As part of the continuing development of www.evivine.com I wanted to utilise a small animation on the opening page, and also to give visitors a taste of Evi Vine’s music. Nothing complicated, just something to give a bit of extra interest in the design of the opening page. In many situations I wouldn’t incorporate an “entrance page” of this type into a site as it’s largely non-functional. But when it comes to promoting something like a band or similar creative media there’s a greater leeway to do things for mood and impression as well as ensuring everying has a specific function (though of course I remain keen to ensure the site is widely accessible).
I can work with Flash, the software that I’d use to create either an animation or music player. But that’s involves a reasonable time commitment to develop something that exists elsewhere from scratch. In this case I knew of a freely available, configurable, Flash application that I could use for exactly the purposes I wanted. Jeroen Wijering is a Dutch designer and programmer who’s good enough to make a number of small projects widely available. In this case the homepage www.evivine.com is using an image rotator and a music player. The image rotator provides the fluid animation for the title text, while the music player is hidden and streams one of Evi Vine’s tracks. As and when the site becomes a commercial entity then licensing for continued use of Jeroen’s Flash projects is only 15 Euros.
These Flash applets that Jeroen supplies are one example of one of the more gratifying things about the web and technology, the continued growth of open source software. Jeroen makes the finished Flash applets available for his media players and image rotator, but also the source files necessary to make any desired alterations to the applets. Open source projects do exist on a much grander scale than this – the likes of the Linux operating system or Firefox web browser are examples of open source software, where the code is available under free or relaxed licensing.
As a web designer this continued growth is hugely beneficial as it allows me to act as far more of a “one stop shop” for potential clients. Instead of having to outsource development work or the integration of new tools or applications into a website I am developing, there is a huge variety of open source resources that I can use. Of course it shouldn’t be taken advantage of, and strictures of the Creative Commons License or similar agreements need to be adhered to. But in general it’s easier to take a selection of relevant and useful tools and applications that have been developed in open source, and use them to benefit a web site or indeed any other aspect of computing.