West Asheville Multimedia CD

 

Chris Pittman

Information Systems

May 2003

Advisor: Susan Reiser

 

 

The West Asheville Multimedia compact disc (CD) is a project sponsored by the West Asheville History Project.? The purpose of this project is to create a multimedia tour of the history of West Asheville.? In this instance, the term multimedia encompasses text, audio, and images.? Gathered and organized by a variety of contributors, this multimedia is intended to provide an educational and entertaining experience for its users.

 

My involvement in this project first began in Susan Reiser's graphical user interface (GUI) design course in the fall of 2002.? The class took on the design of a GUI for the CD as a semester long project.? Low-level prototypes were made and tested by the students.? Then, a high-level prototype was tested with students at Claxton Elementary.? At this point, I decided to change my senior project proposal so that I could help in the development of this prototype.

 

The entire CD has been developed using Flash MX from Macromedia.? Many people feel that Flash is a very simple, point and click, development environment.? However, this project has taught me that this perception is completely wrong.? Flash is an object oriented programming environment with a very powerful, unique programming language called ActionScript.? ActionScript is based on the ECMA-262 specification, so it is similar to Java-Script.? The syntax for coding in ActionScript must be exact for it to work.? Learning ActionScript and how to debug it effectively was one of the biggest challenges during this project.

 

After mastering Flash, the project moved along smoothly.? Susan Reiser, Dr. Phyllis Lang, and numerous other individuals and groups helped in preparing the content of the CD.? This allowed me to focus on the programming and design.? The result of all this hard work is eighteen Flash movies.? In combination, these movies allow the user to navigate through the content hierarchically, by spatial location, and by temporal location.? The user also has the ability to perform a boolean search of the content.? A small selection of games complements the content and provides a little more entertainment.? These games include puzzles, a matching game, and a scavenger hunt.?

 

This CD is expected to go into production in May.? It will be released on June 1st at the 50th anniversary celebration of the West Asheville Branch Library.