| Home | Portfolio | Resources | Flash | Sitemap |
 

flashWEAVER

FLASH INFORMATION

 

 

| About | Tips for Flash | Flash & Search Engines |

About

The origins of Flash start with the chain of thought that started with some ideas that Jonathan Gay had at school, then college and later working for Silicon Beach Software and its successors. This started in the 1980s. In January of 1993, Charlie Jackson, Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Welsh started a small software company called FutureWave and created their first product SmartSketch. A drawing application, SmartSketch was designed to make creating computer graphics as simple as drawing on paper. Although SmartSketch was an innovative drawing application, it didn't gain enough of a foothold in its market. As the Internet began to thrive, FutureWave began to realize the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might easily challenge Macromedia's often slow-to-download Shockwave technology. In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and re-released it as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC. By that time, the company had added a second programmer Robert Tatsumi, an artist Adam Grofcsik, and a PR specialist Ralph Mittman. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early (MSN) work with the Internet. In December 1996, Macromedia acquired the vector-based animation software and later released it as Flash 1.0.

| Back to Top |

Tips for Flash

This document is a list of tips and tricks for making the processes of authoring, optimizing and deploying Flash movies easier. More information on the majority of these ideas can be found in the Using Flash manual or ActionScript Reference, or by browsing and searching the Adobe Developer Center. Although some of these tips are specific to authoring in Flash 5, most also apply to earlier versions of Flash.

Tip Categories:


Authoring and ActionScript | Productivity and workflow | Performance | Troubleshooting | Publishing

| Back to Top |

Authoring and ActionScript

  • To quickly see Flash 5 syntax for a script from a Flash 4 file, open the FLA in Flash 5. The script will be converted to the new syntax. (Do not save unless you want the FLA to be permanently converted to a Flash 5 file.)
  • Preserve rich text (HTML) formatting within editable text boxes using the Text Options panel.
  • Automatically link text blocks to URLs using the Character panel.
  • Use the onClipEvent action to assign actions directly to movie clip instances.
  • Create "smart" movie clips that can easily be reused and customized.
  • Use the Actions panel's Expert Mode setting to type ActionScript commands directly into the panel's text window or use an external code editor (for advanced users, only).
  • Create ActionScript (As) files in an external editor and use the Include action to include the code during SWF export.
  • To allow sounds to be started and stopped interactively, put the sound in a movie clip as a streaming sound. Then, use theTell Target action to start and stop the clip.
  • Use device fonts to minimize file size and download time.
  • Using full paths for URLs ensures that they will resolve to the intended path.
  • Loop short sound clips rather than using a single long clip whenever possible.
  • For large imported sounds use the Stream Sync setting and stretch the sound over a number of frames.
  • Use bitmap images sparingly. To reduce the file size added by bitmap included in the Flash movie change the JPEG Quality setting in the Publish Settings dialog.
  • To retain definition and clarity of imported bitmaps, disable smoothing for that image only.
  • To perform shape effects on text, use the Modify > Break Apart command to change the text from a font to a shape outline.
  • Leave a few empty frames at the beginning of all your movies, to make adding frames before your content easier.
  • Control a movie clip or a movie that was loaded with the Load Movie action by using the Tell Target action.

| Back to Top |

Productivity and workflow

  • Save panel layouts for different tasks; one set for drawing and designing, another for scripting, and so forth.
  • Use the Movie Explorer (Window > Movie Explorer) to easily navigate a movie structure and make modifications to the file.
  • Create custom shortcut keys (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts...) to increase productivity.
  • Launch an image editing application directly from the Library palette to edit an imported bitmap.
  • Hit the TAB key to show/hide the current panel set.
  • Use the Edit Multiple Frames option to edit content in several frames at the same time.
  • Give layers of the Timeline intuitive names.

| Back to Top |

Performance

  • Use Shared Libraries to contain media elements common to several loaded movies.
  • Use font symbols to keep font data separate from individual movie files, thereby decreasing file size and download time.
  • When incorporating sound, use MP3 files, the smallest sound format, whenever possible.
  • Use symbols, animated or otherwise, for every element that appears more than once.
  • Limit the area of change in each keyframe; make the action take place in as small an area as possible.
  • Break larger movies up into smaller movies and join them together using the Load Movie action.
  • For better performance, avoid animating bitmap images. Use bitmap images as background or static elements.
  • Use the Bandwidth Profiler and the Show Streaming option to simulate the playback of a movie over different connection speeds.
  • Streaming performance of Flash movies can be enhanced by reducing the amount of information in the first few frames of the movie.
  • Using simple vector graphics will yield better playback than bitmap images.
  • Use the 'Generate Size Report' option in the Publish Settings dialog as a tool to help optimize movie playback.
  • Test your Flash movies early, often, and on all browsers and platforms that you anticipate visitors will use to view your site.
  • Flash movie playback can vary with processor speed; test the movie on computers of varying speeds.
  • Use the lowest acceptable bit-depth and sample rate for imported sounds in order to achieve the smallest file size.
  • Complexity can slow framerate, even if the movie size is small. Minimize the number of alphas, gradients, masks and tweens you use at any given time.

| Back to Top |

Troubleshooting

  • Use the Debugger to troubleshoot problems with a movie file. Use it to change variables and instance properties in real time - either in the Flash authoring environment or a Web browser.
  • Use the for...in action to loop through the properties of movie clips, including child movie clips.
  • To get help on using a specific ActionScript command within Flash, do the following: Select the action in the Action panel's Toolbox list, then click the Help button at the top of the panel.
  • Use editable text fields in guide layers to track variable values as an alternative to using the Debugger.
  • Search or browse the Flash Developer Center to find late valuable technical information.
  • Often the best sources of information are your peers. Take advantage of the Flash community, by searching for and sharing information Flash online forums and at third party Flash resources.
  • Save multiple versions of your movie as you work. That way, you can revert to the most recent backup version if problems arise during the authoring process.
  • Create small sample files to learn, troubleshoot and refine design methods. After learning and experimenting with implementation, apply those methods to specific projects.

| Back to Top |

Publishing

  • The HTML Templates used by Flash can be modified to streamline and personalize the publishing process. In addition to Flash's Template Variables, standard HTML or other tags can also be inserted.
  • If shapes or text appear jagged when playing a movie check to see if the the QUALITY attribute of the OBJECT and EMBED tags is set to HIGH.
  • Flash movies can scale to fill the entire browser window or can play within a specific area. Use the HEIGHT and WIDTH parameters in the Publish Settings dialog to choose one or the other.
  • If you cannot view the Flash movies off a Web server then the server's MIME types might need to be set, so that it recognizes the SWF file format and loads the appropriate plug-in.
  • Bitmaps can distort if you allow the movie to scale within the HTML page. To avoid this, use an exact pixel HEIGHT and WIDTH for the dimensions rather than percentages.

| Back to Top |

Flash & Search Engines

Giving search engines something to read
You don’t necessarily have to pick through the HTML code for your Web page to evaluate how search-engine-friendly it is. You can find out a lot just by
looking at the Web page in the browser. Determine whether you have any text on the page. Page content — text that the search engines can read — is essential, but many Web sites don’t have any page content on the front page and often have little or any on interior pages. Here are some potential problems:

  • Having a (usually pointless) Flash intro on your site
  • Embedding much of the text on your site into images, rather than relying on readable text
  • Banking on flashy visuals to hide the fact that your site is light on content

If you have these types of problems, they can often be time consuming to fix. (Sorry, you may run over the one-hour timetable by several weeks.)

Eliminating Flash
Huh? What’s Flash? You’ve seen those silly animations when you arrive at a Web site, with a little Skip Intro link hidden away in the page. Words and pictures
appear and disappear, scroll across the pages, and so on. You create these animations with a product called Macromedia Flash.
I suggest that you kill the Flash intro on your site. I have very rarely seen a Flash intro that actually served any purpose. In most cases, they are nothing
but an irritation to site visitors. (The majority of Flash intros are created because the Web designer likes playing with Flash.)

You can employ multimedia on a Web site in some useful ways. I think it makes a lot of sense to use Flash, for instance, to create demos and presentations.
However, Flash intros are almost always pointless, and search engines don’t like them because Flash intros don’t provide indexable content.
Anytime you get the feeling it would be nice to have an animation, or when your Web designer says you should have some animation, slap yourself twice
on the face and then ask yourself this: Who is going to benefit: the designer or the site visitor? If that doesn’t dissuade you, have someone else slap you.

| Back to Top |