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!

This book provides the richest and most solid introduction to the exciting world of Flash applications, which are becoming increasingly popular as ways of presenting visually rich interfaces to useful data and services. Foundation Flash MX Applications supplies you with the knowledge, techniques, and skills that you need to help you plan, develop, and build Flash-based applications that you can deploy on the Web. In true Foundation series style, this book uses step-by-step exercises and a running case study to build skills that you can then apply to any Flash application you create. The emphasis in this book is on the generic skills and approaches that are essential in this field, rather than on shallow walk-throughs of trivial projects. You'll come away from this book with a deeper understanding of the issues (architectural, technical, process-related, design-oriented) that are key to developing successful Flash applications for the Web. This is the only book on the market that focuses on generic, transferable skills that are taught using a case study that'll really drive the learning home. If you want to really understand this subject, then this is the book for you. To get the most out of this book, we recommend that you already have a grasp of the Flash MX interface, as well as some ActionScript experience. Topics include: A full-length case study, creating a dynamic Flash message board application. Designing usable, scalable, and interactive Flash-based applications. Deploying XML for client/server communication. Using PHP as an intermediary between XML and back-end data storage. The MySQL database.

by Bruce Herbert and Diana Johnson ofSorenson Media Creative boundaries are being blown apart as Macromedia Flash MX ushers in a new era of moving images on the Internet. At its launch, analysts predicted that the Flash Player would transform itself from being a lightweight animation tool" to "the de facto technology for simple web interactivity5* (Randy Souza, Forrester). Since then though, Flash developers combining vector animation and video have proven that it's capable of much, much more than "simple web interactivity". We're still just beginning to scratch the surface of the possibilities it opens up to us, but already it looks like Flash MX is becoming the key technology for pushing video creativity on the Web to a new whole level. Understandably, many people look at Flash as just another way to deliver video on the Web, one more program for showing movies on your desktop. Well, it can certainly do that - but there's a whole lot more it can do besides! You can use ActionScript to add custom controls, determine a video playback sequence, or mask your video with a custom shape. You can use layering to create special effects, design custom templates for e-learning applications, and use lightweight video streams along with Flash animation in rich media e-mail campaigns.

* First Flash book to use the unique "virtual classroom" approach to teaching ActionScript programming to absolute beginners, so it meets a need head-on that no other book addresses directly—providing the missing link between technology and creativity. * Flash and ActionScript are extremely simple to learn, so this book provides the ideal entry point for any aspiring programmer and web designer, compared with technologies like VB and C++, which can be very intimidating to the novice. Additionally, this book is complementary to any other entry-level Flash titles – it recognizes that as well as mastering the design side of the toolset, effective designer/developers also need to grasp basic programming skills. Having Flash on your machine doesn't miraculously turn you into a web designer – you need to work at learning design and programming skills too. * The authors are highly experienced authors and Flash tutors, well versed in communicating technical information to a low level consumer audience. They are also active web community members and will provide personal technical support for the book direct to the reader via the Friends of ED support forums.

If you are a professional animator and want to learn to use the Flash environment as a vehicle for your creative work then this is the book for you. It gets you up to speed fast with the basics of how to use Flash MX to animate, so you can start concentrating on how best to translate your animation skills to this medium. The techniques shown throughout the book build up in skill level quickly, showing you clearly and concisely the most effective way to translate your animations into Flash with the focus remaining on the importance of creative animation techniques. Benefit from Sprite Interactive's wealth of tips and tricks from their wide range of professional Flash animation work and successful training courses. Learn how to apply these techniques to your own work, how to make your characters run in Flash, speed them up and slow them down, make them stumble as they walk, show their anger or fear, make them come to life. Alex Michael, Lead Animator and MD of Sprite Interactive (www.sprite.net), shows you how to achieve all the creative skills of traditional animation using Flash so you can create work for a wide variety of new and innovative platforms, including PocketPCs and interactive TV, as well as video and the web. The free CD includes all the files you need to try everything in the book for yourself, as well as invaluable time and money saving animation processes and tools. Make sure you are at the cutting edge of animation and push your creative skills to the edge, if you want to animate successfully in Flash, buy this book.

*Over one million Flash developers worldwide. The book supports the new version of Flash, due later on this year *The only up-to-date book that focuses on usable Flash design *Mimics Dan Cederholm’s best-selling Web Standards Solutions—broadening the Solutions series

Have you ever poured all your creativity into a Flash movie, but found your friends grumbling at the download size? Have you tried to use just one tiny picture in your movie, and seen the file size go through the roof? Is it possible to do anything remotely effective in a small file? More than you could possibly imagine! This collection shows you just exactly what can be done with tiny Flash files, using some of the hottest Flash designers around. These authors pull designs out of the top drawer and show you exactly how you can go about creating great SWFs with the smallest amount of download pain. We will look at: creating incredible generative designs -- so small you can use them for wallpaper producing 3D animations that roll in at under 5k in size creating sound toys in the smallest possible file space de-mystifying the use of JPEGs and photographs while keeping your Flash movies small strategic use of back-end technology to keep your delivery times down to nanoseconds! changing the boundaries to look at new ways of delivering entire sites! From the Publisher Who is this book for You've worked with Flash, but are wondering why people are getting tetchy at the download time. You're willing to start learning some ActionScript tricks to fight the file flab, and you're not afraid to become addicted to optimization! About the Author Genevieve Garand Conceived 3weeksinApril.com, an experimental web site that explores new ways of navigation and features an engaging narrative. David Hirmes is a Flash developer living in Brooklyn, New York. Kip Parker Works through his own company Hi-Rise Limited and in collaboration with Anthony Burrill as Friendchip, which was established in 1998. Keith Peters Found Flash to be the ideal medium for creating graphics with code. Robert Reich lives in Hamburg, Germany. Flash became his favourite besides normal HTML and serverside driven website creation. He is working as freelancer for several firms. Roy Tanck Currently employed in Hilversum, as part of a team that creates innovative e-learning solutions. Within this environment, Flash is a great tool.