About 4-5 years ago, I began animating the majority of my Flash projects with Actionscript. First with EnterFrame and later with a few components I found around the web. Eventually I came across MCTween by Zeh, and I haven’t really looked back. I played with Laco’s tween and Fuse, but MCTween just has seemed to fit the way I work. I introduced it to my coworkers and use it at school in teaching my students animation with Actionscript and UI design/development with Flash. I have recently moved on to using the updated Tweener, but still have some older legacy work built with MCTween that I will need to support for some time.

I like the flexibility, power and reusability animating things with code gives me. For UI Design , its absolutely necessary. I wouldn’t think of building menus, screen transitions or advanced interfaces with a timeline anymore. No gotoAndPlay, gotoAndStop nonsense for me, thank you very much.

I rarely have the need to animate elements on the timeline, but yesterday I had to produce a few quick animations and didn’t know how I wanted the timing to work out. The various elements needed to be carefully choreagraphed and had some interplay with each other. They used tweens of color, opacity, position and blur and had to match some storyboards the client had provided. To produce them with AS instead of the timeline would have probably taken twice if not three times as long as it did to just whip em out on the timeline. The ability  to scrub the playhead back and forth in the authoring tool sure helped, but so did the pulldown menus in the property palette and the quick preview of color changes on the stage. By saving the need the need to publish every time I made a tweak, in this case I probably saved 10-15 minutes in testing alone.

How about you? How much traditional vs. scripted animation do you perform today? I’d say I am about at 80-90% scripted animation vs. traditional timeline animation.

You make my karma puke… You; who refuse to defuse to disarm a nuke, and keeping printing marmaduke. - Paul Barman
Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke
Yes, it’s totally off my normal topics, but hilarious nonetheless.

To me, the open sourcing of Flex is not only a great idea, it displays yet another reason I am developing using Adobe tools. Silverlight ain’t got nothing on this…

Flex:Open Source - Adobe Labs

Absolutely brilliant. Take your flagship development SDK and opensource the code, compiler and see the developer base sky rocket.  Not only does this shoot a nice one across Microsoft’s bow, but also takes one of OpenLazlo’s major draws (being open, of course) and nullifies it.

You will see so many new sites developed in Flex that would have been HTML/AJAX and so much community activity around this, that I have a feeling the Moxie is going to be something really special. The fact that it’s coming out so soon (second half of 2007) - is a bit crazy (man is stuff moving fast these days).

Very cool, and thanks to my friend Lawrence for pointing it out.

I need to put some existing Flash animations on a DVD and also to a controllable SWF/Flash Video with play pause controls. The animations are complex. They have lots of nested animations. I have the FLA files, but reediting them to not have the nested animations in them is just not in the cards. Too much time and not enough hours/budget to do it… Plus that would be a painful process.

A coworker came across this app: Geovid Flash to Video Encoder Is it app any good? Any experiences with it?

Not sure if this will do what I want, and I would have to purchase it, which is fine, but then I also have to find a Windows system to install it on… Also ok, but another step. On another machine at work, we have Camtasia Studio… I’m thinking about just capturing the animations at high res and then importing them into After Effects to tweak the clips if the timeline goes wonky/laggy.

Any other ideas?

In case you didn’t notice, this weekend on Digg.com, a couple of user submitted stories made it to it’s front page regarding the use of Photoshop as a verb. Here and here. While I certainly can appreciate Adobe’s need to protect it’s trademark, the damage may have already been done. People have been, for as long as I know, using Photoshop as a verb. What they might want to do is also stop people from using Flash as a verb… I see it all over the internets. Lots of sites about flashing.

But seriously, there are people I still hear that have no idea how to use Adobe’s product names. I hear people saying “Oh, that’s a PDF, we need to download Adobe.” , or “I have a PDF, we need Acrobat to open it.” Don’t even get me started on the Flash platform naming conventions. Flash Player, Flash (the IDE), Flash Paper, how the Flex IDE can author Flash , etc… Heck, some people even think Photoshop’s name is “Adobe”. Of course, I also hear people call MS Word “Microsoft”. Not Word, but “Microsoft”.  In some ways, Adobe should be thankful that the Photoshop name is so ubiquitous and understandable, even non Photoshop users know what it means to Photoshop something out of an image.

Point is, trademarks aside, I guess there is no really effective way to change how people out in the real world talk about you.

FlashGuru (Guy Watson) has always made some of the best Flash extensions, commands, components, out there, and this is no different… His new Apollo for Flash CS3 extension is absolutely brilliant. Opening the door to Apollo for all the Flash deselopers out there is something that Adobe should have done themselves (who knows, maybe they planned to and were just beaten to the punch). Unfortunately, at this time it is Windows only and doesn’t actually package up .air installers, but its a great start. Check it out: FlashGuru Consulting » Create Apollo Apps in Flash CS3

Yet another reason why working in the Flash community is so great. Flash CS3 is out for a couple days or so, and voila… people are already extending it and making it better for the entire community.

Thanks, FlashGuru.

Today was beautiful here. 70° and sunny. Light wind. Went and played my first round this year… It was pretty good. Parred a couple holes and only had one triple bogey. All but one drive were pretty much on the fairway too… for a hacker like me, that’s pretty good. I’m hoping to make it out at least a couple times a month this summer. Would love to go more, but we’ll just have to see how it goes. With a new son and a daughter that is really starting to love playing outside, I’ll probably be spending most of my leisure time with them.

Having played so much Tiger Woods lately on my Wii, I found myself wanting to press “A” and get the ideal putt camera to come up. It doesn’t work in real life.

I have written a few posts about designer/developer integration for Flash/Flex teams (and a few deselopers/devigners had some great tips: Scalenine, JesterXL, etc.)… Looks like Adobe is actively trying to preempt any CS3 designer/developers difficulties, not only are the standard Flash UI components substantially easier to use/skin, now they are working to make Flash authored SWFs a full fledged citizen within a Flex project. This will allow my development team to leverage all the great design work the designers we collaborate with create!

EverythingFlex » Blog Archive » Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 - WOW - Now this is what I am talking about… can’t wait to get my copies of CS3 and play with this. From his post:

• Ability to access Flash content natively within Flex using any Flex container
• Flash content can be used as a skin
• Ability to define events from within Flash content which can be accessed from Flex
• Bounding boxes to define the space the Flash content will occupy within the Flex application
• Flashframe labels can be accessed from Flex using state management

Very cool indeed.

Got a comment sent to me on a post of my blog… didn’t approve it. Something about a new web media format called “Frogans” (http://www.frogans.com). Anyone seen this stuff? Looks intersting, if a little late to the party. The design for the site isn’t doing the technology any favors, either.

Anyway, I’m too tired and too busy to write more now. I used to wonder why my Dad and Mom were so worn out at night after work… man, was I naive.

Man, I want this on my Wii!

» Adobe takes the wraps off of Philo, brands it Adobe Media Player | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com

Sounds cool. Point and click IPTV. Maybe even better than AppleTV. What’s it going to take to get Nintendo/Opera to update the flash player in the Internet Channel to Flash 9?