Need help making an "interactive" portfolio.

[Drewbacca]

The flash interface is very awkward at places where you must label objects, in order to refer to them in your script.

Labels save your ass every single time. If you know how to use them you save yourself so much time. Never EVER use frame numbers to program ANYTHING. Because if I come in and add 40 more frames to the beginning of an animation your code has just been obsolete and you'll have to redo it. Putting a label on it means you'll just have to take the label, and scroll it back 40 frames and that's it. It's so easy.

Loading files and movies is a fucking pain in the ass.

Loading in files into Flash is easy. It can't do movies very well, and that's because Flash is an internet based medium. It's supposed to be very small after compression so that it runs smoothly. Nothing else provides much of a problem (you can import in virtually anything). If you want a movie the easiest thing to do is rip the movie open, and take a sampling of frames and just animate those back to back in flash. Same impression, a little loss of animation and a good looking result.

Designers are more graphical and just throw graphics on the stage at different frames and have a layer devoted to code at different frames. This is very awkward. I probably shouldn't have said hard in the previosus post, but awkward.

This is why they give you labels.

Java is straightforward, you just have to understand Objects(classes, interfaces, inheritance). You cannot do macro or pointer tricks like you could in C/C++ and that makes it very consistent so that everyone could read it and understand immediately. You can also do 3D and pixel effects. Can't do those in Flash can ya.

I don't think he wants to go throughout all of this just to make a good resume... that's like a years worth of work and troubleshooting from a beginners angle.

[seen]

seen's suggestion is nice, but he's a programmer... programmers (most of them) can't design to save their asshole. They want to fool around with code.

http://www.tastudio.com
http://www.wonderosity.com
http://pages.prodigy.net/tan.ax/ArtWork.html

I understand that he might not want to use Java for his project now and Flash might be a little easier to learn, and I emphasize easier, but in the long term Flash is only as extendable and adaptable as Macromedia will allow it to be. It requires the developer to play by it's very restrictive rules.

However, in the long run Java is here to stay and works or will work on anything from mobile phones to Unixes. At this time according to a report by Macromedia the Flash player leads in penitration of the desktops on the internet with Java being a close second, but I'm sure this will change soon as kits like WireFusion become more accepted by the developer community. I should know about this, I worked as a programmer at Viewpoint. Viewpoint charges $1000 a year for licensing their plug-in for commercial use by developers. Wirefusion costs $100 for students. Macromedia Flash MX costs $500. They all have very similar features and Viewpoint and Wirefusion can also intergrate Flash in their content. In the long term I think platform independence will win. It takes Macromedia years to release a player for Linux.

EDIT: Also, Labels are not enough. There has to be a presence behind every object and more definition of it's available features. There must be stronger defined types, which are not there. I tend to think of Macromedia as a design engineering company not a code engineering company, this means that they are not in the business of making logical stuff but better looking stuff.

[Spent]

There's a certain mindset you must have when you get into Flash. The main thing I got out of it is this:
You can write functions in Frames and call them objects. (Counterintuitive to a programmer, even an Object oriented one)
You can call functions by jumping from timeline to timeline using keywords like parent_.(This becomes a mess when you have multiple timelines)
The flash interface is very awkward at places where you must label objects, in order to refer to them in your script.
Flash designers and Flash programmers write actionscript differently. Some coders I've seen just write the code into a single frame and just treat that as the whole program, and have graphical elements in the library as resources, to instantiate in code later.
Loading files and movies is a fucking pain in the ass.
Designers are more graphical and just throw graphics on the stage at different frames and have a layer devoted to code at different frames. This is very awkward. I probably shouldn't have said hard in the previosus post, but awkward.

Java is straightforward, you just have to understand Objects(classes, interfaces, inheritance). You cannot do macro or pointer tricks like you could in C/C++ and that makes it very consistent so that everyone could read it and understand immediately. You can also do 3D and pixel effects. Can't do those in Flash can ya.

Yeah no shit. It makes it hard as fuck to do tutorials because everyone does it differently. As a programmer I keep all the code in one frame but it seems any tutorials I look up don't do this at all. I wish flash was more friendly to object coding.... even if it let you use headers, but I suppose the whole idea of flash is to minimize that shit.

Labels save your ass every single time. If you know how to use them you save yourself so much time. Never EVER use frame numbers to program ANYTHING. Because if I come in and add 40 more frames to the beginning of an animation your code has just been obsolete and you'll have to redo it. Putting a label on it means you'll just have to take the label, and scroll it back 40 frames and that's it. It's so easy.



Loading in files into Flash is easy. It can't do movies very well, and that's because Flash is an internet based medium. It's supposed to be very small after compression so that it runs smoothly. Nothing else provides much of a problem (you can import in virtually anything). If you want a movie the easiest thing to do is rip the movie open, and take a sampling of frames and just animate those back to back in flash. Same impression, a little loss of animation and a good looking result.



This is why they give you labels.



I don't think he wants to go throughout all of this just to make a good resume... that's like a years worth of work and troubleshooting from a beginners angle.

Well yeah, labels are great if you want to bounce between design view and code view. Problem is you cant declare labels in the code, which is frustrating as a programmer to say the least.

[Drewbacca]

seen: None of those sites besides the first's splash page have a lot of great design in them.

But if you're a programmer and you did them then that's awesome, because most programmers I've met up with don't design for beans. But that last page you linked was really bad... like something somebody would make on geocities bad.

[seen]

Heh. The last one was a portfolio site from my high school and college days. I thought you meant design in general, not just website. The site is supposed to be bad. As for the other two, for tastudio.com, I wanted it to be well designed and functional, I think I've achieved those. Wonderosity will be an e-commerce site in a couple of days, also programmed and designed by me. Not to mention that a lot of images on there were modified by me.

Let me see one of your sites Andrew, so I know what to compare my garbage to.

[Drewbacca]

I'm a print designer. I didn't say your stuff was garbage. The first one is good and by the standards of the internet you're a good designer, although the standard on the internet is typically low.

The fact that you can program is worth more money then if you could design well. Programming is a little bit more valuable because not a lot of people can do it.

[seen]

I didn't mean to be mean. I suppose it's all in the eye of the beholder. I try to stay away from techo design, even though lots of people consider it to be good.

Do you have any of your print pieces online somewhere, I would like to see them, and I promise I will not be overly critical.

[jonas]

Being his brother, I've seen his print stuff and it's pretty damn good. Check out the artist forum for some of his artist stuff (most recently his system drawings).

I'm what you call a rare.... I can program and design.

I really don't get what you guys mean about Flash being hard to use. It's really not.
But you can't expect that just because you know Java (which Flash AS is really similar too) that you can just jump in the program and be a wiz.
It takes a couple months to really get the hang of things.

I know Flash pretty well know, so if you ever have questions or programming questions... shoot me a PM. I'll answer them for ya.

As for calling movies and keeping track of timelines, I gotta defend flash and say that it's actually SUPER easy to do... but you have to have some experience with Flash first.

Just think of the variable line as a timeline, with oldest (most root) directions first and newest (most highest in the root) last.

so _root.movieclip1.movieclip2in1.movieclip3in2in1.play()

Get it? Anyways, yeah. It's really not hard at all.

And you can't make presentations like Flash in Java. See Java, you still work with rectangles and 'boxes'. Flash totally destroys that and you can make your presentation any shape and form.