Scott Morgan

Tonight my first public facing work since I started at Disney 3 months ago went live. Usually when you start a job you start out slow, do the odd update here, maybe add a widget or two to a page a few levels deep. Not this time, I was tasked to rebuild Disney.com in AS3. Not only rebuild it but optimize it and add a few features.

This is Disney’s public face on the internet. <sarcasm>A small site</sarcasm>, only 23+ million unique users a month, needless to say there were a lot of stakeholders and a lot of people looking over my shoulder (and a lot of backseat qa testers :). Talk about new job pressures. That’s OK, in a sick, sadistic way I actually enjoy the pressure and stress of it all. You have to in this industry or it will chew you up and spit you out.

Now when you hit disney.com everything you see is AS3. If you visited the site before you will notice a huge performance improvement, most of this is simply AS3 being 10 times faster than AS2, however I did optimize a lot of the code while porting it.

The biggest item to change on the site is the carousel. Visually there isn’t much change (other than the opening animation build) from the previous version, it’s what’s under the hood. The carousel is now built using Papervision, unfortunately all of the features I built into this component are not yet live on the site (stay tuned for another update in the near future). Just like the previous version you use the arrow buttons to rotate the carousel. You can either click the arrows to rotate the carousel one tile at a time, or hold the mouse button down over one of the arrows and rotate the carousel until you release the mouse button. When the carousel stops it centers on the tile closest to the camera and plays an animation for that given tile. You can interrupt the animations at anytime by clicking either of the arrows which forces the animation closed and then rotates the carousel.

Check it out, let me know what you think, and remember, this is only the beginning. There is some real cool stuff on the disney.com horizon.

Tags: actionscript 3.0, disney, Papervision3D

A short time ago, almost a year now, I blogged about how I was leaving Critical Mass to go and work on the Yahoo! Flash Platform team. Well, believe it or not, I am on the move again. This time I have accepted a job with the Disney Internet Group in North Hollywood. Just like Yahoo! I will be a Senior Flash Engineer working on the core technologies team. I am not sure who is more excited about me working for Disney, my son or me?What excites me the most about this opportunity is the creative environment I will be working in. Those who know me know that I thrive in a creative environment, and it doesn’t get much more creative than Disney. I love to push the envelope and one thing I have learned over the past 10 years is it takes a great creative team and environment to push development teams to the next level.

Yahoo was great, I learned a lot, met some great people, and I worked with some of the smartest people I have ever had the chance to work with. Plus I got to see Taylor Hicks in concert at the Yahoo! campus, oh wait; I am only supposed to be mentioning the good memories.

I would like to thank Yahoo for the great opportunity they gave me and everything I learned. There are some very talented people in Sunnyvale and around the world painting the internet purple. Do you Yahoo? I did and it was spectacular! (obscure Seinfeld reference for you hardcore fans). Now I must replace my Yahoo! hat with a pair of ears.

Tags: disney, job, moving, Yahoo