Make Those SWFs Smaller

I always thought that Flash compression was amazing and it is, but you can compress those SWF files further with Eltimer's Flash Optimizer. The Mac OSX utility program claims to compress SWF files to 80% of their original size. At $99, it might be worth looking into for anyone publishing dense content.

Beginner's Guide to ActionScript 3.0

At FlashDen.net, there's a new video series by Doug Winnie titled Beginner's Guide to ActionScript 3.0, which are hosted at tv.adobe.com. It's pretty amazing to me that anyone is producing video's of this, since ActionScript 3 has been around for so long now. I guess there's still a lot of ActionScript 2 development going on out there.

Enjoy.

Nice AS3 Tweening Tutorial

Kirupa has posted a nice tutorial on ActionScript tweening.

Migrating to ActionScript 3.0

Oh, snap! That was my reaction to Dan Carr's article on the Adobe Developer Center about migrating to ActionScript 3.0 in Flash CS3. I've been keeping up with AS3 since the public release of the Flash 9 Beta. Yes, I'm sure the code is better, more compliant, and all that, but - to be brutally honest - there are things in AS2 that are still sinking in for me. I feel like I've just reached a pinnacle with that knowledge and now it's totally changing, again.

Making the transition from AS1 to AS2 took a while, but I think moving on to AS3 is going to be tough. There are some pretty significant changes, some of which I like and others I don't. For example, properties no longer require the underscore character. So I can target the alpha of a movie clip with alpha, not _alpha. That's pretty cool. What's weird though is that you specify the alpha value with a decimal value, not a percentage. So if I want the clip to appear at 50%, I use .5. Same is true for Xscale and Yscale.

Event handlers are differnt, loading external XML files has been changed, movie clip syntax and instance names are different. There's just a whole lot to get used to. Oh, well. Hopefully somebody will write a great book to make the process easy to learn.

First Look at Flash CS3

Flash Magazine has a First Look at Flash CS3 article. Flash's native support for Illustrator and Photoshop is going to be huge for me. I hardly every create original stuff in Flash, unless it's very simple. That will change now with Flash's pen tool taking on Illustrator's. The ActionScript window got some upgrades too. Sweeeeet!

Flash Performance Tips

Big Spaceship offers more tips for better Flash performance. Some of these are obvious and others are genius. Check them out here.

Hope for Flash

In the latest issue of ALA (A List Apart), Dan Mall talks about Flash and where it fits in with the web standards movement. Unfortunately, Flash has seen it's share of criticism and backlashes. But other technologies that have received similar tirades are now coming back, notably JavaScript, which has seen its second coming with Ajax and other technologies. Mall seems to think that Flash is beginning to get similar attention.

Whenever I hear someone from Adobe talk about Flash, [like at the recent Boston InDesign User Group meeting] they always harp on the fact that it can do video. That's only one aspect and when done well, sure, it's really beautiful. But Flash is so much more than just a viable video solution. Fully interactive environments and sites have been created that extol its benefits clearly, much too much to mention here. [See theFWA for more examples.]

I think the hybrid approach that Mall mentions is an interesting, though not unique, concept. Although the example given is pretty cliche, it does show some of Flash's power to talk to other languages and receive information from them. So don't throw Flash aside because it's not Web 2.0.