Back to the Timeline

If you hadn’t been checking recently, FE has been doing a series on Timeline management. It covers both the IDE in the Flash Authoring Environement and ActionScript to manage and control timeline features. There are quite a few tips and tricks I have provided along the way. I wanted to make it different from any other tutorials that have covered this topic in the past. I delivered it with the content I felt would help anyone needing to use the timeline in real-world situations. The lessons also cover important topics such as dealing with framerate, code organization on the timeline and useful alghorithms to manipulate tweens on the screen. If you haven’t already done so check it out. (This series is available to members). Click here to visit.

Q&A

Many of you have emailed me with similar questions, so I thought I would share with you some of the questions and responses to them.

Q: Will you be doing videos on Flex 2.0?

A: Yes. Flex 2 and ActionScript 3.0 will be covered in future the articles and lessons. As you now may now be aware, Flash 9 will also provide the ability to write AS3 code as well. The siding advantage of using Flex 2 over Flash 9 is its code editor support and debugger for AS3. I don’t think the editor in Flash 9 is going to really improve much more than what you have today, so AS3 specific topics will be covered in Flex 2 as apposed to Flash 9 since Flash 9 is currently in Alpha.

Q: What’s next on the list of tutorials?

A: I will still be continuing on the Back to Basics series for a while. This series will prove to be invaluable for anyone who wants an in-depth look at the nature of how things work in Flash. I cannot really call it a beginner’s set of tutorials because in the process I am also providing professional tips and solutions that have taken years to discover and master. I really like this series because it is the foundation for everything Flash-related that you will do in the future. The next video set I am going to cover are data containers in Flash: Booleans, Strings, Objects, Arrays, XML & MovieClips. There are so many different ways and rules for using these primitives. Since I use them in the lessons all the time in so many different ways, I thought it would be good to go over how and why I use them the way I do. This will be a real eye-opener for developers to see because there will be some amazing insights provided.

Q: What is happening with Banshee Components and Framework?

A: I have partnered with another company and their component framework, XT. So, Banshee and XT are being merged into a single framework and component set. We both had technologies that complimented each other and saw it best to merge them rather than compete. An official website will be available shortly regarding its progress. The nice thing about the merge is that it will offer all the features I have been promoting but on steroids. It is also now being developed and maintained by a team of developers and designers as opposed to just myself. Overall, it is a good move for the product. More information regarding it will be posted later.

Blog

If you don’t know by now, you probably do now, Flash Extensions has a Blog. I am going to be placing all articles regarding lessons in the blog from now on. I will also be working on porting over previous articles to the Blog. The articles themselves will always be to everyone. The video tutorials, however, are only available to members unless otherwise indicated.

Release Flash 9 Player, Flex 2.0 and Flash 9 Alpha

Today Adobe released a new Player and Flex 2.0. The last significant releases that had this impact would be Flash 6 (AS 2) and Flash 4 (AS 1 environment). I have permenant links to these areas on my blog where you can use to access them.

Hope you have a great week! Thanks for the emails!

Rob Taylor