use Perl

So after a ton of work, learning ActionScript and Flash, I'm proud to announce the release of our first "Interactive Feature" (don't blame me for the name -- it's not really interactive, per se). Just go to our homepage[1] and click on the main story image to launch the presentation (after a while, it gets pretty boring, unless you're really into the fast food industry -- so I won't blame ya if you bail ;)).

Anyway, what's cool about this is that the whole thing is driven by an XML file. The Flash file loads the XML, which specifies an MP3 file and a series of slides like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<presentation>
    <title>Simple</title>
    <audio>simple.mp3</audio>
    <slides>
        <slide photo="00.jpg"   start_time="0"    end_time="1"   caption='' />
        <slide photo="01.jpg"   start_time="1"    end_time="5"   caption='' />
        <slide photo="02.jpg"   start_time="5"    end_time="9"  caption="" />
        <slide photo="03.jpg"   start_time="9"   end_time="14"  caption='"Chick-fil-A announced its 37th year of consecutive sales gains."' />
        ...

Then the Flash file will start the presentation and through an internal timer, fade the slides out at their end_time.

Neat, huh? Well, this non-Perl moment brought to you by Macro... uh, I mean, Adobe.

Peace,

Jason

[1]: That URL will change later, so I'll come back & update this journal entry when it does.