At one of my clients I was asked to help position and illustrate the company offering on the marketplace in layman terms.
After participating at a few customer meetings, it became clear to me that the products offerings were highly complex and needless to say also very technical. But even worse, the initial raison d’etre didn’t seem to exist at all.
Just like on the security market, no potential performance tool client would ever admit to having performance problems. The challenge was to make the potential customer understand that even though their business apparently was operating perfectly, there might be enormous unused potential under the hood.
The animation I drafted was used in various configurations throughout the presentation to illustrate hidden performance problems, unused resources, pinpointing the party responsible for the problems etc.
Note:
Clicking on the middle section of the tube will reveal the inner workings of the system.
Graphics
The scene is set up as a tube like construction with particles moving through. The particles bounce off the walls and move with individual speed. This could be illustrating the entire company input/output or a very specific system in the company. A mouse click will reveal the inner secrets of the tube, and the delays inside the black box is demonstrated with a gel-like delay section.
Particles are delayed randomly and change color to indicate if they are doing good, OK or terrible.
Almost everything is constructed in Flash Mx actionscript, but the code is nonetheless straightforward.
Download
I have made the package available for download with source code included. Feel free to experiment with this. Get it here: [download#3#nohits]
PowerPoint
Let’s face it. Whether we like it or not, a lot of people use PowerPoint for their presentations. Although cumbersome, it is fortunately possible to make the “foreign” Adobe/Macromedia technology work in your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.
You will have to follow this procedure:
- From PowerPoint, select View menu/toolbar/control toolbox
- In the control toolbox, click “more controls” (crossed hammer and wrench icon)
- Scroll down and select “shockwave Flash Object”
- Draw the bounding box with the crosshair where you want the animation to be placed on your slide.
- Right click the embedded object and select properties.
- Click in the Custom field to get the “…” symbol activated.
- Click the “…” symbol to start the property pages dialog.
- Specify the movie url as the filename, e.g. myradar.swf.
Tip:
save the .swf file in the same directory as the .ppt file, because there is no browse function in the property pages dialog. - Set any other option as you wish
- click OK
- View the presentation
