I would have a hard time picking an answer If I were asked, “Of all the work that you’ve done for the EXG team (Entertainment eXperience Group) what are you the most proud of?”

The Lenzer RIA is, dare I say, perfect. It took a lot of work to get it polished just right but I don’t see any flaws with it. It works as well as what MTV has but my version is dynamic and navigable.

The Rapter360 is just plain brilliant work if I may say so myself. I did a pretty good job of using the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern for this and it has really paid off.

And then there’s the Zune Demo. This is the demo that was used to show off the concepts behind the Zune MP3/video player before it had a name. It started out simple enough as a small part of a PowerPoint presentation and then grew more and more into the centerpiece of the presentation. It was shown off to MTV executives, WarnerBrothers, FOX, and countless others. It was even presented to Bill Gates – he liked it.

This was also the project that required the most teamwork. There were constant requests for additions and modifications coming from all corners of Microsoft. Those requests were filtered by the EXG team manager, Russ Glaser, and then handed to the project manager Jeremy Hutton. Then myself and three graphic artists took on the job of meeting those requests. All the while I was at the center of it making sure everything worked together.

Essentially the presentation is a main page (shown here) that is a gateway to various interactive presentations of the Zune devise and it’s family of hardware and software.

Here is a sample of some of the issues that had to be solved.

• It had to run full screen. The background would stretch to fill the screen which is easy enough. Then comes the issue of centering the presentation on the desktop. Again, not a problem. It just required a little math. But it had to run smoothly at resolutions from 800×600 up to 2500×1600. That took some work. To accomplish something like that we had 4 versions of the interface at various resolutions. The appropriate version was dynamically picked based on the size of the desktop by creating a screenResize listener. It worked flawlessly which was very important because this would be presented in rooms where we had no idea what the hardware would be capable of.
• Some of the presentations were fairly simple timeline based animations. But, they had to run backwards and forwards in case the presenter wanted to back up. You know, Flash doesn’t really run timelines backwards but I found a way to do it and made it simple enough that the other artists working on the project could use it without supervision, freeing me up to work on other things.
• The one presentation that I was responsible for – aside from the integration of everything – was of the the Zune devise itself. The hardest part of this is that it began as something fairly simple but had features added on so many times that it grew into something with dynamic navigation and content. Looking back on it I’m amazed that I was able to extend the simple original demo to serve all those requests and not break down. It was almost a daily activity of looking at some new request and thinking, “How am I going to get this to work with everything else?” I always came up with something.

On more than one occasion someone from the marketing team would drop by and tell me that they received compliments on the demo itself from some executive and they wondered if they could get the name of the company that did it. I’m sure they were surprised to discover that it was done in-house.

In the end I’d have to say that while it wasn’t my favorite project to work on it is what I’m most proud of because there was a lot riding on it and I managed to incorporate every single request that got to me, on time. And it worked flawlessly which is what you want when you’re showing off a demo in front of Bill Gates.