Speaker: Julian Dolce of Fuel Industries

The session spoke to the development process in creating www.fairiesanddragons.com.

Explore the inevitable challenges working with a highly inter-disciplinary team presents. Learn about the various tools and approaches adopted to ensure a smooth project work flow from conceptual to delivery, on time and within budget.

Challenges and moving from short-cycle projects to long term and high resource projects:

• Working with a big team
• Version control
• Bug logging
• Testing & Q/A
• Multiple locales
• Cross platform development

Step 1: choosing technologies for a desktop app installed from cd. A feature comparison and requirement checklist between Zinc, mProjector, SWF Studio, and AIR. Side bar note: current reservations with AIR are with the requirement of the AIR runtime which really puts up an obstacle for the general public and general accessibility to that platform. Chosen technologies: mProjector, Zinc, InstallBuilder (enable easy and streamlined installation), FDT (flash coding ide) and WPF (windows presentation foundation) for integration into windows platform.

Step 2: Tactics in streamlining production. A couple examples:

• Automatic nightly builds
• Image cropper and importer - automatically prepare images
• JSFL to automate flash processes =

Step 3: Debugging and QA.

• Use Mantis or Bugzilla
• Test on low spec machine
• Check OS configurations. For example, UAC on Vista

Cross platform development:

• Key elements: folder delimiter, performance of transparent desktop, and build on each separate platform.

Weird "features":

• Cool OSX trash can feature
• OSX Icon refresh rate
• Windows titles could not exceed 8 characters when running off a CD on Windows NT
• On lower end machines mouse clicks get ignored by the desktop wrapper