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!
...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!
Who needs all those high-end sounds and graphics on proprietary gaming boxes?! Dragon Gamez hosts the Flash game "Stickman Madness" which proves you don't need hi-res to have a lot of fun.
Stickman Madness is as violent as any other first-person shooter in the vein of Doom, all done in minimal yet ravishing red, black and white. Somehow reminiscent of joys found in the early Frog in a Blender Flash animation...but interactive!
MDM Multimedia is celebrating its fourth birthday by hosting a Flash contest...actually TWO contests. They've set it up as a Designer Vs. Developer contest, but that's really not the case. It's really two different contests: one for designers and one for developers (a distinction that I've never really liked...I know that there has to be some division of duties in a business workflow, but the implication that a designer is the "creative" person and the developer is the "technical" person just doesn't sit right with me, nor has it ever been that clean-cut in my experience...end rant...).
The designer contest is for a marketing campaign and the developer contest is more application oriented. The new version of MDM's Zinc supports Flash Player 9, AS3 and Flex 2, so the idea that you didn't use for the Flex Derby would be a great fit here.
The prize packages top out around $1,000 worth of goodies, so take a look-see and show 'em your stuff!
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.
Registration for Adobe MAX 2006 opens today. This is the first post-merger MAX, so it should be a doozy!
They've also posted an agenda for the conference. Register today! and I'll see you all in Vegas! Registration Info (including pricing) Direct link to the Registration Form
Miltos Manetas has put together a nice time waster for your Monday afternoon. Create your own Jackson Pollock drip painting without all the mess at JacksonPollack.org. Great use of the Drawing API! I can't wait to show this to my 7-year-old...but I get to play with it for a while first...
Added Note (7.6.06): Seems the authorship of JacksonPollock.org is questionable. See the comment below for some background and Stamen's site for the original.
Yikes! Don't know what to make of this so soon after the merger but...
According to an Adobe press release dated yesterday, 15 June, Stephen Elop, former CEO of Macromedia and current President of Worldwide Field Operations, has resigned. There isn't really any more information than that except that Elop will remain on till 5 December....wonder if he'll make MAX?
What's the consensus on this? Adobe cleaning house? or does Elop have something else up his sleeve? Maybe he's going to join Jeremy Allaire at Brightcove?
Our sister site, Ad-Jab, blogged about this site yesterday. Brawney Academy is an advertising site for Georgia Pacific's Brawney Paper Towels. Under the auspices of a reality show, our host, "Brawney Man," leads eight manly men through some sort of outdoor sensitivity training. Only the first of what looks to be eight video episodes has been posted so far, but lots of other stuff to do on the site including your own training in manly sensitivity. If you work at it, you too could attain the Brawney Academy goal by becoming "[d]ependable and strong, but caring"...and thus, like the Brawney Man himself, "a literal human representation of the paper towel's qualities."
Not too sure about the whole reality series concept, but I like the site design. The combination of photo-realistic elements and retro graphics is worthy of a Disney Imagineer.
Save the date! October 23-26, 2006! Las Vegas, Nevada! MAX 2006!
This will be the first MAX since the merger. Adobe folks were present last year (remember the guys in the suits?) but couldn't really say too much since the merger had yet to close. This year, we'll get the full treatment: Adobe goodness on top of all that Macromedia richness. Sometimes MAX is a bit of a cheer-fest, preaching to the choir, but just having all those designers and developers in one place is always inspirational. So mark the date, keep checking the site, or sign up for the emails. More info will surely be coming soon!
Here's something to add a little laughter to your day...or a lot of laughter, depending on how you react to such things. So, just to play it safe, don't look at this in the middle of a meeting like John Dowdell did yesterday! Wait till you have a few minutes alone (or invite your closest cube-mates) and let it roll. Alan Becker did a great job updating the Harold and the Purple Crayon concept, infusing it with the frustration and angst that every Flash animator has experienced at one time or another. There's something really satisfying about seeing the Flash IDE under attack.
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).
To see what I'm talking about, try out the Philips Bodygroom at shaveeverywhere.com. Warning: The contents of this site are rated PG-13. Don't go if you find yourself easily offended. But for the use of innuendo in marketing, this site should win an award of some sort. AND its a really well-put-together Flash site. Nice use of video loops to keep things engaged. As a cyclist who shaves his legs, I watched this purely for informational purposes ;-) (cyclists are known to be a little gadget crazy)...but it gave me a chuckle or two to start off my week. And a good laugh is always a nice way to spend a Monday.
If you missed Flashforward 2006 Seattle and you can't wait till September's Flashforward 2006 Austin, get your Flash fix listening to Flashforward podcasts! A lot of great interviews with some really talented Flash folks: Jonathan Blank of Wildform, Andrew Wright of Smilebox, James Paterson of Presstube, Branden Hall of Automata Studios...just to name a few. So tune in, and get ready for Flashforward 2006 Austin!
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 
