Seems you can’t adjust opacity and other attributes on elements in IE, something that works no problem in Chrome or Firefox. So the animation IE ends up with less effects and doesn’t look nearly as polished. And the best part about this, is the animation is for a Microsoft site.

Anyways, if HTML5/JavaScript/whatever is going to take over doing all the things Flash already does (and does pretty well for the most part) cross browser support needs to be way better. We are pretty much there with Firefox and Chrome/Safari, but IE is so far behind and has such a huge market share (about 2/3’s) that is impractical to code everything in JavaScript because you have to spend twice as long as you should to make sure it works in all the browsers correctly. Where as Flash, I code it once, it works in every browser. It just makes things so much simpler to have a common platform to develop for that works everywhere.

You might be able to notice (if you’ve ever been to the site before) that I actually did some styling on this site. Not that it’s going to blow you away with its awesomeness, but it’s something besides the default theme and I think it looks pretty good. But it’s a good thing people don’t pay me to design their sites, it’s much easier to build them.