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.
...so get some help! And help others while you're there too!
Programming is Hard is a code snippet repository that covers a number of useful languages, including Actionscript. FriedGeek's post with AS shortcuts is a great tip to know and there's plenty of other good info here. Grab what you need and leave a snippet or two of your own!
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!
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.
Sean Moore over at the eponymously named ActionScriptCheatSheet.com has put together some great single page cheat sheets for ActionScript. Currently, he's posting sheets for AS3 (so far, he's posted sheets for Top Level Classes, Packages and the Display Package), but there's an older AS2 sheet as well if you're still not on the beta bandwagon.
Download 'em and print 'em! And keep 'em close by! And don't forget to send a note to Sean and tell him thanks!
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.
I'll warn you that this is a ~20MB ZIP file download. Jay is offering
tutorial files as well as the Quicktime movie of the tutorial which is almost 50 MBs (somebody get that guy a copy of
Captivate!), so...
You'll also note that Jay is using the older "FlashObject" which Stearns has
renamed the "SWFObject" for reasons explained here.
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.
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).
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.
We usually concerned with Flash as a means of
creating interactive, multimedia pieces for use on a personal computer, but Chris Georgenes reminds us that Flash can
be used for a lot more. Check out his article, "Migrating Flash Projects to
Video" on the Flash Dev Center site. He
has some great tips on taking your Flash movies to DVD and broadcast TV. I especially like the nod to Flashants' SWF2Video. A couple of years ago, I
had to reanimate pieces in AfterEffects for DVD menu backgrounds that I'd mocked up using coded animation in Flash
because I couldn't figure out how to output the dynamic Flash movie to video. More recently, I've seen GeoVid's Flash to Video Encoder at work and
been pleased with it, but I'm definitely going to check out SWF2Video now too!
When I think of dynamic websites, I'm usually thinking about data-driven
sites that have customized information. Mike Madaio over at Digital Web Magazine
has started to think beyond the data to the design too. After all, not all monitors are created equal; there are lots
of wacky aspect ratios hitting the market. Mike uses a really elegant combination of JavaScript and CSS to take care of
the problem. Check out his tutorial here and design your site for screens of all sizes!
John Dowdell just posted
about the official Flash Player for Intel based Macs. You can download the updated player to bring yourself up to a
version that doesn't require Rosetta to run and fixes the latest security issue. Current issues with this player
include a strange issue where Flash will only recognize the default iSight camera. Also this is a universal binary that
included the latest Flash Player for Power-PC based Macs. Installation is reletively painless with only four steps.
Back in art school, one of my first Digital Media
classes (they teach art using digital media as you medium, yay weird web art) required me to buy a certain Flash
5 book by a Mr. Hillman Curtis. Unfortunately the book was extremely useful as an art reference, but next to useless
as a Flash reference. It did inspire me while creating a few projects this year, so when Jan Kabili emailed
me about an interview by Inside Mac of Curtis that was online I found myself needing to tell you to check it out.
Curtis is known for experimental and commercial Flash based design going back for a number of years and currently he is
working on a new video project. Feel free to download the interview for yourself and check out the main Hillman Curtis site for some inspiration of your own. Link goes to iTunes
download of interview.
In case you're like me and stuck no where near
Seattle this week, but wish you could learn more about integration from Photoshop and Flash, Jack Nack has a few good links for your. Jack's
buddy Michael Ninness compiled a set of tutorials and even gave a talk at FlashForward this week about the best ways to
combine our two favorite pursuits. I only wonder if this means animated cartoons showing off the perfectly toned body
attached to someone else's head... Back to the subject at hand though. Start your tutorials with one describing how to
adjust
your beloved Photoshop away from its print/camera roots and closer to your web needs. Then check out the rest at
the link.
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. 
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 
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 
NewsForge wrote up a quite PHP tutorial for displaying charts using the 
We usually concerned with Flash as a means of
creating interactive, multimedia pieces for use on a personal computer, but Chris Georgenes reminds us that Flash can
be used for a lot more. Check out his article, "
Back in art school, one of my first Digital Media
classes (they teach art using digital media as you medium, yay weird web art) required me to buy a certain 
In case you're like me and stuck no where near
Seattle this week, but wish you could learn more about integration from Photoshop and Flash, 
