Flexibility

Justin and I got into this great talk about how we should design Flash-based projects for the whole network. Until I got to Emmis, I was good at making one-off solutions. Each time someone wanted something, I’d be able to build it. But since working with Ben and Justin, I’ve started to try to stretch what I create so that it can accomodate any one of our many radio stations. Keep the basic structure static, and make it so that more than one location can utilize it (without having to recreate the damn thing several times over).

On top of trying to stretch a particular Flash component across several sites, we got into the issue of duplicate instances of the same .swf files. The more we got into breaking things down, the more interesting our converastion got.

Before, I used to think about how to make a particular thing "work" in Flash. Now, I’m trying to think of ways in which we can scale and reuse elements, while still providing that functionality. Working with Justin and Ben, it’s making me stretch my brain and rethink the way I do things… and it’s fun!