As
the Internet continues to grow with hundreds of thousands of pages being
published everyday; the battle for drawing visitors to web pages and conveying
them the message is getting harder and tougher. People like to visit the page
that is dynamic, enticing, comprehensive, and yet simple in its contents. In
this arena the tools & technologies such as Shockwave & Flash are making
life easier for cyber stakeholders.
Whether
it is a question of high quality vector animation over the web or a light GIF
animation, whether it is a cartoon film or home movie, whether it is a company's
corporate multimedia presentation or an advertisement banner, whether it is a
dynamic web application or an XML based Web-Service, whether it is a cell
phone's graphical interface or an online game, whether it is editing of sound or
streaming of video over the web, whether it is highly animated 3D website or a
very light yet eye catching web portal; The answer is Flash.
Since
the booming of Flash version 4, Macromedia Flash has evolved itself as one of
the industry's leading solution provider, While offering powerful tools for web
designers & animators, Flash's Object Oriented action scripting language
backs the developers to program with freedom & ease.
But
despite all these great features, Flash still has to improve a lot as far as the
accessibility is concerned. There are some irksome issues & problems such as
scrolling, Font clarity, keyboard accessibility etc that should be resolved for
better & easier accessibility for everyone.
Here is a brief overview of some of the
areas that you can work in Flash.
Vector
Animation
Vector
Animation is one of the main reasons of Flash's popularity. Basic drawing tools
are advance enough to give you the power of creating astonishing animations
& vector graphics while keeping small file sizes. Flash scripting adds the
advantage of developing 3D content with extensive control over the objects.
Gif
Animations & Animated Banner
With
Flash you can create eye catching Gif Animations & banners, and Flash Mx let
you create transparent banners that could stroll on your web page and disappears
while grabbing more attention of the visitors.
Cartoon
Film
Cartoon
industry has also benefited a lot from the capabilities of Flash. Cartoon movies
for several different mediums can be created in Flash. These movies are
basically created on multiple scenes, and these scenes are loaded one over
another to create movies of big lengths.
Home Movie
Flash
Mx incorporate very powerful movie handling capabilities, especially for the
web. You can import movies in different formats, add effects and export back for
viewing over different mediums. On other hand Flash Mx lets you stream your
movies over the web very efficiently.
Multimedia
Presentations
Flash's
primitive templates let you develop presentations very quickly. You can insert
sounds, graphics, movies, and bring interaction to make your presentation more
effective and attractive.
Web
Applications & Web Services
Powerful
scripting capabilities & XML integration gives you the freedom of developing
dynamic web applications or utilizing existing web services with complete
control.
Graphics
for handheld devices
With
Flash MX you can design graphics and animations for hand held devices as well.
Templates are available for different cell phones.
Games
With
Flash's Object Oriented Programming capabilities you can develop highly
interactive games both for online & offline playing.
Flash
Websites
Dynamic,
scalable, highly interactive interfaces and swift in downloading are some of
major credentials of websites created using Flash. The features like LoadMovie
allows you throw the different parts of websites as they are asked, instead of
downloading the whole website at once. Flash Mx provides you the advance feature
of "Library Objects Sharing" to make your website even more efficient
in loading over the web.
XML:Xtensible
Markup Language. A subset of SGML constituting a particular text markup language
for interchange of structured data. The Unicode Standard is the reference
character set for XML content. (See also SGML and fancy text.) XML is a
trademark of the World Wide Web Consortium.
Web
Service:
A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces
and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be
discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the
Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages
conveyed by Internet protocols.
Object
Oriented Programming:OOP
= Type-extensibility + Polymorphism. Programming paradigm beyond and including
data abstraction facilities. Basic support needed consists of a class mechanism
with inheritance and a mechanism that allows calls of member functions to depend
on the actual type of an object (in cases where the actual type is unknown at
compile time).
Video Streaming:A
method for transferring video such that it can be processed as a firm and
continuous stream. With streaming, the client can start presenting the data
before the whole file has been transmitted.
(“Tech
Word” definitions from “Google Web Definitions”)
M Tabraiz Feham - London Metropolitan University Graduate, currently working as Web-Multimedia Designer & Developer at Gettech Pakistan http://www.gettech.com.pk
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The Power of Macromedia Flash - A bird’s eye view of Flash & its capabilities
