Archives / Tag: Flash

As a one time evangelist of Flash it’s interesting to see new tools floating to the surface over the course of the past few months. As browsers become more capable of delivering animation and effects without the need for plug-ins like the Adobe Flash Player I think this market will become increasingly competitive.

I’ve not had a chance to sit down and look at any of these tools in earnest, indeed some of them are not even available to download yet but I thought it would be worth creating a brief list and adding to it as time goes by. For now at least here’s the current crop of HTML5/CSS3 animation tools which I’ve stumbled across:

• Animatable – http://animatable.com/
• Edge (from Adobe would you believe!) – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/
• Hype – http://tumultco.com/hype/
• Radi – http://radiapp.com/
• Sencha Animator – http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/

It will be interesting to see how these applications develop over the coming months and whether any on them particular gain traction with the community as the ‘go to’ tool for online animation, just as Flash did back in it’s glory days. Let me know if you’ve seen a tool that I’ve missed and I’ll add it to the list! :)

Seems there’s been a lot of buzz about this little game on the web, I’ve been a little late to give it a try but now I have, I’m totally addicted. It’s a ‘simple’(?) Flash based game where the objective is to ‘draw’ a course for the ‘Line Rider’ to ride (ahem).

‘Linerider Jumps the Shark’ (above) is perhaps the most incredible demonstration of what someone can acheive with a little patience. My attempts don’t even come close.

Blip.tv, Google Video and YouTube content experimentally re-engineered into the most fantastically simple yet compelling interface.

Look out for the subtle transitions between clips. Kudos to Paul Neave. Very nice work.

(hat tip: Robin Parker).

Here at Nine Four we have a fair few Flash based projects on the horizon, and I’m a little short on freelance Flash talent. So if you think:

• You’re a bit of an ActionScript guru,
• You love Flash based games,
• And you want to work with me… (?)

or…

• You’re a total ActionScript guru (Yes, total!),
• You have experience interfacing between Flash and Server Side Programming Languages,
• And you want to make Flash beg you for mercy…

…drop us an email [studio at ninefour dot co dot uk] including some recent (and relevant) portfolio examples and an indication of your hourly rate.

It’s not often that you come across Flash based websites which really make the most of this highly interactive medium. More often than not Flash sites exist because it was the easiest way for the developer to produce a consistent result, and one which in reality could have easily been accomplished with just a sprinkling of flash, or even none at all.

Dontclick.it however is the total opposite, a site which would never work using good old XHTML and CSS (Well maybe with a very very large serving of JavaScript). Thank goodness more designers and developers are starting to use Flash for the right reasons.

This Friday Jason Wylie (Senior Technical Support Engineer at Macromedia) will be presenting “Introducing the Flash Player Detection Kit”.

This macrochat will explain how to create a Flash Player detection script from scratch, use the Detection Kit to create the script, and help you to understand why detecting the Flash Player on a website is important.

It will be interesting to see what the response is to deployment of Flash within XHTML after the discussion around this subject over at all in the head a couple of months back.

Bit of Friday fun… eggshot.com :)

A couple of years back Drew wrote an article for A List Apart detailing a method that could be used to embed Macromedia Flash movies in a valid XHTML document. Fresh discussion on the topic has sparked some interesting comment from John Dowdell of Macromedia. Well worth a read.

Colin Moock has posted a video on his blog of Kevin Lynch, Macromedia’s chief software architect, demonstrating the next generation version of the Flash Player at the Macromedia Flash conference in Tokyo, Japan.

Only a few features are shown, but already we can see the monumental improvements that are being made by the 8Ball team.

In the video below you’ll see:

• Saffron, a new type-rendering engine
• Dramatic performance improvements
• Realtime bitmap effects (blur, dropshadow, colour matrix etc)
• Realtime video alpha channels

Very exciting stuff.

• Demo Video (14.5mb 320×240, 30fps)

Update: Kevin Lynch has posted on his blog about his presentation in Tokyo.

My good friend Steven Grosvenor has written a new Command Panel for Flash which provides an interface to add comments to Flash files.

The Comment Adder Panel allows you to add comments at the click of a button, including the following types of comments:

Comment Block, To Do, Bug, Kludge, Tricky

It also has the option to include your signature and a date/timestamp. Very handy indeed.

Steven Grosvenor of Phireworx has been hard at work on a brilliant new book for Flash Developers called The Flash Anthology – Cool Effects & Practical ActionScript.

As you probably guessed, the book is about Flash, and covers subjects such as ‘Cool Effects & Practical ActionScript’. ;)

You can buy the book directly from the publishers SitePoint or from Amazon.

If you want a taster you can download 4 sample chapters from the SitePoint site.

After what seems like an age, yugop.com has been updated by Yugo Nakamura.

In addition to the new flash experiments and newsfeed section Yugo has added a beatifully executed archive of previous work, so you can still view all of his previous experiments.

The Macromedia Flash Video Kit is a set of extensions and resources to add Flash Video quickly and easily to your website. The Flash Video Kit contains the following items:

1. Flash Video Extension for Dreamweaver MX 2004: An extension for Dreamweaver MX 2004 that enables customers to add Flash Video quickly and easily to their websites.
2. Sorenson Squeeze 3.5 Lite for Flash MX: A special version of Sorenson Squeeze produced by Sorenson Media especially for the Flash Video Kit that converts (encodes) common video file formats into Flash Video format (FLV).
3. Flash Video Learner’s Guide: An introductory guide to using and deploying Flash Video.
4. Flash Video Stream Service Lite Trial powered by VitalStream: Purchasers of the Flash Video Kit are entitled to a free 15-day trial of the Flash Video Streaming Service Lite powered by VitalStream. This service allows them to harness all the power of streaming Flash Video without the need to install and maintain their own Flash Communication Servers.

Macromedia have gone public with the Ellipsis updater for Flash MX 2004. This update to Flash MX 2004 increases developer productivity by making the application lighter and more efficient to use. The updater offers substantial improvements in performance and stability and more comprehensive documentation, including:

• Faster initial launch time
• Compile times up to twice as fast
• More than 400 additional code examples
• Additional documentation on working with components
• Over 100 bug fixes. Read the details in the release notes.

The updater can be downloaded from the Flash Support Center.

All via flex-mx.com

“Microsoft Expression”:http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/ is a free vector-based illustration and graphics tool for the Mac or PC, and according to sources, is Microsoft’s first product that exports to Flash SWF.

This might be a “dead end” product (it was aquired when Microsoft acquired Creature House)… Forest Key (project manager at Microsoft) mentions in the Expression Forum: “For the time being we do not have any announcements regarding future plans for Expression.”

Deadend product or not, it’s been getting lots of attention… Haven’t had the chance to play around with this yet, but I’ve heard it’s on par with “CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand”.

Well, it certainly sounds interesting, I’m downloading a copy right now, so I’ll have a play when I get a chance and post some more on how it stacks up…

If you work regularly with Flash you will be well aware of the annoying ‘shifting’ pixel issue. This generally occurs when you group or resize an object. More often than not the x value of the object will shift from ‘200’ for example to ’200.1’.

Now, this is easily correctable by re-entering the original value manually, but I’m sure that you would wonder why on earth the application does this in the first place. It seems that Owen van Dijk has discovered the answer courtesy of Gary Grossman…

According to an article on CNET New.com Macromedia has been inviting beta testers of Flash MX 2004 to sign up for testing of a product update code named ‘Ellipsis’.

A Macromedia representative said the package would be released late this summer as a free update for Flash MX 2004 and would consist largely of performance and stability enhancements, part of Macromedia’s push to extend Flash as an environment for creating Web applications.

Via Flex-mx I came across this very neat Flash experiment based around audio that responds to the cursors distance from the floating globes.

This reminds me of a number of Flash experiments I put together some years ago. One being a Sound & Vision screensaver and another a screensaver based on random movement of coloured globes. I’ll post them here if I can dig them out.

Inspired by Jon Hicks 3D CSS Box Model graphic which I posted a link to last week, Redmelon.net have posted an Interactive 3D CSS Box Model on their site. Nicely executed with a smattering of Flash.

There’s a great new tutorial on the Macromedia Developer Center which covers assembling a rich Flash interface and connecting it to a MySQL database through XML and PHP.

The tutorial is written by Sajid Saiyed of SSDesignInteractive.

Well, Neve had so much fun in the bath last night, I thought I would share her smiles and ‘splish splash madness’.

The video was recorded using a Casio QV-R40 Digital Camera, imported into Flash MX 2004 Pro, and then exported as an FLV which has been embedded into a Flash Media Playback Component.

Note: I’ve optimised the FLV for broadband (256k) playback.

Well, I’ve been a little out of the loop for the past week or so. I’m ‘on holiday’ at home until the end of this week with my ‘family’. :)

However; this morning after feeding the milk monster I found some time to browse some blogs and do a little catching up. I happened across a couple of nice items which I present here for you to peruse.

Processing is a programming language designed for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It seems that you can pretty much use it for whatever you want and there are some great examples on the Processing site of just what can be done with it. I’m sure this would interest many Flash developers as the programming fundamentals sound pretty similar.

Mike Chambers has put together a nice standalone Flash Application for displaying the most recent posts to the Macromedia XML News Aggregator. It’s called MXNA Feed Scroller (catchy!) and uses the MXNA web service API to populate itself. You can download the source code and tinker with it to your hearts content. Nice work!

Right, better go. I think I can hear the milk monster waking.

So, I finally got round to having a look at the Data components in Macromedia Flash MX 2004. I decided that a good place to start would be to create a small application for browsing the RSS feed of this very site.

I quickly came across a sample application on the Macromedia site and took to deconstructing and re-assembling the code. Once I’d got my head round the concept of binding XML nodes (Is that the right terminology?) to fields or instances it quickly began to make sense.

Well, now that I have a better understanding of how I can use XML together with Flash maybe I can think about applying these skills to some future commercial projects.

Update: Anyone know how I can ‘format’ the excerpt field to render out links and HTML chars correctly??? I’m guessing I need to attach a stylesheet in some way…?

Update: I think I’ve sussed the HTML chars issue and have implimented some simple styling of “a” tags within the excerpt field. Neat.

So today I went to check the news on Actionscript.com, and I got ‘Peggy Stancavage’s Internet Homepage’… Hmm…, something here is wrong.

“Let Peggy’s expertise and market knowledge work for you”

Well personally I’d rather not, Actionscript.com, , where art though…?

Rubberduck�s new version of its rich client desktop application production software enables Macromedia Flash developers to leverage their skills from the browser to the client desktop.

�Screenweaver MX extends the traditional Flash capabilities by acting as a bridge between Flash and the operating system� says Martijn de Visser co-founder of Rubberduck. �It provides Flash developers with a toolset to create rich client desktop applications without having to acquire new skills�.

Screenweaver MX is available immediately on the Windows platform. A fully functional trial version is available for download at www.screenweavermx.com.

I just have to share the Macromedia Site Of The Day with you, its an amazing flash piece developed by Method, Inc. and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

Of particular interest to me was the ‘page turning’ on the Dreamworks case study, I’d really love to see the source file for that one. Amazing stuff…