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Feeling Frightfully Forever Flashless?
ghost_crab asks: "After finally getting the guts to fdisk all my M$ problems away, I find myself happier and less stressed. Now all I want for Christmas is a good, solid Flash editor, a la Macromedia's Flash, or even Adobe's Live Motion, neither of which run well with WINE. I have queried both companies for projected *nix releases, and both have instead emphatically supported the EvilEmpire. A search with Google and of SourceForge gives one little hope. Is anyone working on Flash for Linux? Open Source or Not - I would be thrilled to pay for a good Flash Editor. Is there hope for those of us who claim to be graphic designers yet cannot stomach Windows for even one more day?" Is there anyone out there working on replacements for the plugins that are only available for Windows?
Flash support on Linux has always been questionable for me. I can get it to work in Netscape Communicator. Mozilla doesn't seem to want to recognize the plugin and Konqueror? Well, Konqueror just locks up hard when it encounters Flash content...either that or it throws up lots of windows when it tries to go to Macromedia's site, which bothers me to no end. Unless other OSes gain access to richer-than-HTML-content, their users will slowly find themselves left behind in a web that's becoming more and more centered on Win32-only content, which would not be a good thing.
I am involved in a project to do distance learning for a branch of the military - guess what, it's all flash. No flash, no training. The powers that be have specified IE-only - they're a Micro$oft-only shop. I've tried to explain that there are other browsers out there, but to no avail. The only hope is that Section 508 (the requirement to provide web access to the disabled) will force them away from their IE monomania.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
From the point of view of an animation tool, I would say, Flash is good - but flawed. Also, as an alternative to java applets for a slicker web experience, it is also flawed. Version 5 was a disappointment, since all my original gripes aren't dealt with at all.
I don't know much about the downloadable file format and its limitations, but my guess is that a fresh design has the potential to address these flaws, if not remove them completely. Or maybe that would require rewriting the file format?
Hmmm... maybe the solution is some sort of Java Bean that plays Flash movies? Or is Java too slow?
These are my criticisms - they turned into a bit of a rant, sorry - Flash isn't all bad,just annoyingly imperfect. Note, I've never used Adobe's Live Motion, or Macromedia Generator.
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Shape Tweening:
This is potentially a wonderful timesaver. But if you try anything trivial, it just won't do what you expect. Even a straight line tweened into another straight line is unpredictable - the choice of which end morphs into which is decided by the editor application - apparently it maps each end of the initial line to the nearest of the final line. So, you can have it morphing one way, then move an end slightly and suddently it'll switch.
- Forms:
Another use of Flash which seems attractive is as a form of applet. Then, as well as looking a bit nicer, the form could cache data internally, and exchange only those chunks it needs to with the server via XML (which Flash5 supports). Potentially an online form would be much less clunky, and more like a standard GUI.
- Finally, the scripting - although it is mostly like javascript,it isn't quite the same, and has some very funny and undocumented scoping rules, which makes for some puzzling problems where variable x doesn't contain what you want it to, and you can't figure out why. And there is only rudimentary "print" style debugging available - so, any scripting is going to be time consuming because bugs are so easy to introduce and hard to find.
So - I probably won't get aroud to all this, but maybe some selfless sub-genius soul can do it all for nothing by next week?This problem is only slightly alleviated by the use of shape hints.
Basically, Flash tries to be too clever. It allows you to draw a shape with any number of control points, then it chooses the mapping from initial points to final points. Where this is not a one-to-one mapping it adds in points mid-morph. And one point can be mapped to two totally disparate final points. So, while a circle morphed into a square is an intuative thing to imagine, Flash may decide to morph the circle into one side of it, and have three other circles spring out from nowhere to make up the other sides. And when you get it to work, it's fragile - a slight slip and suddenly shape A morphs into shape B via a cloud of garbage. Using it to tween a walk cycle is a recipe for disaster - I don't bother any more.
So - it's fine for making some text dissolve into a cloud of polygons which reassemble themselves into something else. But that's about it.
How I would suggest it should be done is this: draw a starting shape, whatever you like. Select it, and copy it to the final frame of the morph, turning on tweening. Then modify the final version - this ensures that the number of points is constant and the choice of which morphs to which is obvious, controllable, and intuative.
Also, potentially it could improve session security by allowing client-side encryption and, hashing.
There are several problems with this: although form components (combo boxes, radio buttons, etc.) are available, they are unresizable without a redrawing all the internals. The scripting cannot manipulate graphics primitives, only movie clips, so they cannot be generated on-the-fly. A button cannot be duplicated with different text, it has to copied and manually changed. Basically the all GUI controls I've seen don't hide their complexity.
Use of other scripting languages would be nice, and presumably this could piggyback on the debugging tools available for them. This is where flash would really benefit from the pooled efforts of its users. Plus, server-side scripting tools like SWIFT would allow you to generate components on the server, relieving the graphic designer from having to redraw virtually the same component many times.