Gerald YardFace – författare

As a creative professional or interactive developer, you’ll be amazed at the exciting possibilities presented to you by the features available in Flash 8; but as a busy designer, we know you won''t have as much time as you’d like to explore these new additions. Never fear; this book wastes no time looking at timeline basics, tweens, or movie-publishing options—it focuses exclusively on the new Flash 8 features, getting you quickly up to speed with a combination of illustrative tutorials, handy references, and inspirational examples.

By the end of the book, you’ll know that there’s no shortage of new tools to enhance and inspire your Flash development; and since this book is written by some of the community''s leading Flash experts, you’ll know you’re in good hands. If you’re looking to master Flash 8 with a minimum of time and effort, then this is the only book for you.

With the release of Macromedia Flash 8, Flash is the most powerful and widely-used client software for the web, and it''s the only one that runs on virtually every browser, on every platform. It also features ActionScript, a scripting language with great object-oriented support. As such, Flash is the ideal platform for producing sophisticated object-oriented web applications. Complex applications demand a solid understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques, regardless of the language and platform used, and this book will provide all you need.

Object-Oriented ActionScript For Flash 8 teaches the theory and practice of OOP with ActionScript. You do not need any extensive prior programming experience, you just need to want to go beyond the usual Flash interfaces. Authors and working Flash developers Peter Elst and Todd Yard take you through the complete development cycle of a series of related applications, using numerous step-by-step instructions. You''ll be able to develop highly reusable applications and services that leverage the dynamic features in Flash.

This book demonstrates professional OOP skills and techniques that are completely transferable to other programming languages and technologies, including Inheritance, Polymorphism, managing classes, component development, consuming web services, and much more. It also includes some cutting edge ActionScript programming techniques, and animation and effects classes.

If you want to create exciting dynamic web sites that will amaze your online audience, then the Flash platform is a great way to go, with it''s many features, including powerful graphical and sound and video capabilities. To really harness the power of Flash though, you need to make use of ActionScript to provide dynamic effects, enable user interaction, and manipulate data.

ActionScript 3.0, the Flash Platform''s scripting language, offers a lot of new and powerful features. ActionScript is now a full-fledged programming language, with complete object-oriented capabilities, improved event handling, sound and video support, drawing capabilities, support for regular expressions, and much more.

Whether you are a Flash designer wishing to add to your skill set or an experienced ActionScript developer who wants to get up to speed with the latest version, you''ll find all you need to know in Foundation ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex.

This book covers all the essential techniques from the ground up, allowing you to get up and running quickly and easily. Starting with the fundamentals, you''ll learn about using ActionScript objects, manipulating sound and video, and harnessing the power of regular expressions and XML.

The book concludes with two case studies to consolidate what you''ve learned and to introduce some more advanced techniques. This will give you some grounding in the new and exciting world of ActionScript 3.0 and show you how it all fits together in larger applications, allowing you to go on and build your own professional sites.

The sensible layout of the book makes it easy to find information about specific techniques. It doesn''t aim to be an exhaustive reference, but rather focuses on the essential skills that will enable you to get up and running more quickly. With this book as your guide, you''ll be creating killer Flash applications before you know it!

Those who are quite comfortable with Flash MX  and know a little ActionScript, will enjoy this book. It provides detailed step-by-step tutorials, and boasts complete technical support from the friends of ED website.

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects discusses the ins and outs of graphical manipulation through code of all the different elements available in a Flash project, from vectors to bitmaps to videos, from animated text effects to dynamic video filters. Flash 8 introduced a vast array of image features, such as blend modes and filters as well as ActionScript''s powerful BitmapData object, and this book covers all those effects in their CS4 form, as well as the graphical options that are available, such as the Pixel Bender Toolkit. It also details the many possible effects that can be achieved and the associated practical applications, with a focus on strong object-oriented programming methodologies to make the code more modular and reusable across projects.

The absolute cutting edge for application development at the moment is using Macromedia''s Flash MX (the premier software for designing fantastic looking interfaces) with Microsoft''s .NET framework (tremendously powerful server-side technology).

Combining these technologies has been greatly aided by the release of Macromedia''s Flash Remoting MX, which is covered fully in this book. Designers and developers involved in the creation of this technology impart their knowledge to you in this book through extensive case studies.

Flash Remoting is not the only way to combine these technologies, however, so this book will fully cover Flash/.NET integration using ASP.NET.

This book is for readers who are looking to integrate their Flash movies with a .NET-enabled back-end. It assumes no prior knowledge of server-side technologies, but does require knowledge of Flash MX and ActionScript.

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 andaudiovisual 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.

Some friends of ED books concentrate on more serious aspects of Flash; this one concentrates on the fun. Flash can be used for many purposes, but making visually stunning effects to impress your boss, your friends, and anyone who looks at your site is one of the most rewarding.

Friends of ED have scoured the web and the Flash community, discovering the most requested and popular Flash effects in action today. We have investigated the visual effects and actual design techniques that Flash beginners have been asking for. The visual inspiration and detailed explanations of how to recreate these effects are combined together in this book.

The eight leading designers in this full color book take these effects apart, showing you how to adapt your basic Flash knowledge to achieve results exceeding anything you thought possible. The effects stay true to the tried and tested friends of ED design-centric approach, with full exercises and explanations for each effect. Topics include: ground-breaking site navigation, a dynamic MP3 jukebox, cartoon animation, and Flash math visual effects.

All you need to use this book is a knowlegde of the Flash MX interface, and some imagination. So sit back, relax, and open up your mind to the visual potential of Flash MX.

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!

With the release of Flash MX 2004, Macromedia gave us a brand-new Extensibility architecture layer, which let us look under the hood of Flash and extend its functionality. With the extensibility tools, which include behaviors, custom-made tools and commands, the JavaScript API (or JSFL), and the XML-to-UI API, you can literally extend Flash to do things it cannot do out of the box. Things such as adding new custom commands to the menu and customizing the tool bar, adding brand new, custom created tools. The commands could be as simple as drawing a commonly used shape on the stage, or as complex as creating an entire new Flash movie from scratch.

These features not only allow users to share code and effects more easily within the community or a production environment, but will also allow developers to package up and reuse more within Flash than was ever possible before, increasing productivity and decreasing production times. We now have the ability to take our designs further than ever before—if you have an idea for a new feature, you can just create it yourself and “plug it in”. This is the future of Flash!

Extending Macromedia Flash MX 2004 covers the entire spectrum of the extensibility architecture in Flash MX 2004. It includes in-depth tutorials on each new area—commands, tools, timeline effects, behaviors, use of the MMExecute command, executing Flash from the command line, and full coverage of XML to UI, which enables you to easily create custom user interfaces for your Flash Extensions. The final section of this book contains a comprehensive desktop reference to JavaScript Flash (JSFL), the new language that you''ll use to create your Flash extensions.