subject: Testimonials Platform - Graphical Accelerations In Your Browser [print this page] Outshine Interactive was commissioned to bring St. Edward's University's testimonials platform to the 21st century.
Challenge
The original testimonial platform was a Flash applet, which has minimal support ( or none at all ) on mobile devices.
Thus, the main challenge was to develop the platform in such a way that it would run on a large variety of devices, ranging from iPhones to older smartphones, Android tablets, desktop PCs or smart TVs, each with very different screen sizes and capabilities.
On all these devices, the animations and advanced effects (such as glows and reflections) had to keep they're original aspect and animated as smoothly as possible, even on those devices with lower capabilities.
Another challenge was to make the multimedia content available to all devices, even if they were loaded from a local source, or from external services such as Flickr or Vimeo.
Results
The result was a standards-based approach, using the new HTML5 tags for semantics and multimedia, CSS3 for the advanced visual effects, and JavaScript for behavior handling and generating content, from either local or external sources.
We started with accessibility in mind, so the platform would be completely usable by keyboard, or other similar devices, and would work great with screen readers.
Even though the platform uses intensive JavaScript calls, we wanted to allow users to be able to bookmark any page of it, so we implemented shareable URLs to both individual sections in the app as well as individual items such as photos or videos.
To accommodate for the various devices and screen sizes we adopted a progressive enhancement and responsive approach, using CSS3 and JavaScript to detect device capabilities and adapt to them.
To make sure the animations are as smooth as possible, on devices with WebKit-based web browsers, such as iOS, BlackBerry, or Android based devices, we use CSS3 3D transforms, that are hardware accelerated on these platforms.
For touch screen devices, like tablets or smartphones, we improved the user's experience with various touch effects, such as swipe.
To make it easy to manage the content of the tutorials platform, we added API integration with Flickr and Vimeo. This allows the full content of the app to be generated based on the data available on the accounts at these services.
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About St. Edwards University
A Top Liberal Arts University
Having achieved the goal to become one of "America's Best Colleges," St. Edward's University, a Holy Cross, Catholic university, stands distinctively as a top liberal arts university.
