April 27, 2005

• Do you have any experience in the application already? Do you have any samples of the type of thing you would like to accomplish? I have been using Flash since it was future splash (oOOo street cred) and I teach it at a local Collage, so I know a thing or two. Depending on your current level I can suggest some site,books etc... Also, how much time do you want to invest in learning? Flash is quite a complex application that can do some rather cool stuff if you put the time in.
• I've got some HTML chops, although I slack and use Dreamweaver mostly these days. (Notepad & FTP days are over i guess) No experience w/ flash at all. I'd like to be able to use it for (a) an intro screen (skippable) and (b) navigation. Something along the lines of Homestar. Although it remains to be seen if I'll actually use it for that, that's the level I'd like to be able to get to.
• Oh and realistically I'd say I'd like to put in . . . eight hours of learning? Is that realistic? As long as it takes to get to where I want to be I suppose. I know that I don't work well with the dry O'Reilly type books, but I tend to blow right through the Dummies books, and both of them never speak explicitly to what I'm trying to do exactly.
• 8 hours might not get you very far... It's a really deep program... Learning Actionscript is like learning Java at this point and you'll kinda need to if you want to do anything beyond making buttons that wiggle when you mouse over them. I have had good results (shameless self link) from the books (this one in particular) put out from macromedia themselves. The "bible" books are more for reference, I don't know why everyone goes right to them... More important is utilizing the many sites and resources out there... (totally random selection. some useful, some not so much...) Google knows even more of them.
• Those are all good recomendations. Based on your stated goals, you should focus on animation (motion/shape tweens) simple timeline scripting(gotoAndPlay/gotoAndStop) and movieClip control. These three techniques are pretty common, and are all that are required to build page like the runners homepage(in terms of techniques, you still need to get the content). In terms of other applications you can use it again depends on your comfort level. You can develope all of your content in Flash, or import it from Illustraitor or Photoshop. You amy also want to give livemotion a whirl. A far superior animation tool, especially if you know After Effects. its main weakness is scripting, but it supports the kind of thing you want to accomplish. Good Luck
• I've had good luck with Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guides. Clear presentation and a bit of a sense of humour in most cases. They've got a huge series of guides - I've got at least six of them - and are reasonably priced.
• Any reference to the song "Flash" by Queen is prohibited by the Ear Police. Agreed. Your compliance with this directive will save every one of us. Thanks in advance.
• I highly recommend this book - an concise and well written Flash reference.
• THanks all - I'm off to start the learnin' up of infomation. What I'm guessing (and will discover soon, I suppose) is that there's no free way to do flash animations. I.e. I'll need to buy something to get going? something about that makes me not want to do it . .but the_bone, you're welcome. And take a lap.
• Can you tell us more about what you're trying to do? I did my whole site in Flash, with a lot of help from Flashkit.com but it's made it kind of clunky and tough to update. There may be something better for what you're trying to do, is all I'm saying.
• the_bone, you're welcome. And take a lap. That, like, the second time in two days. Thanks, Coach!
• Can you tell us more about what you're trying to do well it's gotten around to both of my friends that I can string two tags together and suddenly I'm registering domains and putting up websites. I figured I needed to know how to do flash for when they say "hey do some of that cartoon stuff" or whatever. the_bone: don't mess with the bull young man, or you'll get the horns TM
• ah-aaaaaaaaah!
• If you learn well by tutorial, This is the book for you. It shows you how to do everything, rather than having to just read about how to do everything. It saved my life in my ActionScript class when I didn't even know how to do basic flash. Good luck!
• thanks all - how about some links to flash that youse guys have done?
• I rarely do this, but; Here is a sample of my work