Adobe Flash, or easy only Flash, called format SWF (Shockwave Flash, as ’swifi’) of Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Flash Professional, the program for development multimedia content for platform ‘Adobe Engagement Platform’ (such as web-applications, games and cartoons).

Correctly it would saying the next, Adobe Flash – it is the framework for creation applications for Flash Platform, and besides there are exist other tools (frameworks): Adobe Flex Builder, Flash Development Tool (FDT), etc.

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Flash-applications making with the help of ActionScript – programming language. If source code do not contain  the language instuction then during the compilation generated some basic code on ActionScript (you may see it in Flash-bytecode). Then it’s exist basic clip, inherited from MovieClip, which is reproduced. Framework Adobe Flash is direct for designers, animators, though it’s has possibilities to write valuable code. Flex Builder, FDT, oriented to programming and there it’s no interface tools for animations, visualization.

Flash using programming language AtionScript, based on ECMAScript.

History of Flash.

Nowadays the last version of program is Adobe Flash 10 (CS4), with version of language ActionScript 3.0; last version Flash Player – 10.

3D-runners.

    * Papervision3D — Open Source. Vectorial drawing by triangles.
    * Away3D —  Include to project Papervision3D. Open Source. Also vectorial drawing.
    * Sandy — More easy in using then Papervision3D. Open Source. Also vectorial drawing.
    * FFilmation AS3 Flash Isometric Engine — isometric runner. Open Source.
    * Playing platform Alternativa Platform — Platforms for 3D games. Vectorial drawing by triangles.
    * ZenBullets Flash Isometric 3D Game Engine — isometric playing platform.

There are exist playing runner, which are using Flash as base. There velocity and quality of working are too low. The main cause of it – it is impossibility to use tools of DirecrX or OpenGL, that’s why it is carry out whole emulation of all 3D-algorithmes. There are no supporting of hard acceleration, multinuclear processors, that also lower velocity of runner. Nowadays it’s occur some improvemant in quality and velocity of 3D working, because the Adobe including the using 3D-effects to new Adobe Flash Player 10.
   

Valant actively uses Flash in development. 

Shortage of Flash.

Using Flash for distribution of text information hinder from it’s indexing by searching systems. However it is exist greate number of ways to decide this problem.

Closeness.

In 2008 May Adobe Systems declared about discovery of specification of SWF and video container FLV for using on more loyal conditions, as part of ‘Open Screen Project’, oriented to creation total area of Flash on all devices.

Alternatives.

Also there are using JavaFX (Sun) or Silverlight (Microsoft) in the presence of plugins.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Flash, Flash Player, JavaScript, SWF

 Photoshop CS4.
 

 
 Company Adobe release new Adobe Photoshop CS4. It’s usually interesting to know what is new in newest version of Photohop. So, what is new in Photoshop CS4?

Valant

 Palette ‘Mask’ in Photoshop CS4.

 Use perfected panel ‘Masks’, which include greate collection of instruments for creating masks, changing it’s  thickness and shading. You could easy make your own masks or change existing masks.


Improvement of palette ‘Correction’.

Since it’s now exist new comfortable toolbar for correction colour and tone of hand-picked image, the greate choice of various styles and tool for control image – you may make in full size. All this is thanks to improvment palette ‘Correction’.

Automize the image imposition.

Using ‘Automatic layers imposition’ you make a single whole image of lump of analogous photos. You will contented of result because this command corrects defects at shoot, carefully mix colours and works with shadow.

The latest versions help in making 3D graphic.

Yours abilities in conversion two-dimensional images to real three-dimensional models became unlimited! All this achieved simple ways: transformation of gradients, making intensity and volume to text layers, abilities for transfer to 3D formats and with the help of newest technology for getting quality for print.

Improvement of images handling in RAW format.

Images in RAW format became more quality thanks to module Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 5. It’s uphold more 180 models of photocamera, provide correction, vignetting after framing, handling images in TIFF and JPEG formats.

Editing properties of 3D objects.

Using optimize interface without bothering windows, you may not only editing three-dimensional images and move it. And besides to improve the quality of image, changing stream of lights, starting materials and survey of camers, applying the movemant of three-dimensional axes.

Acceleration of turning.

Only one clicking on mouse and your canvas roted to necessary angle for it’s previewing. You do not need to bend your neck for drawing of details.

Very easy and smooth rolling of image and ranging.

Now tto get across from one part of working field to another bacame very easy. New functions of ranging and rolling answer for this. Allways saving legible image and even at maximum increasing. It’s thanks to new comfortable option – ‘Pixel net’.

In Photoshop CS4 optimize the autoalignment of layers.

Your works became more realistic, because of function autoalignment of layers get across on new level. Now you may change, turn and deform layers as you want. Also there is exist way of spherical alignment of image for experts of panoramic survey.

New for ranging of image.

Use exclusive option ranging with maintenance of image for easing your labour at correction and reorganization of composition. You may leave the most  important details do not changing the scale of new image. One clicking and you don’t need long and laborious work with frame and retouch.

Perfection of depth of sharpness.

You may unite in one image several images with different colour spectrum, focal, exposition. The result surpass all expectations as saved basic tone and colour of image but sharpness became depth.

Innovations in editing animation graphic.

Using easy keyboard abbreviation to edit animation graphic becam east. To synchronize digital video effects with audio plots also easy because of tools of audiosynchronize.

Automatize the intagration with other Adobe programs.

To work with Adobe Photoshop CS4 became more interesting in consequence of automatize of interaction between Photoshop Extended and other applications of Adobe, including Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Professional.

One more improved technology Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom buy separatly. It’s give the best fit for making panoramic survey. Choose as many as you need separatly frames in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, automatically open in Photoshop CS4 and unite to panoramic, image with diapasone (HDR) or to multi-layer document of Photoshop. And that’s all!

Improved tools for correction of colour.

In Adobe Photoshop CS4 improved tools for correction of colours – ‘Lightener’, ‘Darkener’ and ‘Sponge’. They are intend for intellectual colours changing and selection of tint.

New in working with files.

You choose type of window for conveniences to work with many open files. It is can be a window looks like inset or mosaic order of open images.

 Valant actively uses Photoshop in development.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop CS4

Here’s what our Flex Application will look like:

How does the example work?

When you click the Load Blog Entries button my RSS feed entries are loaded into the datagrid. When you click on a row in the datagrid the corresponding entry is loaded into the text area.

 Valant actively uses this technology in development.

Step 1 - XML and Application declaration.

Start your XML file with a XML declaration, and an mx:Application tag:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml">

Step 2 – Define your HTTPService.

Our first step is to define the HTTPService that we will use to connect to my RSS feed. We will give an id of httpRSS so we can refer back to it.

<mx:HTTPService id="httpRSS" url="http://www.petefreitag.com/rss/" resultFormat="object" />

Step 3 – Enclose your controls within a panel.

A panel is simply a container to put controls (the DataGrid, TextArea, and Button) into. We are going to set some attributes on the panel as well, it should be pretty easy to figure out what they mean:

<mx:Panel id="reader" title="Pete Freitag’s Blog Reader" width="500">

Step 4 - Define your DataGrid.

In the attributes of the DataGrid we are using dynamic variables or expressions denoted by the curly braces {variable}.

<mx:DataGrid id="entries" width="{reader.width-15}" dataProvider="{httpRSS.result.rss.channel.item}" cellPress="{body.htmlText=httpRSS.result.rss.channel.item[entries.selectedIndex].
description}">
  <mx:columns>
    <mx:Array>
      <mx:DataGridColumn columnName="title" headerText="Title" />
      <mx:DataGridColumn columnName="pubDate" headerText="Date" />
    </mx:Array>
  </mx:columns>   
</mx:DataGrid>

Ok so there is a lot going on there, first so I’ll break it down a bit:

width

We are setting the width dynamically based on the size of its parent panel reader, specifically we set it to be 15 pixels narrower than its panel.

dataProvider

In the dataProvider attribute we are binding the data for this grid to the result of our HTTPService named httpRSS. More specifically we want to bind each item tag in our XML file to a row in the datagrid. Since the item tags are inside the rss and channel tags we refer to it the array of items as httpRSS.result.rss.channel.item.

cellPress

Now we just need to set the value of our TextArea which we will define in the next step to the rss item description, so we simply assign that value to the htmlText property of the TextArea (whose name will be body).

columns

Now we need to define which columns we are to display in the datagrid. The columnName must match the tag name that we want it to correspond to.

Step 5 – Define the TextArea.

Use the mx:TextArea tag to define the text area where the entry body will go:

<mx:TextArea id="body" editable="false" width="{reader.width-15}" height="300" />

Step 6 - Create a Button.

Our last control to define is a Button which will simply tell the HTTPService to make the request.

<mx:Button label="Load Blog Entries" click="{httpRSS.send()}" />

In the click event handler we call the send() method on our HTTPService object.

Step 7 – Close Panel and Application.

Simply close some tags, and your done!

</mx:Panel>
</mx:Application>

One Caveat

Flex 1.5 uses a proxy to invoke HTTPService calls, and other remote service calls, and for security reasons the proxy will block the HTTP call. You add the RSS feed url (or simply http://*) to the proxy whitelist in your flex-config.xml. See this KB article for more info.
Complete MXML source code:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml">

 <mx:HTTPService id="httpRSS" url="http://www.petefreitag.com/rss/" resultFormat="object" />

 <mx:Panel id="reader" title="Pete Freitag’s Blog Reader" width="500">

  <mx:DataGrid id="entries" width="{reader.width-15}" dataProvider="{httpRSS.result.rss.channel.item}" cellPress="{body.htmlText=httpRSS.result.rss.channel.item[entries.selectedIndex].
description}">
    <mx:columns>
      <mx:Array>
        <mx:DataGridColumn columnName="title" headerText="Title" />
        <mx:DataGridColumn columnName="pubDate" headerText="Date" />
      </mx:Array>
    </mx:columns>   
  </mx:DataGrid>

  <mx:TextArea id="body" editable="false" width="{reader.width-15}" height="300" />

  <mx:Button label="Load Blog Entries" click="{httpRSS.send()}" />
 
 </mx:Panel>

valant

Technorati Tags: application, Flex, XML

map and grep are two utilities that are extremely useful if you know how to use them, but more often that not, I see more convoluted code written to achieve the effect of these functions.

Historically, I believe that John Resig was inspired by the Perl functions of the same name – which are basic building blocks of the Perl programming language. Let’s look at how you can use these functions.

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Map

Map comes in two flavours: $.map(array, callback) and $(‘element’).map(callback). The first allows you to iterate vanilla arrays, and the second to loop through elements.

The $.map function returns a plain array, where as $(‘element’).map returns a jQuery wrapped array, which means you still have access to functions like each.

A really powerful use of map to pull out a comma separated list of element IDs from a list of anchor element, as often explained by ajpiano on the #jquery IRC channel:

var panelIds = $('a').map(function() {    return this.hash;  }).get().join(",")  

// returns: #tabA,#tabB,#tabC

This can be useful to collect the list of tabs the links are related to as seen in the jQuery look: Tim Van Damme tutorial last month.

Grep

grep is similar to $.map in that it will return an array. It’s only available in the $.grep flavour, and allows you to create new arrays when a certain condition is met (which is defined in the callback).

Note that in the this keyword is a reference to the window object, rather than the current item as you might expect.

A contrived example could be to create a comma separated list of IDs that start with the word ‘tab’:

var g = $.grep($('a').get(), function (item) {   

  return /^#tab/.test(item.hash); });  var panelIds = $.map(g, function (item) {

     return item.hash }).join(',');

These are pretty useful utilities for specific problem.

 Valant uses actively jQuery in developming new features.

Technorati Tags: grep, jQuery, map

Robin Williams

It is easy to make a dorky web page. It’s also easy to make a very nice, clean, professional-looking web page even if you don’t have much design experience. Often the difference, even for beginning designers, is simply a matter of eliminating certain features that are guaranteed to make a page look amateurish. Go through the list of things that people–designers and non-designers–from around the country have cited as the things that make the difference between a well-designed and a poorly designed web page.

Keep in mind that the point of eliminating bad features is not just to make the page prettier, but to communicate more effectively.

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Below are features that can make a web design look dorky. These are not just my personal opinions, but are ideas I have collected from speaking to groups around the country. Examples of many of these features and more detailed explanations of the problems and solutions are in my book, The Non-Designer’s Web Book, written with John Tollett.

Backgrounds

Default gray color

Color combinations of text and background that make the text hard to read

Busy, distracting backgrounds that make the text hard to read

 

Text

Text that is too small to read

Text crowding against the left edge

Text that stretches all the way across the page

Centered type over flush left body copy

Paragraphs of type in all caps

Paragraphs of type in bold

Paragraphs of type in italic

Paragraphs of type in all caps, bold, and italic all at once

Underlined text that is not a link

 

Links

Default blue links

Blue link borders around graphics

Links that are not clear about where they will take you

Links in body copy that distract readers and lead them off to remote, useless pages

Text links that are not underlined so you don’t know they are links
..(If you’re not going to underline your links, please make darned sure
..that each link is perfectly clearly a link! Don’t make me wander around
..with my mouse checking to see if randomly colored text is a link!)

Dead links (links that don’t work anymore)

 

Graphics

Large graphic files that take forever to load

Meaningless or useless graphics

Thumbnail images that are nearly as large as the full-sized images they link to

Graphics with no alt labels

Missing graphics, especially missing graphics with no alt labels

Graphics that don’t fit on the screen (assuming a screen of 800 x 600 pixels)

 

Tables

Borders turned on in tables

Tables used as design elements, especially with extra large (dorky) borders

 

Blinking and animations

Anything that blinks, especially text

Multiple things that blink

Rainbow rules (lines)

Rainbow rules that blink or animate

"Under construction" signs, especially of little men working

Animated "under construction" signs

Animated pictures for email

Animations that never stop

Multiple animations that never stop

 

Junk

Counters on pages — who cares

Junky advertising

Having to scroll sideways (800 x 600 pixels)

Too many little pictures of meaningless awards on the first page

Frame scroll bars in the middle of a page

Multiple frame scroll bars in the middle of a page

 

Navigation

Unclear navigation; over complex navigation

Complicated frames, too many frames, unnecessary scroll bars in frames

Orphan pages (no links back to where they came from, no identification)

Useless page titles that don’t explain what the page is about

 

General Design

Entry page or home page that does not fit within standard browser window (800 x 600 pixels)

Frames that make you scroll sideways

No focal point on the page

Too many focal points on the page

Navigation buttons as the only visual interest, especially when they’re large (and dorky)

Cluttered, not enough alignment of elements

Lack of contrast (in color, text, to create hierarchy of information, etc.)

Pages that look okay in one browser but not in another.

 

One of the elements of good web design is a lack of the elements that make bad web design. If you stay away from everything listed on the page about dorky web pages, you’ve probably got a pretty nice web site. In addition, keep these concepts in mind:

 

Text

Background does not interrupt the text

Text is big enough to read, but not too big

The hierarchy of information is perfectly clear

Columns of text are narrower than in a book to make reading easier on the screen

 

Navigation

Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use

Navigation is consistent throughout web site

Navigation buttons and bars provide the visitor with a clue as to where they are, what page of the site they are currently on

Frames, if used, are not obtrusive

A large site has an index or site map

 

Links

Link colors coordinate with page colors

Links are underlined so they are instantly clear to the visitor

 

Graphics

Buttons are not big and dorky

Every graphic has an alt label

Every graphic link has a matching text link

Graphics and backgrounds use browser-safe colors

Animated graphics turn off by themselves

 

General Design

Pages download quickly

First page and home page fit into 800 x 600 pixel space

All of the other pages have the immediate visual impact within 800 x 600 pixels

Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, pull quotes) to break up large areas of text

Every web page in the site looks like it belongs to the same site; there are repetitive elements that carry throughout the pages.

 Valant 

Technorati Tags: design features, general design, links, Web Design