Bill Napier Design

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.

Interested in FREE web design templates?

Well, I’m afraid you get what you pay for. A short trip to Google will reveal that. However, I stumbled across a interesting site this morning which offers templates for reasonable prices.

Template Monster offers WordPress, web design and PHP nuke templates. (The WordPress templates were mostly $50. Not bad.)

What interested me, of course, was the fact that I could become an affliate. That is, I could sell my templates to Template Monster and earn 20% commission.

Could be higher, but enough to get my attention …

Flash Creations a website by Helen Triolo is an online accompaniment to the Flash Animation class she teaches at Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC.

It covers ActionScript 2.0 basics and ActionScript Classes and is an excellent resource for anyone starting to learn Flash 8.

Helen also offers Flash samples and 1 month class file access for $20 (which I’m sure is much cheaper than taking her class.)

Google released its patented search formula March 2005. Read about the patent here.

Today, I was reading Lorelle VanFossen’s WordPress blog specifically her article title ‘Secret Out - How Google Ranks Websites.’

It has always been known that links to and from your site increase its ranking. But one other thing that the patent revealed was that the age of those links was also important. As links grow older, they are given less importance.

The age of the domain name also matters. If you have owned, ‘www.suchandsuch.com’ for 10 years and have consistently updated your pages and links, then your ranking is higher. Much higher in fact than a domain which is only a month or so old and has thousands and thousands of links associated with it.

Another tip Lorelle offers is that blogrolls could be considered by Google to be link spam. If Google recognizes that your blog and others are simply exchanging lists of urls, then they are considered spam.

Click through rate also increases your ranking. If your content is fresh and more people have recently clicked their way through your site your rating goes up. Makes sense, huh?

Jesse Warden, Flash/Flex component developer, questions why the upcoming Flash 9 uses ActionScript 3.0. Great questions …

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Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, said that the company had seen an “unprecedented demand” for its Mac line in the fourth quarter, selling 1.61 million Macs; the most ever in a single quarter. Apple will hold about 3% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2006, and that number could rise to 4% by the end of 2007

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Can you link to parts of embedded Flash? Yeah, you betcha.

Want to learn some techniques for linking to a particular frame or anchor?
Paul Robertson details how to deep link to Flash on his blog today.