Category: Flash

Have you been nice to a programmer you know? If not, you may be in trouble. I’ve made an extreme effort to be nice, courteous, and respectful to all of the programmers I’ve met in online mailing lists and forums in helping them with Flash. Anytime I had a hardcore programming question, they were more than willing to help me out.

Now that Flash Pro has landed, people like me need a lot of questions answered to get over the initial programming hurdles before I can make serious progress on my own. Thankfully, I’ve picked up a few good online friends to help out, and other aquaintances.

I just hope others are in my boat. It’s nice having all of these smart people around now to ask questions, who, for the past year and a half, I was ansering theirs. When the tables are turned, it’s still cool, ya know?

I’m frustrated. Wanna know why? How would you like if those people who bitched an wined about how Flash sux were on a forumn that only THEY were on, ALL day. Then, people like Mike Chambers read that forumn, and made the assumption that this was the voice of the community, and they actually modified Flash to suit those “supposed” community needs. Wouldn’t ever happen, right?

Well, it’s happening with Star Wars Galaxies right now. Somehow, the forumns that station.sony.com hosts appear to be the main customer feedback area. Not only that, but they are communist-like controlled in that some posts are deleted, and a lot of them ignored by the devs.

The game was released with a lot of bugs and things didn’t work, but it was, and still is fun as hell. However, they keep changing things, and only fixing 1 or 2 bugs each change (about every 3 days). The game is not what it was 2 months ago.

The people on the forumns are rude a-holes, negative, and frustrated with no way other than the forums to funnel their frustration towards SOE, the company making the game. Out of the hundreds of people I’ve met online and played with, I’ve only met 2 who were “slightly” annoying, and even then, I’d still play with them. No one acts like they do in the forumns. I don’t like them being my representatives, but the forums suck usability wise, and customer relation wise.

Over the course of 2 years, I’ve seen Macromedia people get involved in all walks of life to understand their customer’s needs. I’ve seen the results of people’s inquires, suggestions, and frustations. I’ve seen Macromedia improve their products. By giving us people to talk to, and “inside” channels of information, Flash (yes, and ColdFusion, and all the others) has given us such a great community of people and a phat product.

You don’t appreciate someone until you realize how valuable they are when you don’t have them.

Thanks guys and gals! I think I speak for the Flash community, and the MM community as a whole when I say thank you, you are appreciated!

In the creation of behaviors for yourself and others (many developers use them to prevent writing the same shiot over and over again) as well as empowering designers to not have to code, I’ve noticed something interesting.

Because your creating code that is placed ON an object, you revert to the on(press) and onClipEvent(load) mentality of Flash 5.

I think with onClipEvent(load) and a little Flash 6 mojo, you could still get away with some pretty clean coding for behavior creation. Since behavior creation is, in itself, not technically coding but the actual creation of code underneath, you can get away with a lot of bad things because the complexity of the app will not get too high (assuming your not doing crazy shiot with your behaviors).

Therefore, what are people using for best practices in the code they use for them? (I know it’s early in the game, but at least we can look back on this).

Can’t remember the product, Swish or something, but I remember a lot of people loved it because they could use it to take custom text and generate a banner for their site. I think a lot of people will be blown away at what timeline effects will do to not only that market, but the people who want to create timeline effects in general.

With the multitude of options in generating parameters for such animations, Flash animation, for specific effects, can get fairly automated pretty quickly almost akinning it to filters in other programs. You have your object your applying the filter too, the interface which you provide to adjust the fitler parameters (which offers the options of XML or Flash for the interface, better than Fireworks, baby!), and if coded correctly, you end up with a non-destructive effect all encapsulated in a graphic symbol (or movie clip, but I’m assumign graphic for the sake of this discussion).

Anyway, for people like me who love to empower designers and those “design challenged”, this is just extremely phat.