28 May 2003American Idle
"Flashed" with Success

I stayed up all night last night working on the flash intro to the site and it is working like a charm, finally (sort of - the images sometimes still get stuck loading, but at least they load in the right place and in the right order).

This was not easy to pull off. Flash is a pain in the ass to work with. It's one of the least user friendly programs out there. And the help documentation that Macromedia provides is dogshit. That aside, it's serious fun to play around with and make animation.

In the latest version, Flash MX, Macromedia has included dynamic capabilities, which is how I solved the loading problem that I was having with the first go around. All the images in the movie are loaded dynamically off a server so the .swf file, the actual file that contains the animation, is tiny, only 16K or so. Before it was over 250K, which is large, especailly for the narrowband connections in Samoa.

The really beautiful thing about the dynamic images is that I never have to edit the flash file ever again. If I want to change the images that appear in the movie, all I have to do is upload new movies. I love it!

Posted by andrew at May 28, 2003 02:58 PM


Comments

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?


TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.americanidle.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/165

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference:
'"Flashed" with Success'.