Space Ship News (music news) - feeds from MODx

Hey folks,

I’ve been (casually) working freelance with flash (AS2.0) and modx for a couple of years now and thought id share my latest work

Space Ship News was originally a music e-newsletter based on local band and events news in my home town Perth, Western Australia. The client decided the next step was to have a site built (i thought he should have stuck with the newsletter a bit longer to build a bigger readership, but oh well)

The Flash uses Fuse Kit for all the nice transitions and SWFAddress for deep linking (which was a real pain in the neck!)

From MODx i outputted each XML via one XML feed document containing the request extension. The flash calls for either a parent document for a list, or a single document

As for the design.. it’s a little cluttered i know - especially the home page!

Why did you decide to use Flash for such a site? I don’t see anything in there that couldn’t be done without Flash (apart from the FLV player, of course).

Frankly, I would have chosen to use the full available space, not just one tiny corner. On a 1920x1200px monitor, it looks too crammed and tiny. One of the advantages of Flash is exactly that you can design a liquid layout with it - I would have used this as a design element; it makes a big difference if done right.

well i know flash better than any other language, and i gave the client the option to use someone else. i pigeonholed the design into that corner for accessibility reasons.. but i probably should have done it to a slightly bigger res.

if i had more time id have made more use of flash to do more interesting animations/transitions.. but as it is, the obvious question for most is ’why did you decide to use flash?’

That is very cool site. I am not a fan of flash but this site came out very well. It is very fast and I particularly like the ability to jump straight to a specific section via the URL. Good job.

I can see flash and this different design be just perfect for this target group.

For me personally, bottom left corner is not a very nice place... But when resize browser window
it’s all good and content get placed better off. This webpage would be perfect in a popup window.