Uhhh.... This message is concerning to me, being close to a lot of really wonderful Flash developers who put out a lot of educational materials. Th is message is in two parts, a list of resources on the Web you may find helpful, and 2) my own explanation of why Flash is so tough for so many.
I. Resources I don't know how many times I have posted these links to this list, but i f you are looking for instructional materials on Flash, look here: www.moock.org - this is Colin Moock's site and it tells you how to do jus t about everything there is to do in Flash, gives examples, and is useful f or people at an introductory or advanced level. www.praystation.com - This is Joshua Davis's site and it is tremendous. U p until recently, there were like 50 tutorials on advanced actionscript programming, with examples, and they can still be ordered in a cool CD bo x set. Between these two sites, there is a lot to learn for someone patient enou gh to read (or look at) what is posted. However, if you find yourself in nee d of more... www.macromedia.com rules. There are tutorials, instructional materials, links to sites with the same, and answers for troubling questions. But I am stating the obvious. www.flashkit.com is an excellent resource. Many of the tutorials / articl es are a little dated, but there is some really good stuff there. The forums are a font of good advice, and whenever I have needed to have an answer t o a question the community has come through rather quickly. Also, most of the authors on the forums have their own Web sites with more tutorials that a re really excellent. You never know what you are going to get when you searc h through them, but there is always something useful. www.flashchallenge.com is sort of a clearinghouse for the avant garde, an d often features sites that, if you search around through them enough, expl ain what they did and how they did it. Take a few hours and explore this one for the tough questions. http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/multimedia/shockwave_flash/ has a lot of good resources on planning and deploying a Flash site, and has been helpf ul for me to move from a Flash designer to a Flash programmer. I always encourage people to look there before starting any significant project. www.popedeflash.com is full of tutorials and instructional materials in using the program. Flash's own documentation is worth reading, and explains how to use the program and interface. And, yes, I am a contractual Flash developer who integrates Flash Web sit es with backend systems (using CF, ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl, or anything else end ing or beginning with a P). I am available for project work and classroom-led instruction, and would be happy to consider anything anyone needs help on. There are about ten other people I know who do the same thing, so, shop around if you have needs. II. Differences Between Flash and CF There are two things I find give traditional developers trouble with Flas h: 1) The IDE and 2) the conceptual differences between Flash and Web programming. The IDE is a little obtuse in some regards; there is a timeline, there is a stage, and there is a library. Some people who have been developing in Fl ash for a while still don't get even these basic concepts, much less the fact that any code written is put into a floating actionscript window. Develop ers expect to write code, not draw funny symbols. Understanding how these fou r things interact within the IDE is not always easy for those used to studi o or dreamweaver. The conceptual differences are a little tougher. In OOP, you have objects , which have methods and properties. The same is true in Flash, the differe nce is you see the objects. To make an item an object, it must be defined as a symbol and placed in a layer. Taken a step further, an object's position within a layer affects how you can access it, and the layer itself is an object within the heirarchy. And the most chilling concept, new to anyone who has just developed for the Web, is that all of this occurs over the passage of time. You need to think about controlling the flow of events a s time goes on, and not just when the page is loaded. In DHTML, there are w ays to interact with events over the passage of time, but, for 99% of the DHT ML work actually being done, the passage of time on a page is meaningless except in regards to how long it takes to load a page. In Flash, conceptually, time is everpresent and you are always having to think abou t what came before and what is next. One other big thing that gives developers a lot of trouble, but that most developers do not currently have to worry about, is interacting with a database. It is really easy once someone know how to do it, but it is a p ain for a traditional developer in that Flash (not Flash MX) has no native ho oks to a database. Developers are dependent on a Web server to pull the information out and format it so Flash can understand it. Part of the gen ius behind integrating CF and Flash is that, from a programming perspective, the two are tied together anyway. Flash needs CF to pull off much of its 'interact with something besides Flash' tricks, and CF is so easy to prog ram in it makes sense to use. The fact of the matter is, it is a complex programming environment. But i t is no more complex than CF itself, with all the variable scopes, server clustering configurations, native COM integrations, administration nuance s, undocumented functions, requisite SQL and Web server knowledge, etc. In fact, it could be argued Flash is far less complex in that it primarily i s a client side technology and there is no 'Flash Server' to speak of, that needs to be administered and optimized for performance. Anyone with any specific questions about this topic can feel free to cont act me either on list or off list. I would be happy to provide CF to Flash support if anyone needs it. That's my tutorial, and hopefully it helps. Mike -----Original Message----- From: Mike Kear [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 6:31 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Flash Tutorials (WAS: a little about the future) Justin that's not fair. I don't expect someone else to do everything for me. But I think the resources I've been able to find fall FAR short of anything educational. (But since you've mentioned flashkit.com I'll have a look there. I never saw that URL before). I haven't found that the stuff that comes in the Flash 5 documentation is very useful for educational purposes. It just says do this do that, with out explaining why you're doing it. So at the end you're well equipped to d o what the documentation explains and little more. And as I said, ALL the on-line things I have found have what they call tutorials and they aren't anything of the kind. They're examples. Wade through the code if you ca n find the various parts, but there's nothing to explain what connects to w hat and where the various parts of the code are controlled from. I have foun d them an impenetrable fog for learning anything at all about connecting fl ash and CF. For contrast, have a look at anything on Hal Helms site and see how his tutorials actually teach. They actually explain things - what is happeni ng and why. There are a host of other tutorials around in ColdFusion, but so far as I've found, not a thing about Flash. I'd be grateful for even O NE simple-to-understand TUTORIAL showing connecting a Flash movie to a CF qu ery and using the data in flash. Once I've seen one step-by-step for making dynamic buttons or a dynamic nav bar or a news scroller or something I'm sure I'll be able to work out the rest. That's how I learned most of the things I do on the web. But to my knowledge, there isn't one. I'd have thought Macromedia would have produced such a thing by now, since they're going all-out to promote the dynamic uses for flash. So, there's my problem. If you can't get started, you can't do the more advanced stuff. And I never said I wanted someone to hold my hand all the way to Advanced Flash status. That's ridiculous, Justin. You say there are plenty of go od tutorials? Tell me about one. (qualification: it may well be that flashkit.com gives me what I need, but as I said I haven't seen that yet. I'll do that next). An example is NOT the same thing as a tutorial. If I was to teach you how to strip and rebuild a car engine, I wouldn't just point to a car and say "well there's one over there" and call that a lesson. That's an example. Only people with lots of prior knowledge of car engines would be able to work out what to do from that. Up till now, all the Flash material I hav e seen has been either clouded in technical jargon and incomprehensible to me, or not a tutorial at all but an example instead. Cheers, Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP WebWorks -----Original Message----- From: Justin Waldrip [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Subject: RE: a little about the future When I learned flash I picked up a book for reference and hit up flashkit.com. There are plenty of good tutorials out there. You can't expect to be walked completely through the learning process. You have to find and learn some of this stuff on your own. Otherwise everyone would be a flash guru. Thanks, Justin Waldrip Internet Technology Specialist CCS, Group Inc. -----Original Message----- From: Mike Kear [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 2:45 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: a little about the future I look forward to the day when someone - anyone - puts some kind of tutorial on the web that isn't couched in jargon. The tutorials I've tried to work through are either totally incomprehensible to me because they're expressed in jargon, or they claim to be tutorials but aren't . . . they are only examples. And you have to have extensive prior knowledge of Flash to be able to make head or tail of them. It's unusual because there is a wealth of tutorial material for beginners on ColdFusion, but no one has put anything for beginners that I've seen about flash. Is anyone aware of any beginner material on flash? (I've asked this before and was pointed towards flashcfm.com but I didn't find anything there that I would call tutorials. Only examples. "Look through them and you'll work it out" I was told. Yeah right. If you know plenty before you start. Cheers, Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP WebWorks ( p.s. with my track record, someone is now going to show me a url for somewhere I've been three times and never seen it. ) ______________________________________________________________________ Dedicated Windows 2000 Server PIII 800 / 256 MB RAM / 40 GB HD / 20 GB MO/XFER Instant Activation � $99/Month � Free Setup http://www.pennyhost.com/redirect.cfm?adcode=coldfusiona FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
