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!
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!
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!
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.
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).
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!
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.
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?
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).
OK, that
subject line was just too easy, but I couldn't resist. It doesn't do justice to this site though. I don't know anything
about the band Less, but their site is really well-designed. I love the combination of the
2-D Flash animation with the stop-motion origami stuff (I have a soft spot in my heart for stop-motion animation...from
Rankin-Bass to Brothers Quay). Might have to listen the music
now...
Just got a Monk-e-Mail from a friend! Of course, I couldn't resist sending
one back...and maybe to a few other friends, too...
CareerBuilder.com has taken their monkey-themed advertising campaign (which I
find amusing) to the web with this Flash application. You can build your own Monk-e-Mail and send it to all of your friends too! You might want
to wait till Friday for this though...may be too disruptive for your workday otherwise as Monk-e-Mails fly about the office.
On a slightly
different note, has anyone noticed how popular text-to-speech applications have become in the last few months!
Following off of my post yesterday about Jumpcut, I'll throw this one out there too. Chevrolet has a Flash site in support of the new Chevy Tahoe where
you can make your own commercial and save it on their site. Similar idea to Jumpcut if not as full-featured...and of
course, Chevy is supplying most of the content... You can start to see a convergence of ideas around how Flash can be
used on the web. I think the word about the "Flash Platform" is starting to sink in...
It's
interesting how folks are already subverting the Chevy application. Check out the videos: C.I.C.L.E.'s here
and Rocketboom's here.
This is very
cool! Video editing on the web, complete with effects and transitions, in a Flash-based application! Jumpcut is taking the services provided by Google Video and YouTube up a
notch by giving users the tools to create as well as the tools to post and share. You can even remix a video
you find there and repost it. And its all written in Flash! So we have the wedding of Flash as a tool for interactive
environments with Flash as a tool for content delivery (video).
Really great stuff! Check out my current
favorite video up on Jumpcut here. Definitely some future internet stars
here!
Clive
Whitear over at Adobe Consulting's Work in Progress
blog just posted a really nice Transition and Tween Explorer. Not the prettiest app you'll ever see, but really
functional. Great way to learn some Actionscripting as well if you're new to the whole coding aspect of things. Have
fun playing with the effects, then cut and paste the code into your own files! Download the files
here!
Adobe should build this into future Flash UIs, similar to the filter explorer in Photoshop.
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 
The 
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 
