If you are new to Flash, or an experienced Flash user, you will find this book to be exciting, informative, and offers a wealth of creative ideas and techniques for getting the most out of Flash for web creation. Learning Flash is both fun and easy. This book provides over 30 short projects and over 100 experimental ideas that cover a variety of effects and techniques such as: Melting Type, Solar Explosions, Animated Typist using ActionScript, EZ Web Games, MP3 Sound Controllers, Dynamic Photography, Fading Web Paint, Motion Trails, Score Keeping for Web Games, Collision Detection, Creating and Testing Preloaders, and Interactive Web Portfolios. There are also tutorials for using Photoshop and Illustrator with Flash and a chapter on reverse engineering interesting Flash web sites. Additionally, this text provides a straightforward introduction to ActionScript. You will enjoy exploring new Flash ideas that are presented in a short (2-8 page), easy to follow, step-by-step format. This book allows you learn, create, and publish a variety of Flash effects quickly and easily. If you have never worked with Flash you will appreciate the fact that from chapter two, you are producing web content. Rather than describing each palette and menu item, you will learn by doing. The projects were designed by a professional Flash instructor, peer reviewed, and classroom tested, to insure that they are accurate, exciting, and most importantly, easy to understand. Extensive screen shots makes it easier to learn. Short projects, means that you can gain a solid understanding of a single concept before moving onto the next . From the author "My students and I agree that the most enjoyable way to learn complex software is with short projects that provide new, interesting and creative techniques that can be used, or modified, immediately for your own web creations."

Showcases the computer animation program's newly designed interface while explaining how to build interactive Web sites using innovative graphics, text, and animated images.

Flash movies—the ones that play and then, well...stop—are all well and good. They are great as platforms for cartoonists and motion type artists to showcase their stuff. But it's the non-interactive and uninterruptable aspect of these Flash events that has led to some serious underestimations of the power of Flash. All you need to do to begin creating the cutting-edge Flash web-sites of the future is learn how to get the most out of ActionScripting, how to hook up your Flash movie with client/server coding and begin working with a back-end database. And it really is that easy! Suddenly, the world of true Flash functionality is at your fingertips. Flash 5 Dynamic Content Studio is written by a collective of Flash 5 experts who will show you everything you need to know to upgrade your Flash 5 knowledge to Flash 5 expertise. Assuming a basic knowledge of Flash, the book gives you a thorough grounding in ActionScripting techniques, teaches you the basics of a myriad of scripting languages and their Flash interaction capabilities, discusses and implements client-side/server-side interaction, explains the middleware that can make your life considerably easier (Ultradev, Generator, Swift Generator, ASP Turbine), and demonstrates database interaction and usability (Access, SQL, and MYSQL). To conclude this admittedly tough but not prohibitive learning curve, the book walks you through a selection of fairly generic real world case studies, using Flash with middleware and database connectivity, demonstrating how these elements come together to give you truly dynamic, interactive Flash sites. This book is about visual richness and utility. This Web business is getting beautiful, and Flash is getting useful. What you’ll learnWho this book is for Flash 5 Dynamic Content Studio addresses the growing market of web artists under pressure to learn the finer points of interactive design with Flash 5. This book demonstrates the best tools for integrating dynamic content using a Flash front-end. Readers will see how to link Flash movies, via a middleware bridge, through to a back-end datastores (images and/or text). This book assumes that the reader already knows the fundamentals of creating Flash movies, but doesn't assume any programming knowledge at all. The book covers ActionScripting, (of course!), ASP, PHP, JSP, Perl, CGI, Cold Fusion, Macromedia Generator, ASP Turbine, Swift Generator, and Macromedia Ultradev.

It came and went too fast, technically, for human comprehension. It was an infinitesimal piece of a momentalready history before any coherent thought could be formed. Yet, as all who experienced it knew deep down, something as significant as it was inexplicable had just happened, something mysterious that had never happened before ... In a moment thats gone almost before it arrives, everything changes. What the townsfolk come to describe as a "flash" dramatically alters the lives of every person who experiences it. At first, it is the animals: the pets, the cattle, and the wildlife of the small Midwestern town of Highland, Illinois. Soon enough, the insidious symptoms spread to the people of Highland. A besieged police chief, his best detective, and the city manager try their best to understand and confront the evil gradually taking over their world. It keeps growing, though, and they soon realize that it might be bigger than all of them. This is a book that will capture you - and then won't let you go - starting with the very first page. It is the most haunting story since "Night of the Living Dead."

Enhanced and revised edition of the bestseller! 100% of what you need to know to learn and master the latest version of Macromedia Flash. Includes a CD-ROM packed with files from the book and valuable tryouts.

Applying FLASH Character Animation Studio Techniques will help teach the next generation of animators the skills they need to communicate their ideas and expand the art of storytelling further into the computer realm.

Written by a professional designer, this volume covers one of the leading graphics applications: Macromedia Flash 5. The concise yet complete guide uses real world solutions to take the reader from early design stages to launch on the Web.