« Flex 3 at 360! | Main | More on Flex 3 »
Announcing ringdesignonline.com (Flex 2)
| By Rich Tretola | January 24, 2007 |  Print This Post
|
  (1 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ... | 134 views |
Well, after a long development cycle, I am proud to announce the release of the all new ringdesignonline.com. This application is the results of many hours of Flex development by myself as well as a large SQL server project for the millions of records of data representing the millions of possible ring combinations, and many hours of design work on the thousands of ring image assets by our talented SQL team and graphics designer.
This is a Flex 2, Cairngorm 2 application utilizing both ColdFusion services and Java Hibernate for data retrieval and persistence. There are many custom features of this designer including the validation button bar, multi row tab navigators, image tool tips, custom preloader, image capture (used in the email a friend functionality), and more.
This designer is also a full blown ecommerce application with this additional functionality scheduled to roll out on 2/1/2007.
This is my largest Flex application to date and I am proud of the way it came out.
Please visit the application and post your comments as they are welcome here.
Rich Tretola
Topics: Announcements, Cairngorm, Flex 2 |
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:11 am
I think it is awesome to see large scale application like this in real life. There is no way people can say Flex produces a bad user experience if they are faced with something like your app.
With regards to you using the Cairngorm framework, can you give some clues as to how big the app actually is? For example, how many Commands and Views does it use?
Also, I’d like your opinion on View Helpers. Do you use them to remove logic from Views or do you let the Views contain some logic?
February 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 am
Thanks for the compliments.
Here are the stats:
Commands : 21
Events : 21
Views : 35
Custom Components : 10
VOs : 15
I do not use ViewHelpers as I simply am not a fan. I have all of my helper scripts in line within the MXML files.
May 26th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Rich,
You certainly should be proud of this app. Well done. My team and I are starting to get into flex for the first time this month.
Here are a few usability suggestions. I hope you dont mind.
1. The Initialization of this application takes a very long time. It took 17 seconds on my computer which is a 2Ghz Dell on a fast cable modem. I wonder how much you are actually doing in the startup sequence and whether or not any of the work could be done on-demand?
2. School selection: I was looking for my university but then later realized that you only had high schools listed. Maybe you could state that up front?
3. After I fill out my ring info, I clicked on the tab for my HJ representative. But then I could not go back to my Ring Preview as that tab was not active. I almost thought I lost my selections! I finally found a way back there via clicking Next on the Welcome tab. Perhaps you could make more of these top-level tab navigable during more states.
4. Choose a size under style-Crestline show a broken image.
5. Tab for future selections. I understand why these are Red with an X - you want me to “next” out of the current panel. But the hint only shows up during the “hover” as a tooltip. Whereas I was trying to click on them, the tooltip was not showing (because I click faster than a tooltip delay). You should give this message upon click as well.
Otherwise: Well Done! You should add pricing info and send-to-a-friend should include a preview image of the ring just built.
Fleximan.
Peace.
May 27th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
The initialization delay is due to a huge amount of data and images. If this were a 2.01 application, I would have been able to do some modules to speed initialization. The next version will address this.
Yes, this is a high school only application. The college version is a traditional ColdFusion app.
I will look into your comments about #3.
I will look into the broken image.
Good point on #5.
The email a friend does send a ring preview within the html email version. Perhaps, this should be changed to an attachment so that it is more consistent.
Thanks for your comments.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Hi Rich
Awesome Work ………..