...so get some help! And help others while you're there too!
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!
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.
The creators of the Canadian show Odd Job Jack will release all master flash files, bitmaps, art, props etc. of each episode every week. Also included will be tutorials and documentation so you can hack or remix to your hearts content via a Creative Commons license. Check for a new set every Monday via bittorrent. If you do anything with these files, post it in our comment section. Happy animating!
This wickely-twisted Flash design will leave your skin tingling. The navigation can be a bit confusing but it is still fun to explore the site. I'm not quite sure what the site is about, but it is very imaginative, to say the least. My favorite part is the twisty music position bar at the lower right. What do you think? Post a comment in the section below.
3D Stereogram is a neat little app that lets you make your own magic eye pictures. You start off at a blank canvas with various different pen tools. I don't know if there are any tricks to creating a good one so I just scribbled around. Next hit done and it will generate your magic eye with the necessary code to embed it elsewhere on the web. Not knowing how to exactly see the magic, I can't tell you if it works or not. Have a look at what I did and give it a try yourself.Hoss Gifford has figured out a way to dynamically resize a Flash movie embedded in an HTML page. The practical application of this is now you can have your movie resize based on how much content there is to display. Being able to scroll with the browsers scroll bar instead of creating a separate flash scrollbar is the chief benefit to this technique. To accomplish this Gifford uses the swfObject by Geoff Stearns. Hoss has kindly made available the source code for this project under a creative commons license in hopes that someone can improve it. Check out the demo to see the resizer in action and download all the necessary files in one convenient zip.
Miltos Manetas has put together a nice time waster for your Monday afternoon. Create your own Jackson Pollock drip painting without all the mess at JacksonPollack.org. Great use of the Drawing API! I can't wait to show this to my 7-year-old...but I get to play with it for a while first...
...so to speak...
Regular readers know that I live in New Orleans. It's been nine months since Hurricane Katrina and the failings of our levee system laid waste to my home town. Even now, we're still dealing with the after effects. At least I'm one of the lucky ones. I get to live in my own house. Too many of my fellow citizens can't say the same.
Jay Dyke over at CartoonSmart.com has posted a free video tutorial on how to use Geoff Sterns' SWFObject, a Javascript solution to the recent unpleasantness
regarding Flash running in IE 6 on Windows. If you're a real visual learner and you need to see how it all works, this
is the place for you. Jay rambles a bit, but he gets the point across eventually. And the SWFObject is an elegant
solution once you're all set up.
Seems like building Flash explorer-type apps is the new black! A few weeks back, we had the Transition & Tween
Explorer. Now we have a Flash Gradient
Explorer. Maybe the Flex Explorer and the Flex Style
Explorer (warning: needs Flash Player 8.5....AKA 9)
have just inspired folks to build this type of thing! And the rest of us get the benefits!
InformIT put up a sound tutorial earlier this month that shows how to create a control a couple of sound buttons that
mute and unmute audio that is playing from your library. The tutorial is meant as a starting point for new Flash users
who want to integrate sound into their projects and want to give their users a little needed control of the audio. New
Flashers can extend this tutorial by flipping to the Livedocs at Adobe's site and looking over the Sound object. You can take a user's experience to
a whole new level with audio manipulation via balance, fade, volume and even dynamic control. I recommend even browsing
the Microphone object to look into ways to
create a visual experience that feeds on sounds fed into the user's computer (much like many of us are doing with the
Camera object for video controls).
Pepsi's Japan division has a simplistic time waster of a game up for your afternoon enjoyment. The game allows you to
run down a path punching walls of ice to the sounds of the usual viral music. Unfortunately I'm not exactly sure what
Pepsi Nex is supposed to taste like (I'd assume nastiness in a bottle, since its Pepsi), but the game is a great way to
waste a few minutes after lunch. Plus this is a great example of a Flash game that doesn't use stereotypical Flash
style. The game relies on the On2 video codec to display most of its animation with integrated video for a running
player and a bursting wall.
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