Flash

[RFH Customer: AndyHearne]

Hi All

I want to get into doing Flash sites now, I Was just wondering if anyone could offer any self starting tips as am new to this - I have Flash 5 on my computer though shortly will be getting MX 2004 on my machine and really want to start doing this for work in web design later

Many thanks

Andrew

[RFH Customer: terraqueotenaz]

Hi,

Maybe you can find these links helpful:

http://www.flashkit.com
http://www.w3schools.com/flash/
www.dynamicfactory.com


You can find a lot more on google

[RFH Reseller: Space Cowboy]

I can also reccomend a great book.

Its basic, but great for starting out. I think that people are either better at code (ie writing php/html etc) or they are better with programmes like Flash or Director.

Im great with code, but not overly keen on programmes like Flash, so I found this book very helpful.

"FLASH MX IN EASY STEPS" (yellow and purple looking).
prices £10.99 from www.ineasysteps.com for your local book store. Sometimes books are an advantage to online tutorials I feel as you have have the book open infront of you.

good luck!
dont come to me for flash help though! im a crap beginner too!

[RFH Customer: Jon Freeman]

Are people aware that Macromedia are not supporting AMD 64bit systems, at least with Linux, cutting a few thousand users (including myself on my main PC) out. The number is likely to increase as more people upgrade to these systems and there is a petition about it at http://www.petitiononline.com/lin64swf/petition.html

I would suggest that businesses using flash do at least ensure thier sites are usable without flash. I visited fylde guitars yesterday and that site was completely unusable for me - good job I wasn't a potential customer... And no, I and I suspect thousands of others will not be downgrading for the sake of flash.

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

Actually, using Flash is something that needs to be considered carefully. In most cases websites that use Flash violate Disability Acts for which you can be prosecuted. An example of this would be the guy who took the Sydney Olympics Committee to court and was awarded AU$20,000.

Details can be found here:

http://www.independentliving.org/doc...-decision.html

http://www.humanrights.gov.au/disabi...0/DD000200.htm

[jaimalchohan]

Very true SOL.

Overuseage of flash is royal pain in the butt for normal surfers, and it can be just plain stupid - like who wants to download a flash intorduction to every time they visit the same exact time? You see it once, job done.

nike.com are just as bad, you gotta donwload some whole crappy flash just to navigate to the page you wanna get to.

Also, flash ties up all your text content in .swf making it impossible to spider by search engines (but I belive they are working round it)

On the other hand, flash can be pretty damn great, like having a presentation about your site and allowing visitors the choice to see, or incorporating video into your site without having to use windows media player.

If you combine the above with captioning (look at some of the program 'demonstration' flash things on macromedia site) then its fine in terms of the DDA, but you still have to rely on people downloading and installing a plugin, so its best not to use flash for anything important, or provide a HTML based version.