Simple XML Gallery

I posted a Simple XML Gallery to FlashDen: http://www.flashden.net/item/strongsimplestrong-strongxmlstrong-gallery/34538. Cool app that is very easy to customize. There is adequate documentation for the gallery.

It features preloaders for the images being loaded and hidden next/previous buttons that appear when you hover over the right/left side of the stage.

Against AS3

Colin Moock, author of Essential ActionScript 3.0, makes excellent arguments surrounding the difficulty for typical Flashers to get used to the new adaptations in the mindset of AS3 as compared to AS2. I heartily agree with all of his arguments, especially from the standpoint of teaching Flash. It is more difficult to teach ActionScript now because of the inherent hurdle of teaching programming terms and skills. It was so easy to tell a button to gotoAndPlay something before, and now I have to explain what event listeners are and why we need to construct them, etc.

It's also impossible (well, at least I think it is) to teach ActionScript the old way - by having students chunk together portions of code from the AS library in the ActionScript panel. It's too laborious to put together any code, even with Script Assist. I now have to approach AS3 like I do with HTML - which leaves the students dependent on code examples and pre-written samples that work without error.

The comment that Adobe has abandoned it's former user base is not that far off the mark. I was completely confident in my AS2 abilities and by the time Flash CS3 came around, I was able to put together just about anything. I have to admit, that when it came to AS3, I struggled with it. Some of it looked familiar and the more I did it, the better I understood, but having to deal with a class-based system and not a timeline-based language seemed a pretty far jump to me.

Having gone through Moock's book, I thought I had a good handle on it - but it still feels very foreign to me - probably because I am not a traditional programmer. I don't know C, or C++, or even JAVA. The only language that I was truly comfortable with was AS. It's hard to say that I didn't feel alienated by Adobe when AS3 came out or that I feel behind the ball this time.

What makes things more complicated is Flex. When we had a single authoring tool, it made it easy to see what needed to be done to get something working. Now it seems like I have to make a decision about what tool to use for what situation. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. Add on top of that MXML - yet another language that you need to know for Flex.

All of this makes pure animation and video very attractive to me right now. I enjoy designing and creating things. I shouldn't have to read 500+ page manuals to have to put together an interactive environment.

Flash CS4 Sneak Peek

Flash Magazine has posted some pics and details on the new Flash CS4 interface and features, revealed at a conference in Sydney. The new interface features a larger properties inspector that sits on the right dock and not at the bottom anymore. The rationale? More space for more access to parameters.

Also new is the timeline, which now allows you to control object in the Z-depth. The new IK (inverse Kinematics) option looks fantastic and I can't wait to try it. In general, new 3D features will be awesome to play with in this release.

Adobe has joined forces with Google and Yahoo to make Flash content more searchable. Nothing will need to be done by the developer community in order to 'optimize' Flash files for search, according to Google. Text, links, and other interactive elements will now be indexed by the popular search engines.

Macromedia had made great efforts in this area with the aid of Jakob Nielsen's group, but met with skepticism by the developer community. Since acquiring Macromedia, Adobe has made a continual effort to enhance Flash and this step - probably more so than any other feature request - will bring Flash and Flex to the forefront in the development community again. Without the problem of indexing and searchability, Flash will become more useful, especially to those with a focus on SEO.

Flash CS3 Preloader

There's a new article about creating a Flash Preloader in CS3 on the Adobe Developer Center by Jamie Kosoy of Big Spaceship.

MailForm Component for Flash CS3

Flep Studio has developed an MXP component for flash called MailForm. The component works with a PHP file, which must be present on the server for it to work. The setup seems reasonably simple.

Flash Player Penetration

Flash Player 9 has reached 91.2% penetration, according to Adobe. This data comes out a year later after its release. What I'm curious about is what developers are actually doing. Are they developing AS2 files for Flash Player 9 or AS3 files?

Preloading in Flash CS3: Addendum

OK, I don't speak Italian, but Flep does. Not only does he speak Italian, but he speaks AS3. Thanks to his post: Preloader for Beginners, I finally found a really good solution for preloading. The only thing I wish it had was a progress bar. Great stuff Flep.

Preloading in Flash CS3

You'd think that something as important and standard as a preloader would be simple in the latest version of Flash. Not only is preloading pretty much undocumented - probably because there are so many ways to do it - the information both in books and on the internet is fairly sparse. So far, I've found at least four different techniques and none of them to my liking.

What's even more daunting is to find out how it's implemented - with classes. Now I've been using Flash since version 2 and I'm pretty fluent in AS 2.0, but this whole business about classes in CS3, although it's slowly sinking in, is a bit much. Instead of a few lines of code, now I need a whole separate .as file as a document class for my Flash file?!? Try teaching that to first time Flash users!

Anyhow, I thought I'd share what I found, so you could pass it along. First there's this post over at BIT-101 entitled: Preloaders in AS3. For something a little more straightforward, you can try Koen De Weggheleire's solution, which doesn't require a class, but isn't all that flexible either: Preloader in Flash CS3 - Actionscript 3.0 way. Weggheleire follows up with another tutorial on a different technique, this time with a class: More About Preloading in Flash CS3. This approach is promising and easy to tweak. Finally, there's ProgressBar Component of Flash CS3, by Flep. This technique utilizes the Progress Bar Component included in Flash CS3.

Actually, preloading has never been an exact science and everybody has different approaches to the whole thing. I just think Adobe could've implemented it better in this release.

AS3 reference

I'm tackling AS3 now and it's been slow going. Finding good information about it on the Adobe website is frustrating. I did stumble on this today and I thought I'd share it with you. It's an 800 page AS3 reference by Adobe - go figure.

Article at Layers Magazine

I've been published! My first article/tutorial was published by Layers Magazine. It's about using Flash and Illustrator together with dynamic text. Getting Dynamic with Illustrator and Flash.

Kuler for Flash CS3

Kuler has been around for a while now and I really like it's implementation across the new creative suite. Now you can download a Kuler panel for Flash CS3. Select a palette and it draws it onto the stage for you.

http://pixelfumes.blogspot.com/2007/06/flash-cs3-kuler-panel-updates.html

Flash Install Issues

I downloaded the Flash CS3 trial last week, I couldn't wait for the real software to be shipped to me. So when I finally got the full version, (for PC) it came on a DVD. The PC that I have at work doesn't have a CD. So I burned the contents of the DVD onto a CD and tried running the installation. It wouldn't work. Every time I launched the installer, I got a progress bar and then it would disappear and nothing else would happen.

So I called Adobe - I've never had a problem with an installation before - and the support person told me to boot in safe mode and try to uninstall the trial version. Every time I tried that, my machine crashed. Piece of crap. He then pointed me to a script that's available on the support site that eliminates any CS3 trial software. http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cs3clean.html

At first, the link above gave me a not found error. The next day, I found and ran the script and then tried the installer again. No luck. So I figured I'd try to run the installer from the trial and then just input the serial number. I tried that and it still didn't work.

After a few reboots, I ran the clean script again. This time, it ran much slower and gave more detailed information about what it was removing. Once again, I launched the installer from the trial download and this time it finally worked.

Wacky.

Getting used to AS 3.0

So I downloaded the trial version of Flash CS3 (finally, thanks to Adobe. The new welcome screen allows you to create a couple of different document types, one is Flash Document AS 2.0 and the other is Flash Document AS 3.0. The difference between AS 2 & 3 is huge, so I'm tearing all over the web to look for good resources.

Senocular has an article called Getting Started with ActionScript 3.0 in Adobe Flash CS3. One of the changes, for example, is the fact that you can no longer put scripts on objects, i.e. buttons, movie clips. All of the scripts you write have to be in the timeline only!?!

Event handling is so different now. In AS 2.0 you could easily write an onClipEvent script for a MovieClip or an on (release) event on a button to get things going. No longer. The method is completely different.

There are other big changes too, so check out the article.

Active Content Conflagaration

I downloaded and installed Flash CS3 today. It took nearly 2 hours to do both. The installation (on a Dell with WinXP, sadly) took what seemed like forever. The install included the Flash Video Encoder and a few other things. I noticed that Bridge gets installed too, even though the installer doesn't tell you that.

There's a lot to squawk about with this new release and in coming posts I'll talk specifically about them. There are still features that I wish Flash did have, but again that's another post.

As we Flashers know what a pain in the butt it has been to publish our movies with the Active Content template that was released shortly after Microsoft changed the way Internet Explorer intercepted active media elements - for security reasons. CS3 addresses this issue:

By default, the Publish command creates a Flash SWF file, an HTML document that inserts your Flash content in a browser window, and a JavaScript file labeled AC_OETags.js that lets your SWF file play automatically in active content-compliant browsers. The Publish command also creates and copies detection files for Macromedia Flash 4 from Adobe and later. If you change publish settings, Flash saves the changes with the document. After you create a publish profile, export it to use in other documents, or for others working on the same project to use.

Although this is a solution, you'll still need to put that .js file everywhere you have SWF's on your server. So it's a solution, but the real problem is with IE, or so it seems.

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!