IMBRAT’Z MULTIMEDIA

From Adrien-Luc Sanders

My End Result

Did you take on the challenge? I did, in an attempt to improve and upgrade the basic application that I created as an example. What I came up with was a paint application with the following features:

# Multiple skin colors to personalize the interface.
# The option to change the base canvas color.
# Two different working layers.
# A removable guide grid.
# Standard brush with user-set size, opacity, and color.
# Opacity and brush size settings that can be entered manually or set using a slider.
# Both a basic and advanced color palette, as well as the option to enter custom hex values for colors.
# A solid fill line tool with opacity, color, and thickness controls.
# A solid fill ellipse tool with opacity and color controls.
# A solid fill rectangle tool with opacity and color controls.
# A gradient rectangle tool with opacity and color controls for both starting and ending colors, as well as angle settings to control the gradient direction.
# A text tool that allows color changes, size changes, bold, and italics.
# A “clear layer” option that only deletes the contents of the current active layer, leaving the rest of the drawing intact.
# Custom cursors based on the tool used, which reflect the color and opacity chosen in certain instances while reverting to the basic mouse cursor when certain windows are active or when selecting tools.
# Menu button highlights to mark which tool is currently selected.
# A tabbed help content menu explaining each tool.

As you can see, it’s a bit more complex than the original version.
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Some of the functions that I used are:

# swapDepths;
# setRGB;
# setTransform;
# The Flash Drawing API tools, including lineTo, moveTo, curveTo, beginFill, and beginGradientFill;
# createEmptyMovieClip;
# Dynamic and Input text fields
# ; Dynamic text properties;
# Listeners;
# _visible;
# Mouse.hide( ) and Mouse.show( ) ;
# A huge mess of onClipEvents; and,
# An even bigger stack of if statements.

The great thing about using Flash for an application like this is that it’s very easy to share with others so that they can install it on their website. All they have to do is download the file, then upload it to their own server and embed the proper code into their web page:

    <!–SkinsSkinsLayer:HEXADECIMAL000000Select a ToolColorBrush Size2Opacity100Gradient OptionsColor 1 Alpha0000FF100Color 2 AlphaFF0000100Angle (0-360)0Text OptionsGradient Options12–><OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" WIDTH="800" HEIGHT="600" id="oekakiv1.1" ALIGN="">
    <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourfolder/oekakiv1.1.swf"> <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high> <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#000000>
    <EMBED src="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourfolder/oekakiv1.1.swf" quality=high bgcolor=#000000 WIDTH="800" HEIGHT="600" NAME="oekakiv1.1" ALIGN="" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></EMBED>
    </OBJECT>

The only edits needed are to replace "www.yourdomain.com" with the URL of your website, and replace "yourfolder" with the name of the folder that you uploaded the swf file into.

Now that the initial challenge is over, the real challenge will begin: deconstructing the entire application, one tool at a time, to explain in detail how each was created and explore the Flash Drawing API. Watch this page and this site in the coming weeks for each new lesson. Or, if you just want to play around, go have a little fun and draw!

5-6 years ago there was the phenomena of "Flashmania" all over the web. Big corporate names, especially in the car industry, were all going for full Flash websites. But where have they all gone ? It looks like most of these companies are now back to the old HTML way of doing things. What happened ? Well it looks like things have just been put into place.

HTML : quick end efficient delivery of information

Most developers and designers will now agree that if the key objective is to deliver information quickly and effectively to a wide audience then HTML is the way to go.

When you are looking for the address of the nearest take-away in your area, you are not really ready to wait for that 5 minute Flash intro to end, you want the information here and now. To an extent you don’t even need any graphics at all. You would be perfectly happy with the phone number written in huge ugly bold "Times New Roman" on a white background.

If your website is regularly updated with new content that needs to be searchable, copied and pasted, crawlable by the search engines and easily viewable in a standard way then you should use HTML without any remorse.

Flash : the multimedia experience

Flash should be used wherever the user is ready and happy to experience a multimedia experience.

Unlike HTML, Flash is a tool that gives a lot of freedom during the creative process : the layout doesn’t need to fit into grids as with tables or CSS, sound can be easily incorporated in a Flash animation without having to worry about browser compatibility and big animations can be streamed so no need to wait for it to have fully downloaded before watching it.

The downside to this freedom of creation is that it might require some patience to learn to interact with the navigation system of a particular Flash website. A Flash application or website is a world of its own so you need to learn to converse with it. If you make the effort to get into the spirit of the Flash application, or intro, and learn to interact with it, you will be rewarded as it will sometimes unveil some hidden treasures.

In a way we can say that Flash will more likely direct the user in a multidimensional surfing experience with a richer interactive environment. Flash websites will impress your senses and stimulate your imagination, it will lead you along the exciting path of the multimedia experience.

The right tool for the right job

At the end it looks like the debate of Flash vs HTML has eased down and that there is no real conflict here. Flash has evolved to a very mature level. Actionscript especially has been evolving rapidly in the recent years. Flash is not only just a "web" tool anymore. Flash is the best choice to create multimedia interactivities, interactive presentations, activities for the e-learning industry and web games. Although it can still be a valid choice to create a full website I will personally still choose HTML when it comes to delivering information quickly and painlessly to the end user.

Calwen
flashvalley.com

Flash CS3 is out and Actionscript 3.0 is on its way to your screen, well it’s not a really a big surprise, Flash 9 and Flex have been available in their alpha and beta version for a while before their official releases and many flash developers had the opportunity to get their hands dirty with Actionscript 3.0.

I must confess that I have never been a big fan of Flex, the main reason being that I consider that it’s been developed only to attract more developers to the flash community. Also, like a lot of Flash developers, I could not find one good reason to learn Flex therefore I waited for the release of Flash CS3 to give it a go and see what Actionscript 3.0 was all about.

I have been surfing the Flash wave since Flash 4 and I have been waiting for every new version of Flash with excitement. Flash 5, especially, was a big improvement. For those of use who tried to program their fist game or application in Flash 4 the new version of Actionscript was very exciting, we could do a lot more without loosing too much hair. With each new version of Flash it’s been very clear than the development team was trying to enrich the actionscript syntax and to bring it in line with the ECMAScript standard (Javascript, JSscript).

With the release of Flash MX 2004 Actionscript 2.0 was born and it was the first big improvement for Flash developers coming from a development background. I remember the "woohoo" and "wow" of one of my colleague at work who was coming from a C++ and strict OOP background, he was obviously getting very excited that Flash was making a move in his direction. For designers who struggled long enough to grasp the concepts of Actionscript 1.0 this wasn’t so much of a good reason to jump up and down. For me, well since Flash is my main tool and "bread provider" I have always tried to stay up to date with the latest developments coming with each new version and the time has come to see what’s in stock for us in the Actionscript 3.0 box.

A new version of Actionscript?

Actionscript 3.0 is a not strictly a totally new version of Actionscript, you can still write "frame based" code and the dot syntax you are familiar with is still there.

Actionscript 3.0 is now a powerful, object-oriented programming language. AS3.0 revolves around objects, classes, properties and methods. Actionscript 3.0 is more strictly Object Oriented than the previous versions of Actionscript, in some cases you are going to have to write more code to achieve results that would have required less code in AS2.0. So you might be wondering why would you bother writing more code to achieve the same result? Well the first important thing is that AS3.0 is supposed to be 10 time faster than AS2.0.

Many exciting classes and methods have been added to AS3.0, amongst many of them I am going to mention the frameRate method of the Stage class that let you set the frame rate of your movie dynamically, a long time dream for many Flash developer If you ever wanted to be able to create your own sound spectrum Winamp style well it is out there with the computeSpectrum method. Also a lot of older methods like getURL, loadMovie, onClipEvent, have been replaced with newer methods, some other methods and properties like removeMovieClip, _global, attachMovie have just been removed.

3 good reasons to learn Actionscript 3.0

It is never easy to change our long time habits. It is somehow painful to have to destroy what we’ve been patiently building but if we can realize that it is for the best things are not that difficult. So let me show you why you should start learning Actionscript 3.0

1. I guess that if you are a professional Flash developer you don’t want to be left behind, also you might have to start on the AS3.0 project of another developer and you don’t want to have to run away screaming because you haven’t done your homework.

2. Actionscript 3.0 has been optimized for speed with the introduction of the Sprite class and the Display list. Speed is important as soon as your application starts growing, also if you are a Flash game developer Actionscript 3.0 will give you the opportunity to develop even faster games.

3. Actionscript 3.0 introduces many new beneficial improvements:
New event handling system, there is now a single event handling system instead of the many different event-handling mechanisms that existed in previous versions of the actionscript.
ActionScript 3.0 includes a group of classes based on the ECMAScript for XML (E4X) specification. These classes include powerful and easy-to-use functionality for working with XML data. Working with XML is a lot easier now in Actionscript 3.0 than it was in Actionscript 2.0.
ActionScript 3.0 includes native support for regular expressions so that you can quickly search for and manipulate strings. ActionScript 3.0 implements support for regular expressions.
A new system called the "Display list" has been introduced to handle the visual elements on the stage. Depth management is now automatic and built into Flash Player, rendering assignment of depth numbers unnecessary.
Actionscript 3.0 brings many more features that I am not mentioning here but that I will approach in a serie of tutorials, make sure to come and check them out.