Happy Tuesday everyone. Wanted to do a special shout out to Tom Green for getting a great tutorial ready for us to check out. I’ll talk about that a little bit later. In the meantime, however, I wanted to get a small rant that I have stuck inside of me out.

Things I Wish Flash Did Without An Programming Degree
When Flash originated, it was built to do animations and some interactivity for the web. There was a time that a good amount of designers could get out there and learn the innards of Flash, and in a relatively short amount of time produce a web project that did what they needed it to do. Those, IMO, were happy days. The Flash machine moves forward and the wishes for Flash increased, the language that underpinned everything it became more complex. In this complexity came a lot of redundancy and inefficiency, and the new Actionscript 3 came to make programming in Flash modular, efficient, and very extensible. One problem came with all of this.

Many designers that used Flash were left collectively scratching their heads as the design tool for the web was kidnapped and taken into the land of the Propellorheads.

Yes, Yes, I Heart AS3
Now, I agree that learning Actionscript 3 is a good thing. I agree that the evolution of the language can let you do cool things. But seriously.. try and find another application thats created such a rift between a set of users and I’ll buy you a coffee. I’m often put in a supportive/defensive position for the evolution of Flash, as the simplest of questions arise. Questions that I myself ask and wonder if the powers that be would ever address. Below are a few things I wish i saw a lot easier in the Flash world:

Preloaders – A necessary component for a Flash site, a preloader let’s you know how far along a SWF file is from completion. Preloaders vary from the straightforward 0-100% to cute whimsical animations that engage a user while the project loads. Why couldn’t this be something that could be built a lot easier in Flash? There are many things that you need to understand in order to understand Preloaders.. you would think Adobe would give you an easy way to say “Click this, adjust this, enter values for this, and save this as a library item. Bam, you have a preloader.” Not the case at all. Its the first thing you see on a site, and the first thing you’d probably build.. but you dont learn the tech of it until way later.

Flash Galleries - Yes Adobe Bridge comes with Flash galleries, complete with headers, scrollbars, and site information. Most of the galleries that come with the program are pretty bland. The obvious exception here being some of the stuff that Airtight Interactive did for Adobe. Those are cool.

I’ve always argued that the Flash gallery should do some basic things: Give people a set of thumbnails on a small area, with previous and next buttons. When you click on them, another portion of the window should load these with an effect. When you click on an info area, you should see some information – maybe even a link to a recorded WAV file. You should be able to then close that file and move to the next thumbnail. It doesn’t have to have a header/footer area. it doesnt need scrollbars. It needs to be a ‘headless’ component. Build it that way, and let me plop that SWF file into an existing Dreamweaver layout. Right now, places like Digicrafts make components that let you do this by referencing external XML files, so why couldnt Adobe jump in the fray and build a couple of kick butt components to do this as well?

Buttons and Actions- When designing something in Flash that’s web based, you’re invariably going to make a button that takes you from one Flash file to another flash file, or one scene to another scene. Why then is it important for me to understand listeners, events, instances, variables just to get a button to click to another scene. Surely you can drudge up the old behavior functionality that says “highlight this button, tell it where you want to go, save and publish” from somewhere. Yes, it’s nice if we learned the AS3 to be able to make this happen.. but come on.. at least admit that theres a bunch of people out there that wouldnt -want- to spend the time doing so, and that they’d like to believe that technology would help them do this one thing – technology that’s done it previously at that!

Heck, take that same behavior mentality and move it forward. Let me put a button on a stage that says “When I click this, run this section of frames (from frame label to frame label, THEN go to the following scene/swf file” Then people can actually use it to build an interactive site (At least a very basic one) and justify to themselves the spending of cash for the suite.

Some time ago, there was talk of a project called Bordeaux that would work on things such as this.. but that conversation faded as the new Flash Catalyst program started coming out. Flash Catalyst looks like an incredibly promising tool to build these kinds of experiences and the solution for my worries may be just to jump and move to the Flash Catalyst world. This is all in its early stages however, and only time will tell how this will all work out. I just thought it important to make mention that these are things that MANY people struggle with, and not many people voice. Kinda like that elephant in the room. Tons of people left out in the cold, and wanting some answers. Over the next couple of months, i’ll be spending some time working on getting some of those answers for you, in training, videos, posts, or other cool projects. Stay tuned!

3D Space Project with Adobe Flash CS4
Tom Green has been doing some previous posts on the Layers Magazine website concerning the 3D tools in Flash CS4. This time around, he’s taken all of the techniques that you’ve learned and put them all together in a NASA themed project. I love it when all small pieces come together.. click on the link below to get to the tutorial:

A NASA Flash Project with Tom Green

We’ll see you guys back here tomorrow morning!