Bill Napier Design

DMX Zone is now offering a Flash based HTML editor which allows you to write XHTML from any browser. Pretty cool.

Currently I’m designing a Flash location map (which may or may not be tied to an xml file.) One nice reference to the type of map I’m producing is available from the National Geographic site.

Its titled, “Discover Appalachia” and shows events a series of icons across the Appalachian region. These icons represent Cultural, Natural, Historical and Festival type events in the region.

The map is clean, simple and to the point. Just what the user is looking for. Nice.

Monoslideshow is an xml driven Flash app for photos and portfolios.

The really cool thing is that you can easily implement your photos into Monoslideshow without opening and changing things inside of the Flash IDE. (Well, that’s neat for people who either don’t own Flash or don’t require a customized portfolio viewer.)

I found the reference to Monoslideshow here.

From MXNA this morning I stumbled across this very cool Flash blog.

Tim Wilson, a young talented Flash developer from Austrailia, has done an excellent job of integreting a Word Press powered blog with Flash. He has Flash make a SQL request from a database via PHP and then post the results as blog entries. Flash also makes separate requests from the database for individual posts.

Chris Georgenes, a full-time Flash freelancer, has posted a great tutorial on animating characters in Flash. In this tutorial, Chris details how to take characters from sketches to vector drawings in Flash to “2.5D” (almost 3D, just not quite

For more on Chris Georgenes, check out his portfolio (www.mudbubble.com) or his blog (www.keyframer.com.) He is also a member of Team Macromedia.

Flash with video and sound at this point is still a little foreign to me. However, I thought I would mention putting an MP3 into Flash after reading a discussion on the Flashnewbie mailing list.

The Flash manual (as quoted by Helen Triolo) suggests that you can load an MP3 into your swf and set it to streaming.

//code from Helen
loadSound (Sound.loadSound method)
public loadSound(url:String, isStreaming:Boolean) : Void

//Loads an MP3 file into a Sound object. You can use the isStreaming
parameter to indicate whether the sound is an event or a streaming sound.

//Event sounds are completely loaded before they play. They are managed by
the ActionScript Sound class and respond to all methods and properties
of this class.

//Streaming sounds play while they are downloading. Playback begins when
sufficient data has been received to start the decompressor.

Jason Merrill, another list member, argued however that even though this method was documented as being streaming audio it was not true streaming audio. It was actually a progressive download. Meaning that audio was not played as it was downloaded. But rather it was loaded and then played. He noted that to in fact stream audio from Flash you needed a Flash media server in place. (The Flash media server is expensive and cost prohibitive to most designers/developers.)

Quit Living on Dreams, the company founded in 1999 by Ralf Bokelberg and based in Cologne, Germany is offering a series of ActionScript 3.0 lessons on its website.

If you are a Flash user and are interested in learning ActionScript to prepare for the release of Blaze (Flash 9) or if you use Flex 2, you might want to check out Mr. Bokelberg’s steps.

One of things that we are working on now is the concept of using an external xml file to plot points on a Flash map. Then, be able to alter the xml file which would show new points without ever opening the Flash IDE.

I wasn’t sure how to go about doing this exactly, so I posted the question to the Flash Newbie mailing list. Helen Triolo, of Flash Creations, quickly answered my question.

In her Easing Slider 5 example she shows how to do almost exactly what we are interested in doing.

She shows how to use the xml as the external data source (instead of placing it into the Flash file.) In addition, the xml places buttons with x and y coordinates and displays scrollable html text in a nearby textfield. With MovieClipLoader class she loads external jpg files which scroll to the appropriate pic onClick.

Simple, cool and to the point. Very nice.

There are some really cool web sites out there using Flash to create a better user experience.RIApedia, a Rich Internet Application blog by Mike Potter of Adobe developer relations noted yesterday.

Nike offers a better user experience. And because of the attention to design it leads to a higher check out statistics. More people buy more shoes or whatever.

Flex 2 offers developers that same capability. All applications (in this case web pages) run inside of the Flash 9 Player

One product which offers easy, out-of-the-box, Flex development is ZoomFlex by Straker. Click here to see an example of its storefront. They offer drag and drop capability which is a great plus and offers easier customer use.

Reading a post this morning courtesy of MXNA (formerly Macromedia’s .. now Adobe’s weblog RSS feed. And found an interesting post on the FlashApe site.

Now, OOP or Object Oriented Programing for Flash has been defined by Colin Moock and others including Joey Lott in this 2003 article on the O’Reilly Web Devcenter site. So I won’t try to go into the concept of using objects in Flash here … but I will say that even as a designer I can see how they could be useful.

However, the other side of the coin is that if you have to put too much work into creating objects and then re-using them in your code, you could fall behind and start to miss deadlines. After all the most important part of the project to the client is when will you provide and at what cost. They really don’t care how you do it.