The days of Flash as a creative luxury are long gone. After months of downsizing, Flash creativity has been on a huge rationalization program. It is no longer enough to present animation in millions of colors and a hundred transparencies. It is no longer sufficient to provide interactivity and dynamism for their own sake. The purpose of this collection is to show how designers have taken Flash and made it work for its supper. What we discover is a series of creations that place Flash at the hub of cutting edge web content. The end result is a snapshot of Flash as the ideal medium. In these amazing examples, we see the software pushed to its limits to create unbeatable applications―a collapsible family tree, an interactive video learning system, and a drawing tool, capable of running online! Beyond this, we dip into the back-end capabilities to look at how to improve Flash still further. Some staple XML and PHP routines are brought in to add a bit of spice, while Flash's mysterious sharedObject command is hunted down and tamed to create a hybrid Tamagotchi houseplant―perfectly suited to lure surfers back to your website!

Flash MX Application & Interface Design

Computers & Technology

McDonald, Jamie

Rhodes, Glen

Shepherd, Robbie

Prudence, Paul

Jokol, Ken

MacDonald, Jamie

Yard, Todd

Aylward, Peter

Web Development & Design

Apress

Flash MX Studio takes your raw Flash talent and multiplies its potency by focusing it on real-world web design situations. In the heady days of the late 1990s, designers were trying their hand at anything and everything they could lay their hands on. Now the marketplace is seriously focused, and serious Flash designers have to know exactly what they're doing and why. These days, it's all about functionality over experimentation, justification over style. It's all about maturity. The design must fit the job specs, and this book shows the reader how to fulfill these requirements and more. This book examines all the avenues open to professional or aspiring professional Flash MX designers. It takes a look at advanced uses of the new MX features, such as components and the Drawing API, and gives guidance on building whole new structures for animation, Dynamic Content, PHP, ColdFusion MX, XML, video, audio and audiovisual formats. Never before has so much power been so accessible to the web designer. This book is designed to put that power in your hands. Flash MX Studio has been broken into four sections to address the most common needs for the Flash designer. First off, Jamie McDonald provides five chapters on site presentation and the principles of web design. These opening chapters take a look at how to create slick, professional-level sites, involving Flash MX's new drawing and motion capabilities and interactive techniques. The second section concentrates on ActionScript. Flash's resident coding environment is crucial to master, and taps into Flash's great strength―intuitive and interactive applications. Keith Peters and Todd Yard have buddied up on this section, and examine some of the most advanced ActionScript techniques around. Be warned―this section is not for the faint-hearted! Section three takes a look at Flash MX's greatly improved visual, audio and audiovisual capabilities. Its three chapters, written by Jez Turner and Alex White, concentrate on building a single site aimed at displaying rich media content. The final section is devoted to expounding a few myths about dynamic content using Flash. Its four chapters talk about general practice, before focusing in on specific areas, including introductions to PHP and XML, together with a look at Macromedia's brand new ColdFusion MX.

Macromedia Flash MX Studio

White, Alex

Peters, Keith

Webster, Steve

Steer, Jon

Tudury, David

Turner, Jerome

Baldwin, Dennis

Turner, Jez

The pressure on web designers using Flash has been seriously stepped up. Flash 5 is a major revision over Flash 4, and the difference between the two is most apparent in the broader, deeper scope of ActionScript. To use the features of Flash 5 effectively, therefore, a thorough understanding of ActionScript is required. The desire to learn ActionScript at the basic level is addressed in the friends of ED Foundation series. Flash 5 ActionScript Studio takes this basic level of knowledge up towards commercial best practices, thanks to the contributions of a range of leading talents who present abundant real-world examples of their techniques. This book is recommended for web designers who realize that coding is the way ahead at the top end of the industry, Flash movie creators who need urgently to get deeper into interactivity, and those who are competent in ActionScript but still need guidance from the experts. The book is split broadly into three sections. The first of these serves as a quick lesson/refresher in ActionScript syntax and technique, focusing on the notation in Flash 5 ActionScript, and its relationship with object-oriented programming. Flash 5 ActionScript presents all of its functionality in the form of objects, and each of these is dissected with examples of its purpose and use. Section Two consists of a set of self-contained examples that each demonstrate a particular use of ActionScript, including topics such as interface design, real-time 3D processing, interaction with JavaScript, and using data in XML files. Finally, the third section comprises worked case studies that involve ideas from all the preceding chapters, along with insights into the design processes used by the authors as they put together their ActionScript-rich movies. What you’ll learnWho this book is for  Flash 5 ActionScript Studio assumes a readership that already has a reasonable understanding of ActionScript and some HTML. Readers will likely be existing web design professionals with 4 to 6 months of experience with Flash 5, or considerable experience with Flash 4.

Flash 5 ActionScript Studio

Rodríguez, José

Bhangal, Sham

Davey, John

Everett-Church, Justin

Bedar, Michael

Chu, Richard

Rodriguez, Josie R.

Wolff, Adam

Computer Science

friends of ED

Also featuring: Keith Peters, David Hirmes, Lifaros, Paul Prudence, Pavel Kaluzhny, Ken JokolForget school math class, Flash math is about fun. it's what you do in your spare time - messing around with little ideas until the design takes over and you end up with something beautiful, bizarre, or just downright brilliant.
It's a book of iterative experiments, generative design; a book of inspiration, beautiful enough to leave on the coffee table, but addictive enough to keep by your computer and sneak out while no-one's looking so you can go back to that Flash movie that you were tinkering with 'til 3 o'clock this morning. 
In New Masters of Flash the designers told us about themselves and deconstructed their finest effects. Well this time we've gathered the best in one book and simply asked them to go away and do what they do best: play. We give you the code and explain the essence, then you take your inspiration and run with it.

Flash Math Creativity

Williams, Brandon

Hirmes, David

Lifaros

Tan, Manny

Hooge, J. D.Amie

Lettau, Ty

Mulzer, Gabriel

This book takes an in-depth look at purposing your Flash skills towards developing fully functional Flash Applications. Taking its lead from the design element, each chapter takes you a step further into evolving your design skills into application development. 
It will look at: 
- Focusing your interface design for ease of use - Shaping up the back end to keep things simple - Delivering complex content, including video 
Using a blend of instructional and inspirational chapters, this book looks at Flash’s strengths – graphical dynamism, interactivity, back-end punch and multimedia delivery. 
- Make gorgeous sites in tiny files with the Drawing API - Look at the marriage of data and beauty with a Flash Family Tree - Create real-feel interfaces that mimic different media - Make XML do the donkey-work in site structure - Ease up you navigation with PHP - Create an entire drawing application - Deliver video and make it interactive with Flash 
...and so much more!

Glen Rhodes

Ken Jokol

Paul Prudence

Robbie Shepherd

Peter Aylward

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Books by MacDonald, Jamie