Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8 offer several ways to include animation and special effects in your document. For example, you can create tweened animations using the Timeline and Flash workspace, automated Timeline effects (by making selections in a dialog box), or ActionScript...

Open source must in some way present itself as a bit of a dichotomy to Adobe, now that it has acquired Macromedia. It is generally accepted that open source solutions foster innovation and adoption. However, with an open file format and a free player, is it possible that some projects ...

Perhaps you've heard of Flex, maybe you've even dabbled with Flash, or you have one or more Flash developers on your team. Nevertheless, you aren't sure how Flash and Flex fit together.

We live in a communications world. The number of software solutions that can provide communication between users grows every day. In the future it's likely that applications unable to provide this ability will be known as 'traditional applications,' shunned because of their lack of ope...

Flash and Digital Rights Management is a topic not often discussed. In fact I tried to do a little research on the topic for this article and could turn up very little. I must start this article off by discussing why I wanted to get digital rights manament (or DRM as all the cool peopl...

Flash in its essence began as a tool for creating vector animations on the web. The Flash Player was designed specifically as a lightweight animation viewer to display those moving vector objects which are in their simplest form, mathematical equations that describe complex shapes made...

We probably all know by now how to play a progressive FLV without Flashcom:

If you are a visual programmer working in environments like Visual Basic, Delphi, REAL basic, or PowerBuilder, you may hesitate to take advantage of the benefits of Flash because of concerns about learning a new, unfamiliar environment. To show how easily you can transfer your existing...

Why is FreeHand not part of Studio 8? What do productivity tools Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2 add? What about Flex? Why has the product name changed from Studio MX 2004? What are the new video features in Studio 8? How about the role of Flash Player 8? These, and sundry other question...

Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX (popularly referred to as Flashcom) is becoming an increasingly popular platform for the efficient delivery of streaming video to large audiences. Many content delivery networks such as Speedera and Vitalstream have teamed up with Macromedia to ...

Flash is one of the great Internet technology stories. It began in 1995 at a small tech startup called FutureSplash, which developed a remarkably efficient solution for delivering rich animation over narrowband Internet connections. Macromedia acquired FutureSplash in 1997 and establis...

About a year ago, I had a long chat with Mike Downey, the Flash Product Manager, regarding the launch of Flash MX Professional 2004. Mike was still stinging from much of the criticism related to the that launch, and the gist of the conversation was 'never again.' He was adamant that if...

I have heard so many people moan on the many community forums and mailing lists about the onLoad event handler not working and although I have already posted a fix for the problem.

With our tunes playing and the volume knob to about the 3:00PM position (I prefer it loud) lets get started. First you need to create some content to drag. I just made some nice looking mockup boxes for now.

In this article I will explain how Flash Panels fit into the grand scheme of extending Flash MX 2004. We'll also discuss some of the benefits and pitfalls you may encounter when using Flash Panels in your day to day work.

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts asso...

Design patterns are standardized solutions to common programming problems. It's good to use design patterns for two simple reasons. First, it's faster (and many times better) to implement a time-tested design pattern as opposed to developing a custom solution. Second, collaboration wit...

Not long ago developers and IT professionals looked at Flash with disdain. The anti-Flash camp had contempt for its lack of accessibility, minimal standards compliance, and of course there was the infamous back button debacle. But things have changed. Large companies are embracing Flas...

When Disney closed the doors of its Orlando, Florida animation studio in January 2004, many saw it as the death knell for traditional hand-drawn animation. Of the 18 big-studio animated films to be released this year, only a handful will be done in 2D animation and of those, only a cou...

In Part One of this two-part article ('Skinning the V2 ProgressBar component ,' MXDJ vol 3 issue 4) we did what we set out to do, but I just can't bear to leave the skinning-a-Button issue unresolved.

Perhaps one of the easiest components to overlook in Flash MX 2004 is tucked away in the UI Components section of the Components Panel, and carries the uninteresting name NumericStepper. Perhaps you're developing experimental effects and require on-screen controls to alter dynamic feed...

Flash Elements were introduced in Dreamweaver MX 2004. Flash Elements allow you to quickly add Flash content to your page from within Dreamweaver. Currently the only flash element that comes packaged with Dreamweaver is the Image Viewer. The Image Viewer quickly assembles a highly cust...

I've been playing around with the Tree Component in great depth and have found a few discrepancies which I feel are major pit holes. After a lot of searching, it was also clear that many other developers have come across the same issues. My main gripe: the tree component's support for ...

This article explains how to completely change the graphical appearance of (i.e., 'to skin') the V2 ProgressBar component. Before we begin, a warning: the techniques described in this article apply to the ProgressBar and to many other V2 components, but not to all. Some components requ...

Captivate came along at a time when I was in a 'tight spot' as a web developer. Imagine the words 'tight spot' said with all the ironic fret of George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill in the film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and you will begin to identify with my situation.

What do 'fantastic,' 'fabulous,' and 'fun' have in common? All three of these words describe the creative work you can do with Flash, Fireworks, and FreeHand. The Macromedia MX2004 Studio 'Fab Three' together give you the tools to create art and animations for the web and other media. ...

In Part One (MXDJ, vol. 3 issue 2) we looked at one of three different ways to consume a Web service, here we look at two other ways and some of the pros and cons of each approach. In this next example we'll explore using data binding in a different way from Pt. 1, by not relying on th...

With increasing frequency, employees (called 'crewmembers') at JetBlue Airways are being asked to fulfill some of their training requirements online. The aviation industry is policy-intensive, and airline employees - everyone from flight attendants, to pilots, to customer service and g...

This is not Web Services 101. This is not an introduction to Flash. This is not art. This is not a love song. Now that that's out the way, be prepared to bind data like there's no tomorrow.

Over the past year, we have rededicated ourselves to getting broad community feedback on our future development plans and efforts. Some of that is done privately through beta lists, customer advisory boards, and customer visits. Increasingly, some of it will be done publicly. To this e...

In Part 1 I introduced you to very basic concepts of ActionScript 2.0. We looked at some simple programs such as setting a variable, basic object-oriented concepts, and some basic interaction with the Flash MX 2004 Interface.

Staff within Macromedia 'tried to anticipate various reactions' to its recent decision to package Yahoo! Toolbar with its Flash player, John Dowdell - author of the popular online 'JD's Forum' -blogged yesterday. He is open to the possibility, he wrote, that there may be 'a potential s...

Akamai Technologies, which already serves several gigabits per second of downloadable Flash content - including several hundreds of megabits per second of Flash video traffic - has in conjunction with Macromedia just announced the immediate availability of Akamai Streaming for use with...

This month the topic is Web services. Previous articles looked at the RIA, component-based development, XML, and the role of ColdFusion as a data source. In this issue we examine the role of Web services in RIA development.

Flash ActionScript has come a long way since Flash 5. However, never has the leap been as great as with the release of Flash MX 2004.

It wasn't so long ago that video and the Web were at odds. Video was becoming more beautiful and entertaining through new post-production techniques. And with the proliferation of video editing software and high-speed buses like FireWire, creative videos started coming from all types o...

The challenge of enterprise-level collaboration is to make data sharing effective and keep costs down. Applications built with C++ or Java must be delivered to the end-users' desktops along with some piece of the collaboration software. That can be a headache for IT departments because...

What does data look like? To a stockbroker, data might appear as a stream of company names and stock values. A database administrator probably sees data as a series of tables. A developer working in XML might see data as a tree like structure. This article is all about data. We will lo...

Sites as various as the J.K. Rowling Web site and a site from The Wharton School were among the winners of the MAX 2004 Awards, announced today in New Orleans by Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess. Full results here.

Perhaps you've heard of Flex, maybe you've even dabbled with Flash, or you have one or more Flash developers on your team. Nevertheless, you aren't sure how Flash and Flex fit together.