Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Sadly, Flash Insider is retiring. During the past two years, Weblogs Inc. has made a gradual evolution from producing mostly business/pro content to publishing sites for a broader consumer audience. We are all grateful to David Robinson, Mike Schleifstein, and (recently) Russ Heimlich for their great contributions in sustaining this blog. Each of them will continue to write for Weblogs, Inc. on a variety of subjects.
And, naturally, we're grateful to our readers! Thank you for your loyalty.
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!
Friends of ED has been releasing competently compiled web design books made with collaboration from some of the best for quite a few years now and when they offered a few books to the Flash Insider team to read I jumped at the chance. The first book I cracked open was the latest in their Essentials series, Flash 8 Essentials. The Essentials books are meant to grab current and future web designers and give them a quick dip into the latest web design software. This book was written a quick guide to Flash 8 and includes enough tutorial and code to get most designers and developers up to speed. The writing style of this book is similar to a motivational seminar on Flash. This helps the reader become extremely excited about the new version and can make you feel like you can do everything in the book.
Flash 8 Essentials has six authors, but the reader will not notice a definite change from one chapter to the next. Each author has already made a name for himself in the Flash design and development world. Two of the authors have already written a few books on this subject and one helped to create the current Developer Certification Exam.
...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!
The creators of the Canadian show Odd Job Jack will release all master flash files, bitmaps, art, props etc. of each episode every week. Also included will be tutorials and documentation so you can hack or remix to your hearts content via a Creative Commons license. Check for a new set every Monday via bittorrent. If you do anything with these files, post it in our comment section. Happy animating!
Have you ever wanted to know how you can create your own video hosting site allowing users to upload video, automatically convert it to FLV, and display it for the world to see? A recent post at Daniel's Random Mutterings (DRM - how clever) explains exactly how to do this with open source tools. Using a Djano CMS system, FFMpeg for the FLV encoding, FLVtools2 for writing meta information, and FlowPlayer for embedding the SWF file you'll have everything you need to get started. The code is pretty straight forward and a great starting point. Now go forth and create your new video distribution empire.
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!
This wickely-twisted Flash design will leave your skin tingling. The navigation can be a bit confusing but it is still fun to explore the site. I'm not quite sure what the site is about, but it is very imaginative, to say the least. My favorite part is the twisty music position bar at the lower right. What do you think? Post a comment in the section below.
Is this my latest piece of Apple hardware? Nope, it's iFizzle.com which has done an impressive job re-creating the OS X interface in Flash. His site features the standard dock, a working iPhoto app for his pictures, text edit for his blog, and even iTunes playing music where you can change the song. To top it off, you can change the frame from a Mac Book Pro, cinema display, Mac Book (black or white), and an iMac. Really creative use for Flash. Go check it out.
3D Stereogram is a neat little app that lets you make your own magic eye pictures. You start off at a blank canvas with various different pen tools. I don't know if there are any tricks to creating a good one so I just scribbled around. Next hit done and it will generate your magic eye with the necessary code to embed it elsewhere on the web. Not knowing how to exactly see the magic, I can't tell you if it works or not. Have a look at what I did and give it a try yourself.
Hoss Gifford has figured out a way to dynamically resize a Flash movie embedded in an HTML page. The practical application of this is now you can have your movie resize based on how much content there is to display. Being able to scroll with the browsers scroll bar instead of creating a separate flash scrollbar is the chief benefit to this technique. To accomplish this Gifford uses the swfObject by Geoff Stearns. Hoss has kindly made available the source code for this project under a creative commons license in hopes that someone can improve it. Check out the demo to see the resizer in action and download all the necessary files in one convenient zip.
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
Friends of ED has been releasing competently compiled web design books made with collaboration from some of the best for quite a few years now and when they offered a few books to the Flash Insider team to read I jumped at the chance. The first book I cracked open was the latest in their Essentials series, 
After my post last week on the 
