Today is Flash's 10th birthday! From 1996's FutureSplash Animator to today's Flash 8...we've come a long way baby! It's been a great ride and there's no end in sight!
So sit down and make a simple timeline animation, make a button that starts and stops your movie, make a shape tween, add a sound effect, get in touch with your inner Flasher and remember the first time you started Flash up. And if you want to celebrate Flash with some other folks, then check out an Adobe User Group in your area for the August meeting. Many groups are having a Flash-themed meeting this month. Get out and join the community!
On a separate note: Weblogsinc, the owner of FlashInsider, has decided to discontinue publishing FlashInsider (there will be an official note tomorrow sometime). The site will remain here as an archive, but no new content will be added. So this will be my final post here, and I just wanted to personally say thank you to all of you for reading. I appreciate your support over the last year or so. Hope to see you all at MAX!
...so get some help! And help others while you're there too!
Programming is Hard is a code snippet repository that covers a number of useful languages, including Actionscript. FriedGeek's post with AS shortcuts is a great tip to know and there's plenty of other good info here. Grab what you need and leave a snippet or two of your own!
One of the most common post topics on the Adobe Flash User Forums is a request for tutorial recommendations. Well, here ya go! Great tutorials and it FREE!
IFBIN.com just opened their service to the public for free. It is a client that you need to download and install that allows you to browse and download the Flash By Example and Flex By Example code/tutorial libraries. Great stuff!
The current IFBIN.com site is a little sketchy on the details, but the FREE message is loud and clear. You can read Darron Schall's (one of the contributors) description of the service here.
IFBIN is the brainchild of Adobe Flex Evangelist Ted Patrick. Originally, a subscription service, the move to a FREE model is a little confusing, but it's certainly not time to look a gift horse in the mouth!
Geek Cocktail Party Bonus: What's better than throwing around alphabet-soup acronyms? Knowing what the mean. Check here to lean what IFBIN really stands for!
Who needs all those high-end sounds and graphics on proprietary gaming boxes?! Dragon Gamez hosts the Flash game "Stickman Madness" which proves you don't need hi-res to have a lot of fun.
Stickman Madness is as violent as any other first-person shooter in the vein of Doom, all done in minimal yet ravishing red, black and white. Somehow reminiscent of joys found in the early Frog in a Blender Flash animation...but interactive!
MDM Multimedia is celebrating its fourth birthday by hosting a Flash contest...actually TWO contests. They've set it up as a Designer Vs. Developer contest, but that's really not the case. It's really two different contests: one for designers and one for developers (a distinction that I've never really liked...I know that there has to be some division of duties in a business workflow, but the implication that a designer is the "creative" person and the developer is the "technical" person just doesn't sit right with me, nor has it ever been that clean-cut in my experience...end rant...).
The designer contest is for a marketing campaign and the developer contest is more application oriented. The new version of MDM's Zinc supports Flash Player 9, AS3 and Flex 2, so the idea that you didn't use for the Flex Derby would be a great fit here.
The prize packages top out around $1,000 worth of goodies, so take a look-see and show 'em your stuff!
After my post last week on the Pollack piece, I was thinking about the whole copyright issue again. As a budding web designer, I learned a lot from viewing the source code on sites that I liked, and I hope that others have viewed my code and learned from things I've done. Once I got into ColdFusion, the learning curve followed a slightly more esoteric bent. You can't view the compiled HTML source of a ColdFusion page and see the code under the hood. so you have to seek out tutorials, books, or kind developers who are willing to share their secrets. Flash is even more of a black box as far as the browser is concerned. All you get when viewing HTML source is the name of the movie. We all know there are decompilers out there, but you're never going to get the experience of seeing the original code even with those.
Coming from a background in education, I have a lot of unresolved issues here. For me, knowledge is a precious thing and it should be shared. This is the basis of the education itself. As a designer and developer though, I need to earn a living from my work. A delicate balancing act to say the least. I've always tried to follow a principle which in college I dubbed "beer karma." You let your friends drink your beer now because it will always come back to you later when you don't have any.
Recently, Microsoft released an Add-in for Office that allows you to embed Creative Commons licenses into your Office documents. Adobe supports Creative Commons through the XMP standard. Last summer, Mike Chambers posted a View Source for Flash Resources extension. These may not be the answers, but they at least start to address some of the questions we face when dealing with these issues.
Even if you aren't quite ready to share your source code with anyone who looks at your movies, share your knowledge and experience. Join one of the many Flash bulletin boards (the Adobe Flash Forums or FlashKit for example) and give to the community. You might be surprised at what you get back in return.
Here's something to add a little laughter to your day...or a lot of laughter, depending on how you react to such things. So, just to play it safe, don't look at this in the middle of a meeting like John Dowdell did yesterday! Wait till you have a few minutes alone (or invite your closest cube-mates) and let it roll. Alan Becker did a great job updating the Harold and the Purple Crayon concept, infusing it with the frustration and angst that every Flash animator has experienced at one time or another. There's something really satisfying about seeing the Flash IDE under attack.
Apollo, the code-name for Adobe's Universal Client, is stating to pick-up steam it seems. I'm sure that the folks over at Adobe have been working their butts off on it, but few details have been forthcoming. In the last month though, that's beginning to change. A big article on c|net, "Flash to jump beyond the browser," in early May really gave the best overview so far. More recently, John Dowdell pointed out an article from PDFZone on a preso at PDF2006 that speaks to the document community's thoughts on such a client. And just yesterday, I saw that Mike Chambers will be offering a workshop at September's Flashforward conference called, "Building Your First Apollo Application."
Macromedia Central was a really interesting move outside the browser, but Apollo is shaping up to be in a totally different sphere, not just outside of the browser, but across devices. I just hope that Adobe keeps it svelte so that it moves seamlessly across those devices and isn't so bloated that its actual uses are limited.
If you missed the MAX 2005 presentation about the potentials of Apollo, check it out here (Day 1, "Experience Vision" segment).
Adobe is sponsoring a Developer Week (12-16 June). This is a free series of online presos aimed at developers. Lots of Flex stuff, an overview of the Adobe Engagement Platform, and AS 3.0 for Flash developers (in case you haven't started exploring AS3 in Flex). If you haven't had a chance to play around with Flex, this would be a good place to get an introduction so you know what's coming on deck.
Looks like there's some good information to be had here...and its FREE! So go sign up today.
I've been thinking about the brouhaha a couple of weeks ago concerning Adobe's moves to protect their trademark of the Flash name. Geoff Stearns had to rename his FlashObject among other changes around. Maybe minor. After all, a rose by any other name...you get the point...but I'm wondering exactly where the dilution of Adobe trademarks really plays out? Is it with the developers that use the authoring tools and the technology? or is it with the client that we build things for? or is it with the end consumer of the things we all build?
I think we developers are fairly savvy about the tools we use. So I'm not worried to much about us. The biggest problem here is that the word "flash" is so generic that without qualification (e.g. "Macromedia Flash"), you're just as likely to get an exhibitionist site in a web search as a useful development site!
Check out Kinglong's Gradient Explorer! (The link is directly
to the SWF file. If you'd can read Chinese or want to use Babelfish on Kinglong's post about the project, go here.) It's a great way to experience how code works in
real time. See how and where the little numbers change the way things look instead of just playing around with
sliders...and you can always cut and paste the code into your own Flash movies too!
Er, um... While flipping through my Flash search feeds today I came across a post by Jean-Francois
Arseneault at ArseNealt.ca blurting out how he didn't realize how complex Flash is. He downloaded the 30 day trial of
Flash 8 recently, installed the app and opened the IDE to its shinny new GUI in OSX. He was quickly over powered by the
shock of panels and all sorts of options to be found once inside and almost immediately had to close down the program.
He says he will grab a beginner's guide soon in order to get into Flash for real in the future.
Reading this reminded me of the first time I jumped into Flash with Flash 4 on a Mac G3 workstation with OS9. My
hardship involved jumping from Windows to Mac and jumping from limited Director 7 and Photoshop 5 experience into the
new Flash world. Though my jump from Director to Flash was probably easier than my original jump from straight web
design (only Frontpage and Corel, please forgive me, it was 1998) to Director. I lucked into jumping into the IDE
via an art class on Digital media and immediately jumped into scripting (using my background in Java and
other object oriented programming languages really helped here) and animation(Director and experience
with art in general helped here). And now I'm here... What about you? How was your first time? Did you get thrown off
track till finding that perfect starter guide? Did you dive right in and push out that first site or game or what ever?
Let me know in the comments below.
Since we've been talking about variousFlash players on the
Playstation Portable, it started me thinking of the proliferation of Flash across various devices. As a certain
do-it-yourself maven might say, this is a "good thing." A great thing really. The more Flash the
better as far as I'm concerned. But we can't really talk about just one Flash anymore. Even though the adoption rate
for the latest Flash player
for your browser has been amazingly quick, we've got all of these other players for different devices, some their own
flavor of Flash (e.g., FlashLite), some just legacy players on devices (PSP case in point). Then there's Zaphod, the
latest beta player (until
recently also called version 8.5, now 9).
So, yesterday's
news was about the PSP firmware update that included Flash Player 6. But that is only Flash 6. If you want to play
Flash 7 content on your PSP, you're going to have to resort to alternate methods. Oregan Networksannounced on 12
April the "imminent availability of its latest technology building block enabling rendering of Macromedia®
Flash® 7.0 content on non-PC entertainment devices." Later, in the press release, they specifically mention optimization
for the PSP. So what does this get you? Try:
• Flash 7.0 content rendering • ActionScript
2.0 support • JavaScript to ActionScript control API • Highly optimised integer-based code for
maximum performance on embedded platforms
All at a footprint of 500kb! Well, sounds promising, but I wonder
what exactly the schedule is for "imminent availability," and I wonder how this all sits with Sony who has
kept the PSP OS close to their chest. How important to you is Player 7 on your PSP?
Well...how
fortuitous! The day that the Flash player hits PSPs, we get a tip to our inbox about ARComics.com. These guys are preparing to push animated comics to your PSP. "Preparing"
is an operative word here though. Not a lot of content at the site yet, and the newest press release is dated 2001.
Seems like these guys are preparing to inject some new life into their company. Glad to see someone jumping on the
chance to use the PSP as a Flash distribution channel though, so I'll keep an eye on them and hopefully, some cool
content will come out of it.
Today is Flash's 10th birthday! From 1996's FutureSplash Animator to today's Flash 8...we've come a long way baby! It's been a great ride and there's no end in sight!
After my post last week on the 
