I love Google Maps Mobile, but it lacks any subway of bus information. (Besides, there’s no signal underground.) So, why not have a version of the TTC RideGuide that runs on my mobile phone? I often use the PDF version of the RideGuide, but it brings my laptop to it’s knees, so I figured the PDF reader in my phone would not work. (Confirmed: Acrobat Reader downloaded and opened the 1MB PDF, but it took about 20 seconds to slowly draw all the roads and bus routes. Then after a bit of panning, it closed the PDF with an “out of memory” error.) I would need something a bit lighter. My Nokia e61 comes with something called “FlashPlayer” which supports a simplified version of Flash (FlashLite v1.1). hmmm.

So, I converted a portion of the PDF RideGuide to swf, and then wrote a simple browsing tool in actionscript and saved it in FlashLite 1.1 format. Using the joystick on the phone, it pans and by pressing some keys (4,5) it zooms in and out. Neat! Unfortunately, a FlashLite application can only use 1024k of memory. Even though my swf file was only 200k, it needed too much memory to run. I chopped the map down in size until it worked. And then I chopped some more. It became clear that to convert the PDF to SWF, would require building the map from scratch in Flash. (Plus the fonts got slightly munged during conversion, so many of the labels look a bit wonkey.) With symbol reuse (e.g. the TTC logo and bathroom icon), the swf file size could be kept down, but that wouldn’t affect memory usage. It’s unclear how to accurately predict or estimate the amount of memory needed. Big problem.

Here’s the result of my test:

Controls:
[4] zoom out
[5] zoom in
[arrow keys] pan


(You need to click in the flash animation before it will read keyboard events.)

Here’s how it looks on the e61. (Wow, do I need a new camera.)

In short, converting a complex PDF map to SWF works, but it must be a simple, or small map in order to not hit the 1MB memory limit.

While enjoying some motion graphics recently, I thought, “Why don’t web people make demo reels?” So, to answer my own question, I found some visually interesting bits of interface design and made a quick demo reel.

Successful? Despite it’s roughness (wicked moire effects, eh?), it does convey a feeling which an online portfolio doesn’t. So, that’s encouraging. It also allowed me to show some non-web projects. (e.g. my German flashcard widget and an mp3 player.) The biggest drawback is that he standard montage format shows short moments, so you can’t get bogged down explaining more complex interactions, or the context around a problem and the brilliant solution. And a lot of interaction design is visually not that interesting.

On the other hand, if web developers always had their “demo reel” in the back of their minds, there might be a lot more fun eye candy online, and more clips to include in the demo reel.