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The ongoings

So, this is week 5. Everything is on its way. What we have been doing so far is basically sketching and designing the skeleton pages (i.e. homepage, 1st tier and 2nd tier pages), and the structure of the whole website. I’m also in charge of researching and looking for some examples of some of the effects that can be achieved with advanced ActionScript.

There are some issues that we need to take into account. A map might need to contain hundreds of different places in HCMC. It would be very time-consuming to go around the city to take pictures of those places. One possible approach to this problem that we could adopt is that we will narrow the number of places to be put on the map down to 30-50 only. That would save us a lot of time. However, the map wouldn’t be informative enough as a large number of places have been left out. We will try to get done with the initial number of places added to the map ahead of time so that we can have time to add more places to it. More importantly, we can see the potential of this project and we surely don’t want it to be a one-semester project. What I mean by that is we mean to publish this website and popularize it among HCMC inhabitants and tourists. Although there are several directory pages available on the Internet, all of them are lacking user interaction. The interface is traditionally boring and the information is not up-to-date and is not well-organized, which makes it difficult to spot out the desired information. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this project is to provide a “smart” map which is purely interactive, more visually interesting, and coherently structured. In fact, the site must be functional, aesthetically pleasing, and thoroughly original.

Luckily, there is no conflict among teammates. Everyone gets along quite well. Each of us is contributing actively towards group work. Hopefully, everything will work out well for us.