Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

Lightmaker have recently completed an ambitious project for the National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant service in the UK that I wanted to highlight here – entitled the “Wall of Life“, it aims to raise awareness of organ donation and sign-up thousands of new donors to the national register.

The site, which has been built using Flash, presents visitors with an image of a child whose life was saved by a heart transplant – zooming in on the image reveals however that it is constructed from up to 60,000 photos of people who have pledged their support for the campaign.

We’re used to seeing these ‘deep zoom’-style experiences now, but what’s impressive here is that the mosaic image and underlying image tiles are dynamically recreated every four hours so as to include people who have recently pledged their support – this produces a whopping 1.6Gb bitmap image, the data from which is then processed by a custom ColdFusion backend and served up by Zoomify Enterprise Server, rendering the final experience using Flash Player.

An impressive result that is worth checking out – you’ll see that there is still some way to go until the mosaic is full up, so if you’re prepared to support the campaign and live in the UK you could always help out and upload your photo to the site.

Update: There is also a Flash-based widget that you can share to help spread the word about this campaign – I’ve included it below:

As part of my learning process with the beta releases of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder I created a simple version of the Employee Directory application that we use inside Adobe to find information about employees.

I’ve written up the process of building this application and it’s now available on the Adobe Developer Connection site as a tutorial. If you’re interested in walking through the process of importing a design into Flash Catalyst, converting graphics to components, creating states and transitions, adding interactivity and then moving to Flash Builder, to connect to a ColdFusion or PHP back-end to retrieve and display data using the new DCD (Data Centric Development) features then I’d recommend it to you.

This is the application that you will build by following the tutorial:

You can access the tutorial and download the sample files here.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future tutorials then please let me know.