Hey just a quick FYI for you Flickr users they now are allowing us to upload videos. Only downside is the 90 sec max time stuck to it. Here is the first video I saw on Flickr and its some Flash art by Eric Natzke. If you are not familiar with Eric Natzke I think its time you start watching his work in Flash, it will inspire anyone.
Archive for the 'animation' Category
Hey I was browsing my mailing lists just now and ran across an email Moses Gunesch sent out to the GO mailing list. It's a video tutorial on how to use GO! He said he is probably going to have to redo it cause of some audio issues but hey its pretty cool to have some info from the source on using GO. Its kind of a big file but, enjoy!
Anyway I'm not sure if any of you guys are following this closely but if not you should be. GO is Moses' new animation engine for AS3 and its supposed to be super fast! Most of you know I haven't made the jump to AS3 yet. But for those of you that have this will be great intro to using GO! And for more info check out the GO blog or Moses's blog. Cheers!

Update: The video has been moved and is now in an FLV format! Much nicer! Thanks moses!
Wow, what a whirlwind of a week has it been since my little Dear Adobe letter. So many of you have responded from around the globe, giving me and Adobe feedback on so many aspects of the topic. It's been really great to get this boiling in some of your minds and to see how many people from all backgrounds care about flash intimately and how they envision flash growing. Well, I wanted to try and clarify some things about my letter, so let me just kinda recap somethings since the dust is starting to settle.
Am I upset Adobe has created AS3, MXML and a tighter programming environment? NO! That would be ridiculous. I know that AS3 is the step in the right direction for Actionscript and the player. It is cleaner, faster, stronger... everything that a new iteration in a language should be. It helps give developers the freedom to tighten down their apps and provide a much better product to the end user. The flash 9 player has given older machines new life by running these larger apps faster than ever before. And that means a lot to all of us, since it's broadening the audience of flash sites and apps all together.
What else has AS3 done? Well, besides the player and scope improvements, it has brought on a much larger scripting engine. One that has improved everything, with better event handling, methods, properties and functions. So why was I saying it's so much harder? Imagine you are a designer and you want to jump into flash, action script and flash animation and start building a website or some type of interactive experience. In the AS1 and AS2 days it would be EASY. Throw some buttons on the stage, put a few mouse events with gotoAndPlay's on them and viola! You're starting to build something. Granted the options were smaller than what we could do but hey you were building a FLASH site/animation!
Now move yourself forward in time a little. Flash is using the AS3/4 engine. It's code driven and can build the best apps in the world! But what happened to all the fun of flash? It's gone. Designers can no longer go hey it would be great to build "X". They can't write a site on one frame. They don't have a clue what an object is and hardly know that actionscript is. But they want to build something in flash. Their minds don't and will not ever work in code. Some of you "devigners" are the exception and are the ones TRULY pushing flash to the edge of its boundaries. But if you weren't ever given the opportunity to start building something with flash in its early years you are never going to find out you are a "devigner". You will always remain a "designer", lost trying to understand what you can do with flash and actionscript. This is what I was trying to truly get at in my previous letter to Adobe.
Was I trying to get Adobe to keep AS2 around forever? No! I was just trying to get us all and Adobe to think about what Flash has done to the design/interactive world! And how this tool is used to not only create apps (which I hope is what Flex will be for, not Flash) but to create engaging animation-driven websites. That engage our end users and "had" made it easy for designers to pick it up and start engaging our users in ways most developers never would of never thought of. This is what made flash magical. All I am asking Adobe to do is look at the product and again think about how to leverage Flash and all the technology behind it back to the designer some again. And not to run off into the sunset of the online application world too fast. But to maybe keep progressing the scripting language to give both worlds the ability to create!
I just want to make sure the designer doesn't lose control and the ability to design with Flash. The word design is funny in today's interactive world. It can mean MANY things. But it still has its roots and whether you are designing with code, photoshop or with the Flash animation tool you can still design! That's what made flash so great. It divided the gap and also made the impossible possible for a designer. That is what was really amazing! And it made it all possible on the web! I REALLY can't wait to see where the product goes! But I also don't want to see it run off too far from all of the designers that are engaging our end users with their magical minds! So I just want to say I know Adobe can still keep moving in the developer direction but I think with the right tools and additions to the product it can also keep the designers interested and keep their hands in the product evolving the web.
I haven't sat down and thought directly about what these changes may be. But I will! I know that my opinions about these tools are not everyone's opinion. But that's not why I have been blogging about this. It's to hear the rest of the community's opinions and open the door a bit more for the designers and everyone to speak! Thanks for listening again!
Update: Sorry for the eariler miss hap on the title of this post. I promise that was not on purpose.
How great has this month been! A brand new year and brand new blog for me! CES 2008 and now MacWorld. Its feels like the month has just flown by! And it doesn't look like its slowing down anytime soon!
So tonight my friend is going to stop by and I'm going to try and give him my quick 411 on fuse and how I have been using it the past 6 months. While we work I am going to build a tutorial to share the knowledge with all of you guys! So it should be a really fun post and my first try at sharing some of my knowledge. So bare with me but it should be lots of fun. For those of you not familiar with fuse you should first check out the fuse site, also look at gotoandlearn.com where lee brimelow has a great fuse tutorial and then download the cheat sheet that has been put together by ewaon.com. I keep one in front of me pretty much at all times along with a few other cheat sheets. They are very handy to get a quick look at the methods and properties we have available in flash and fuse.
I also wanted to say thanks to all the new visitors and I hope I can entertain you all enough to keep you coming back!
Update:
I haven't had time yet to write theĀ post on our quick fuse session but I will try to put it together later!
So I did some work for Uniden GPS, and cordless phones for their booth at CES this year. Supposedly some of my animations were going to be in the interview they were doing with FOX 4 but they didn't quite get the spot I was hoping for! Errrr any way its kind of funny. Here is the link http://tinyurl.com/393sf9. Once there you have to click on 'North Texas Company Leads in Phone Industry'. Its seriously WAAAAAY in the background. Grrrrr so so close. Oh well maybe next year but for those of you that made it to CES maybe you got to see them! They were all built with Fuse and they run really smooth. Its great to be able to animate with Fuse it makes creative changes quick and painless. Thanks Moses!
Thank god for incredible flash developers and there forward thinking!
http://go.mosessupposes.com/?p=14
This is a quick post in hopes that some other developers will show there support for this great movement by
Moses Gunesch. All I can say is Go.. no really GO! Go show your support of this to help all of us!

