Adobe Tour Of California Tracker

So, my first Flex application is complete: the Tour Tracker. The Tracker is a real-time application for following each day of the Amgen Tour Of California bike race. Adobe (my employer) is a sponsor of the race and part of that sponsorship is this application. I volunteered for the project as a bike nut who wanted to learn Flex.

I'll be adding posts this week and next about how we built the application and my experiences over the past 4 weeks of development, but I'll start out with a couple of thoughts....

1 - The project took about 4 weeks from initial design meeting to final product to build.
2 - The team included:
- one designer who did the initial comp and one who produced the graphics
- one engineer working part-time to create the back-end data server (Flex Data Services)
- one engineer primarily handling our connection to the back-end servers (FDS, Akamai)
- one engineer (me) who built the Flex application
3 - Personally, before this project I had never...
- built a website other than the Web 1.0 "Padgett Printing Prototype" on my home page
- seen let alone writtne a single line of Actionscript
- used Flash
- used Flex Builder
4 - The site, when it worked, was SWEET. Sadly....
- the Akamai (video/audio) back-end was very unstable and unreliable
- the GPS coverage was spotty (beta devices, dependence on T-mobile coverage)
- Amgen's servers (hosting the SWF and the results) were down 1/2 the time
5 - Of course, I should have made my application handle all these better...

Tomorrow, some real details....