Joe Pietruch

Posted by Joe at November 16th, 2007

I can say I’ve had a successful fall quarter. I decreased the amount of extra-curricular activities I was participating in, which opened up more time for coursework, allowing me to perform at the level I knew I was capable of but unable to demonstrate last year.

If you don’t believe me, check out the work I’ve done for one of my courses, Dynamic Persuasion Design:

Project 1 - Consensus | Project 2 - Tile | Project 3 - evilprinter.com

I’ve added a number of new skills to my repertoire. All three of those projects are in ActionScript 3.0. All of them use PHP/MySQL extensively to aid in content management. And the last two employ the Flash Media Server, either to broadcast messages between clients, or to stream video from a webcam. Not too shabby.

- Joe

Posted by Joe at October 10th, 2007

This was my life for the past week.5 or so. Enjoy!

http://testing.jp-design.net/tests/ 

It works best with two web browsers or many people. Give me some user-generated-content!

Posted by Joe at October 5th, 2007

Check out the .pdf that is a set of comps for the proposed design of Project 2!

Tile Comps

Posted by Joe at October 3rd, 2007

The latest and greatest project for DPD is “Tile”

Tile is a square-tile based photo-mosaic app. The homepage will have an extremely wide view of the canvas area, so wide that an individual image will only take up one solitary pixel.  Clicking on the wide view causes the screen to zoom to a reasonable viewing distance.

Users will be able to upload new photos, and reorder existing ones. This will be somewhat of a self-organizing site in the sense that we won’t be able to tell exactly what it will look like at any given time. Below is a half-working example of the re-ordering interaction.

I have newfound appreciation for the algorithms that must take place during a disk defragmentation.

Posted by Joe at September 12th, 2007

I’ve been burnin’ the midnight oil because I was crazy and decided to take 20 credit hours this quarter. Here’s the latest progress on Consensus: detailed comps of my proposed design!

First is what you might see as a pre-loader when first visiting the site. Second is what the homepage would look like, the tiles each representing a different poll of opinion. Last is what a poll would look like, after clicking on one of the tiles from the previous image.

Posted by Joe at September 7th, 2007

Today I muddled through ActionScript 3.0 for the first time. It was very messy, but I finally got something I’m happy with. Here for your interacting pleasure, the one, the only (so far) Consensus Black Box:

There are three “characters” on top of each other. Click one of them to enable movement with the arrow keys. It still needs a little tweaking, and certainly real graphics (rather than the stand-in black boxes (hence the name)), but all in all, I’m satisfied with it. (more…)

Posted by Joe at September 6th, 2007

The web is shifting from static sites that purely inform users, to dynamic sites at which users interact. User input allows for fresh, mutable content — and this aptitude for change motivates users to return to the site.

User polls and voting have been around for some time. My proposition for project 1, entitled Consensus, is a “Web 2.0″ user poll.

(more…)