This morning, I joined hundreds of thousands of people around the world for an online streaming presentation of Adobe Creative Suite 4. My overall impression . . . Well, I guess I'm hard to impress.
For years, the advice has always been that if you want good search engine results, then you don't want to create your website entirely with Flash, because search engines have no way of effectively indexing swf files. Well, all of that is about to change.
To be honest, I haven't had time yet to check out the new Beta release of Flash Player 10, but there are a lot of exciting new features that every Flash programmer should be excited about. Foremost among the new features is the native support for new 3D Classes within ActionScript. Flash Player 10 still uses ActionScript 3.0, but it also supports a number of new classes and methods that will make working with 3D a walk in the park.
Since I haven't had time to check out these new features, I'll have to point you elsewhere for tutorials. On the FlashAndMath.com website, there is a great tutorial to help you get started playing around with 3D for Flash Player 10.
In case you don't already know this, it's very easy for someone to take your Flash (swf) files off your website and decompile them in order to customize them and use them for themselves. For many people, this isn't much of an issue, but I've gotten several questions lately regarding ways to secure and protect swf files, and I've found a website that has a solution.
swfProtect offers software that allows you to encrypt your swf files so that anyone trying to decompile your work will not be able to. I haven't tried the software myself, because I don't really have any files that I need to protect, but if this is a concern for you, it's at least worth a look. They even have a free trial version of the software so you can try it out for yourself.
As I watched the goat leap gracelessly into the air, I thought to myself, "What an amateurish attempt at animation!" Where's the anticipation, when the goat rears back before its jump? Where's the squash and stretch? Where's the follow through? Why was this done at such a low frame rate?
But then again, what more can you expect from an animation that was created over five thousand years ago?
Lynda.com's FlashForward Conference has been a constant spring of refreshment for me over the last few years, and I was recently disheartened to hear rumors of its pending demise. Thankfully, however, the rumors were just that.
Minutes ago, I received an email from Lynda herself (okay, so she sent it to everyone on her mailing list) assuring me that FlashForward would indeed live on through a new owner by the name of Beau Ambur, CEO of Metaliq, an interactive application development company. I don't know much about Beau, but Lynda seems to speak highly of him, so he can't be all that bad.
Anyways, if you've never been to a FlashForward conference before, I highly recommend going sometime. Every time I go, I'm reminded all over again why I love Flash, and I'm just pleased as punch to hear that it will continue.
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