After spending the time building a flash MPC2000 drum machine that plays my songs [LINK], I decided I might as well use my new skills to build an interactive flash resume. There are many benefits to an interactive resume such as this:

• Demonstrate your design skills
• Show your creativity and “thinking-outside-the-boxedness”
• Learn some new flash skills – it’s inevitable that you will pick up new tricks any time you do a new project such as this

There are some problems inherent in a flash-based resume. Namely, most prospective employers, if they are not hiring you for a design-specific job, don’t care to see an interactive resume. They want to see a traditional format resume, that fits in the pile with the other resumes. There is nothing wrong with this, they have job to do, to sift through the pile. This is why I recommend adding a link within your resume’s url to a .pdf version of your resume.

The other drawback, and as a search marketer I preach this often, is that flash is not a very search-friendly medium. It is getting better as Google algorithms improve [link]. It is still another reason to offer an alternative version of the resume based in html.

So, I decided Flash would be the best avenue – despite the fact that I didn’t know flash at all. I had seen my roommate design in Flash and I though it would be no problem. My idea was to make an MPC drum machine that will allow you to play the drum machine using your computer keyboard. Also, if you click on each pad with your mouse it will play one of my songs. Seemed like an easy idea at the time, but as a total beginner it was a long development process. This turned out to be a great project to get a good understanding of Flash and have a good time doing it.

Here’s a (very) quick rundown of how I developed it:

Read a bunch of tutorials on Flash design. Started out with a stock picture of an Akai MPC2000 and Photoshopped my logo over theirs. Imported the image to Flash.

Added buttons to each drum pad on the pic. Wrote actionscript that triggers a different drum pad sound on a mouse hover. Assigned each of the drumpads to a keyboard key. Wrote actionscript to trigger a different song for each pad on mouse click. Actionscript for play, stop, volume, MPC displaying the song titles, etc.

And there you have it, no you can build your very own custom flash drum machine/streaming music player! JK, it wasn’t that easy, and I don’t have the time to write about all the development steps here. If anyone is actually interested in learning the ins and outs of this please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be glad to help.

Now have fun with a version of the drum machine below, or play the full sized version at my DJ Chima site homepage. It’s easy to use, just hover over “instructions” to see how. And as with any flash module, you have to click anywhere on the picture in order for it to let you use your keyboard keys to play the drum pads.