Brian McMurray - Interactive and Web Developer - All Projects

Shedd Aquarium

Brian — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:16:45 -0400

The Shedd Aquarium owns its own research ship which it takes every year to the Caribbean to collect fish for the Caribbean Reef exhibit back in Chicago. Shedd wanted to allow visitors to the aquarium to learn more about their research ship, the Coral Reef II. Shedd shot a number of videos both in and out of the water in HD and had a large library of high resolution photography relating to the ship.

The Iona Group helped Shedd turn these assets into an interactive exploration of the CRII. As the most experienced in the development software chosen for the task, I took the lead in developing the interactive piece to play back these high-definition videos and display these high-resolution photos.

Building upon the metaphor of a ship's blueprints, it is easy to navigate to each area of the ship and see listings of informative videos and personal interviews with the ship's crew, as well as to access photos of each part of the ship. Photos can be zoomed in all the way to their native resolution, allowing very detailed exploration of the ship.

The piece is prominently displayed next to the Caribbean Reef aquarium in the main atrium at the Shedd.

Test America, Inc.

Brian — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:55:41 -0500

TestAmerica is the leader in environmental testing in the USA. Having recently acquired one of the next largest environmental testing firms, TestAmerica wanted a fresh design for their website which the Iona Group delivered. Once the design was complete, the design was transformed into full HTML and CSS mockups. standards-compliant templates feature dynamically rendered rounded corners and drop-shadows. My focus on this project was cleaning up the templates for standards-compliance and cross-browser compatibility.

Once delivered to the client, the templates were rapidly implemented into TestAmerica's current IT workflow -- a hybrid of Dreamweaver templates and ASP.net controls to meet client deadlines, with the anticipation that the design will be reconverted into a skin for an in-progress content management solution.

Alan Ross Machinery

Brian — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:31:31 -0500

Alan Ross Machinery is North America's largest inventory of used and new scrap handling and recycling machinery. For their most recent redesign project, they chose to develop a Drupal site and hired a freelance developer to build the site. The developer hardly completed implementing the design into a Drupal theme before disappearing completely. Left with a non-functioning website, Alan Ross asked the Iona Group to repair and finish implementing the site. Alan Ross already managed their product catalog through a custom-built ColdFusion web application which integrated with an custom-built customer relationship management system. Alan Ross needed their main website to be fed the data from their product catalog dynamically and also to be able to track the activities of visitors on the site in their CRM software.

The site builds and caches its product listings from the product catalog through pinging a custom API built to return product information in XML. When a site visitor performs an action such as filling out one of the many request forms, the tracking system kicks in and the user's search activity and future form requests are tracked and reported back to the CRM software. This allows Alan Ross' sales staff to get an accurate picture of their customer's interests and more effectively buy and sell product.

Pioneer Hi-Bred Tradeshow Kiosk

Brian — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:01:42 -0500

Pioneer Hi-Bred needed an innovative way to get their seed hybrid sheets to their customers at tradeshows. Seed hybrid sheets are customized to fit each farmer's geographic region to combat the particular hardships farmers experience in their growing area. This results in thousands of seed sheets for the entire country. In an effort to reduce the amount of paper waste at tradeshows and to create an experience more engaging for the customer, Pioneer hired the Iona Group to create a series of touchscreen kiosks featuring an interactive map and print-on-demand capabilities.

The resulting kiosk features a 32-inch LCD touchscreen running an interactive map of the United States. Customers simply touch where they live to zoom into the map. As the map zooms in, a line map of all of the counties for every state appears. The user now selects her county and is presented with a menu of the seeds that Pioneer offers in that area. Choosing a seed type, the user is now presented with the seed hybrid sheet on-screen. This document can then be explored with the salesman and printed to take home.

The kiosk has been used at numerous tradeshow events for Pioneer around the country and has won Best of NAMA, Region III, for the National Agri-Marketing Association.

MBC: Media Archives

Brian — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:54:30 -0500

The Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, Illinois has an expansive archive of television shows, commercials, radio shows and advertisements, and imagery. They have undertaken a huge effort to digitize their archives and wanted a better way to present their archives online and to also limit the archives to registered viewers. The Museum chose a proprietary media delivery and management system called Pictron which did not have a registration system to prevent the public from viewing the content. The Iona Group was asked to secure the Pictron-powered archives behind the same user authentication system developed for the Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television system, also developed by Iona.

As the lead developer on both projects, Brian integrated the user authentication system for the Encyclopedia of Television and also designed a way to attempt to lock the otherwise wide-open Pictron system behind the user authentication walled garden. While not perfect, the system was successful. In less than 6 months, the Archives attracted more than 13,000 unique visitor registrations, so much so, in fact, that the Museum has been forced to cease the availability of the digital assets due to funding and bandwidth constraints.

Martin Engineering

Brian — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:24:15 -0500

Martin Engineering is the leading global supplier of bulk material handling equipment. The aim of this year and a half project was to restructure Martin's information architecture, introduce new categories for another metaphor for finding Martin's products, breathe new life into the site's design to make it more attractive to visitors and move away from a home-grown CMS into a more robust and solid platform. Developed primarily by Brian with assistance from freelance developer, Steven Merrill, the site features a number of enhancements to the management of the site and has laid the foundation for expansion of the system to include Martin's many international sites.

Powered by Drupal, the site is driven by a robust taxonomy for categorizing Martin's many products and presenting many ways to access these products by product family, service, solution, and industry. The site also has a vast document library for serving approximately 600 PDFs associated with products and services Martin provides.

The homepage of the site features a Flash application which is powered also by Drupal; with all of the information being fed in through AMFPHP. The Flash banner on the site, as well as the global portal, is also fueled and managed by Drupal, with images and slogans able to be easily swaped in and out through the administration area of Drupal.

diggMob

Brian — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:56:40 -0500

diggMob is a FlashLite 2.x program which allows those of us with capable cellphones to feed our Digg.com addictions. Now you can get the most popular articles from most of the main Digg categories while on the go.

Designed in part for Digg's API Contest as well as for a Mobile Development class taught by Steven Merrill in the Multimedia Program at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, diggMob utilizes the power of Digg's new API to retrieve its information quickly, which is extremely friendly for mobile browsers with data packages and generally slower connection speeds.

Unfortunately, in development of this application, I discovered that Stamen's Flash Dev Kit for the Digg API doesn't work in FlashLite. It isn't that the dev kit isn't supported in FlashLite 2.x, which has pretty decent support of most Flash 7/8 compatible code; it's that Digg's API requires proper user-agent headers and FlashLite doesn't send them correctly. To compensate for this, I wrote a custom proxy in PHP to which diggMob connects in order to query Digg's API.

I had more features planned for diggMob like sparkline graphs of diggs vs. time, but most cellphones have extremely limited memory available for FlashLite applications and just the current feature set nearly maxes out the memory allotment on a lot of phones.

This application has been confirmed to run on Nokia phones running Symbian Series 60 (I specifically tested on the Nokia 3230 and Nokia 6670) as well as Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition (specifically the T-Mobile Dash), and Windows Mobile PocketPC (specifically the Sprint PPC-6700). It should work on any phone powerful enough to run FlashLite 2.x standalone.

Maui Jim Sunglasses

Brian — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:57:49 -0500

Maui Jim Sunglasses wanted a new website to fit their brand and culture and target market better. Working with a local design firm, the Iona Group created standards compliant HTML templates with great interactive features in AJAX and Flash throughout the site. The templates were then handed off to a development team from IBM to implement into the WebSphere eCMS used by Maui Jim.

As a developer on the project, Brian worked on creating the HTML templates, AJAX using the jQuery library, and CSS templates for the site. His stylesheets keep the exacting design requirements of the clients across Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Mozilla-based browsers.

Unfortunately the site implementation team, when integrating into the WebSphere system, altered the semantic markup and the CSS of the live site, introducing a number of validation errors.

Irons Oaks Biodiversity Kiosk

Brian — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:02:53 -0500

Irons Oaks Environmental Learning Center is a wildlife learning park near Chicago, Illinois. The Iona Group helped Irons Oaks to create a new learning classroom for their facility featuring touch-screen kiosks where students can explore a library of wildlife journals created by other students as well as other wildlife software.

The journal entry and retrieval system is powered by a database running on Irons Oaks internal network and is accessed by students using software written using Adobe Flash. The software allows students to search and explore previous entries that have been entered by students and approved by Irons Oaks administrators.

From the same station, students are able create journal entries to be submitted to the library. Students are sent into the park with digital cameras and digital audio recorders to explore and find wildlife. These devices are then plugged into their kiosks and students can easily build journal entries on what they discovered in the park.

These entries are not immediately available to the journal library, but can be brought up by an instructor to be displayed on a larger display for presentation to the group. Later, instructors log into a web-based management application to review journal entries, make any required edits, and promote the entries to the common journal library.

Black Bros. Co.

Brian — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 01:24:15 -0500

Black Bros. Co., a leading manufacturer of roll coating and laminating machinery, drastically needed an update to their old website. The Iona Group performed a massive redesign starting from the ground up with a strong information architecture based on three taxonomies for categorizing Black Bros.' expansive product catalog.

The new site was developed on the Drupal content management framework, moving the client out of an out-dated homegrown ASP site. Taking advantage of Drupal's Blog API, the site is managed via the Ecto desktop publishing program. This allows the client easy WYSIWYG editing with image embedding and file attachment.

The site features dynamic inline font replacement for headers throughout the site using the sIFR method to allow for the custom typography, as well as dynamically generated rounded corners and drop shadows using the RUZEE.borders library. A Flash header loads different machines and value statements based on different sections of the site.