This RMA for the Xbox.com homepage was originally built to rotate between five heros. (Hero: a big advertisement at the top of the page.) You know what that means: five now but maybe more later. Of course programmatically there is no difference between 5 and 21. It’s all just the length of an array to me. The one caveat I asked for is that the number of heros had to be odd. That’s because only three thumbnails are ever visible and it’s the center one that starts out as the selected one.

All in all this is a fairly straight forward RIA. The biggest lesson I learned on this project was how to create dynamic text fields populated via an XML file that contains international text. They didn’t ask for this until I was pretty much done with the project - don’t you just love it when your just about done and someone asks, “Oh yeah, and we need it to do blah, blah as well.” In this case it was the international text thing. Now it turned out that it only took a few hours of research to get everything set up and I had it displaying Chinese, Hebrew, Russian, even Sanskrit - no joke, the Xbox is a big hit in Sanskitland. :-)

Now as a rule I look at what the UX team and designers ask for and then try to anticipate what they might think of later. The first rule that I’ve learned is: declare every conceivable variable in the XML. (My XO class types variables declared in XML which is very nice.) I even use settings in the XML to position things that are loaded at runtime. It’s really nice when some designer emails and says, “hey, can you move the what’cha’ma’callit over over 3 pixels” and I respond back with, “change the whatChaMaCallit_x in the node.” I’m not sure if they love me or hate me for doing that for/to them. :-)

That is an instance of the programmers prime directive (PPD): work hard now so that you can be lazy later.

I’ve found that the PPD never really allows me to be lazy later because I’m always busy with the next thing but at least I’m not bogged down in minuscule changes 10 times a day.

I also learned that the Flash authoring tool always uses GET with the getURL method no matter if you set it to POST. That set me and the production team back a spell before we figured out what was what.