I’m officially declaring this the year of the kiosks. I just finished a couple touchscreen kiosk projects with the amazingly talented, creative and friendly team at Second Story Interactive Studios. I am also working with a new client on six other touchscreen kiosks due early next year.
The Second Story project consists of three kiosks—they architected and designed the kiosks as well as handled all of the massive content production. I developed the kiosks using Flash. The project was a great challenge. I faced many hurdles that I’d never faced in the past, I learned a lot, and had a blast developing these. The Paleoparadoxiid kiosk was one of those projects where, well, I looked at the designs provided to me and sat there scratching my head for about 3 days wondering how in the hell I was going to make this thing work. I believe I created at least 30 to 40 small proof of concepts for that kiosk, many of which Second Story never saw. In this industry, there isn’t a higher personal high than when you’re faced with a development challenge, something you’ve never done, and you get it to finally work.
The kiosk are installed at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. For more information on the project, I’ll let Second Story tell the ’story’ on their site: How Do We Know and Paleoparadoxiid. Below are two screen videos I’ve taken of the kiosks in action.



XML “Compression” Tip
Maybe this is more common than I realize; I’m working on a Web project where the initial XML file is 420kb in size—that’ just way too big. I searched for various XML compression utilities, but a few seemed overcomplicated and many of the utilities don’t work on a Mac. In the past, I’ve imported PNG files into FLAs and published them as SWFs. This is an excellent way to reduce the load size of your PNG—while compiling the SWF, Flash compresses the embedded PNG. This gains ~50+% compression of that PNG depending on your publish settings. So, I thought why not add the XML to a variable on the main timeline of an empty SWF. My 420kb XML file is now wrapped within a 24kb SWF making the load time much less significant. Hope this helps someone.