Friends of ED has been releasing competently compiled web design books made with collaboration from some of the best for quite a few years now and when they offered a few books to the Flash Insider team to read I jumped at the chance. The first book I cracked open was the latest in their Essentials series, Flash 8 Essentials. The Essentials books are meant to grab current and future web designers and give them a quick dip into the latest web design software. This book was written a quick guide to Flash 8 and includes enough tutorial and code to get most designers and developers up to speed. The writing style of this book is similar to a motivational seminar on Flash. This helps the reader become extremely excited about the new version and can make you feel like you can do everything in the book.

Flash 8 Essentials has six authors, but the reader will not notice a definite change from one chapter to the next. Each author has already made a name for himself in the Flash design and development world. Two of the authors have already written a few books on this subject and one helped to create the current Developer Certification Exam.

read the rest of the review after the jump

Finally someone has taken our advice and started displaying premium content via Flash video with embedded ads. As I have said in this space before, content providers need only create Flash based video content to distribute their stuff to viewers and then they can grab the largest online viewing audience of any video app. Larger than Windows Media Player, larger than Quicktime, larger than all other video types.

ABC has created and released a new Flash based video player for four of its shows that embeds video with non-skippable ad content from AT&T. Users can choose from four differenct shows (Desperate Housewives, Lost, Commander and Chief, and Alias) and view content in each with sponsor advertisments within.

Screenshots and more after the jump.

Friday You Tube released a new player face for its video. They are incouraging users to check out the new player and tell them what they think. I like the player more than the older one, but its not as 'pretty.' You Tube added needed features including a scroller that can be easily selected and moved to jump through the playing video, a volume control, and a time stamp. Improvements I would like to see include the release of an API so developers can embed You videos in their projects and even adjust the player to add of remove functionality. Plus I would like to skin the player with various colors and designs. They could even use an API to promote the site to content providers for targetted use on sites. Maybe E! could start embedding E! content with custom skins and active dynamic Flash content.

The video played at the link below is from Bruce Springsteen's set at Jazz Fest in New Orleans this past weekend.

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.

So today has just been filled with toon related posts, hasn't it? In January, Scott Kurtz started a new animated venture called PVP Alive. The short Flash-based animations were meant to bring PVP into a fully animated funny future, but no new releases have come out since mid-January (for many reasons I'm sure). So head over to the PVP Alive page, watch and laugh. The toons show how a still artist can easily use Flash to jump into motion and sound. Of course the work isn't at the same level as Homestarrunner.com, but it is a good start. Hopefully some Flasher traffic will incourage Kurtz to pump out some new animations.

The MacObserver directed me to a post at Creative Toolbox talking about a couple of new PDFs that have been posted to Adobe's Design Center (though I was unable to find the Adobe direct link, only the PDFs) that are showing designers how to easily switch from Freehand to Illustrator. This is more Macromedia/Adobe design than Flash, but the product came with my old Studio MX so here's some thoughts. Creative Toolbox sees this guide as a hint at a possible future product strategy for Adobe, specifically Freehand will be dropped for Illustrator leading to GoLive being dropped from Dreamweaver, and a possible drop of Fireworks for Photoshop. I say, Freehand has already been dropped. Macromedia stopped updating it after MX and didn't even include it in Studio 8. That is a much bigger hint than the guide, but I also don't think users will be encouraged to move to Illustrator. I think you guys should move to Flash. So of use already use it from design and move to Fireworks for larger stuff and move to Photoshop from print (I would go on to illustrator for ultra complex design for print and more, but I don't own it... yet) This guide is just an official version of something that is probably already found in regular non-Adobe/non-Macromedia user guides. Head over to the PDF link to read for yourself. But remember one day we will do all design in Flash, so you may want to figure out how to move from Freehand to Flash instead...

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).

No this isn't a boxing post, just a heads up to an animated short about a movie. Angry Alien Productions has been making 30 second versions of classic movies for quite a while. In July of last year they started premiering on the Starz network and then online. Their latest Brokeback parody is really hard to quick so I've decided to just pass on a link to the Rocky story as portrayed by bunnies in 30 seconds. Why watch a two hour epic when you can just jump into Flash?

via Table of Malcontents

The Cult of Mac decided earlier this week to ask people to donate money to a needy school so a classroom could purchase a new IMac to use for editing a class movie project. Pete Mortensen's idea drew me to the site Donors Choose. This site allows teachers to ask for donations to purchase specific things for use in the classroom. After searching through the site I found a teacher in Denham Springs, Louisiana who is trying to purchase Adobe's Web Bundle including Studio 8 to use in the classroom for a web based Nutrition project. The project will teach students about better nutrition and allow them to share their new found knowledge with others via the internet. The class includes students effected by both hurricane Katrina and Rita (storms that combined to devistate most of Louisiana last year). Please follow the link below to donate whatever you can to help purchase this software. Thanks.

Flash Insider would like to welcome our newest blog sibling to the fold. Blogging Stocks debuted today with the help of Weblogs, Inc and AOL. The site will include commentary on all things money and stocks. Unfortunately they haven't started checking into our personal favorite stock yet, but they have gotten the jump on Apple, Google, Walmart, and a few others. Head on over and check em out, but make sure you come back here for all the Flash you can handle.

Third Party Flash creation software Toon Boom released an update for Mac users earlier this month. The software is not official Universal or Intel and PowerPC Mac compatible. We talked about Toon Boom back when they won and Emmy last year and this just shows the software moving forward with its user base. As animators upgrade to the new Mactels they won't need to wait for the next version to run this package outside of Rosetta. I think this developement was achieved with the help of the Universal Flash Player that was released as a beta with Safari on the newer Macs. It will be interesting to see what other third party Flash offerings will beat the Adobe Flash Universal IDE to market in the coming months.

via Macworld

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.

via 4Games

Please don't shoot this puppy... Please... ugh. Well here's a quick and very dirty Flash game for your late night fun. The simple game is much like the Don't Click site but is way more annoying. Yes, I know I'm not really convincing you to check out the game... once you click over you may want to come back here and let me know what you really think. Feel free to drop me a tip to better game on the tips page.

via Waxy Links

Yahoo! Yippee! Etc! Yahoo has just released two new APIs for its mapping service. Web developers can use the new Yahoo Maps AJAX API and the Yahoo Maps Flash API to create their own Yahoo maps in any web-based (or just web connected) application. Now Neave will need to roll the Yahoo info into his Flash map. The API includes hooks for other live data from Yahoo sources like their trakkic tracker and more. Plus the Flash API comes in a Flex flavor for RIA developers looking to roll maps and live data into their applications. I would like to see this added to a live pizza ordering application that shows a highlighted delivery route and availability map that allows a user to click on their house and even draw out a map. Heck, while we're thinking of map drawing, let's create an interactive app that multiple users can log into at the same time and watch a leader draw a live route on the map (with notes) to give directions to a meeting (or something).

NewsForge wrote up a quite PHP tutorial for displaying charts using the PHP/SWF Chart package from Maani. They take a few W3Schools stats and generate some easy to use PHP code for quick insertion and even quicker modification for your site. The charting package they use is an alternative to Flex for interactive chart creation and is a good package for individual sites that may want to avoid a lot of code, but I think developers benefit from the use of these kind of packages to get started if they plan on a stop gap solution only. These packages are good for an easy site throw up, but Flash developers and even some regular coders should really take a long hard look into Flex before building a site around this solution. If you don't want to learn Flex or ActionScript then stick with this solution otherwise take the chance and jump into Flex.