In their first full-cycle release since acquiring Macromedia you don’t have to be a detective on CSI Miami to see Adobe’s fingerprints all over Flash CS4. In a live product demonstration broadcast on Adobe TV this morning we got to see a preview of the direction Adobe will be going with Flash and it’s all about seamless integration.
One of the first things I noticed is how similar the new features compare to AfterEffects. The Motion Editor in AfterEffects is excellent and you’ll see it’s basically identical. Object based animation is also very similar to that in AfterEffects in essence giving each symbol it’s own timeline. Another useful feature straight from AfterEffects will show you a series of dots, each representing frames of your path giving you precise control of your animations.
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With Creative Suite 4 and Flash 10 just over the horizon it seems a good time to reflect on where we’ve come from. I’m going to share my story of how I fell in love with Flash and what I was watching at the time. Everyone is welcome to share their personal story by posting a comment. Here goes.
Sometimes you just know. Like, when you meet the girl of your dreams something hits you and says this is the one! That’s how it was for me anyway. Way back when Zach Morris (Marc Paul Gosselaar) was pleading with Mr. Belding to put an oil derrick on school grounds (bonus points to anyone who remembers that episode) I started developing social communities. I did the front-end with Java Applets and I even went through the trouble of creating a native XML database to store friends, save conversations, and keep track of election results. The community functioned but it wasn’t extend-able and worst of all, it was dreadfully slow. This prompted dreams of greener pastures with fast, stable, graphics-rich environments.
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After seeing the Discovery Channel documentary on the making of Spore I’d like to nominate Will Wright for smartest person on earth. He’s the creative genius behind the Sim City franchise, The Sims and now Spore. What can Flash designers, animators & developers learn from Spore? Lots! Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts’ Games, states “What’s so beautiful about Spore is that it’s extremely malleable… you could take it to different platforms, like playstation, Wii, and flash games…” Seriously, Spore in Flash? Read More …
While tinkering with Flash 10 and anxiously awaiting the release of Flash CS4 and Gumbo (Flex 4) I stumbled upon Degrafa. Degrafa is a flex graphics framework that allows you to markup graphics in MXML. It’s super easy to use and comes with some awesome samples. Use it to make your site beautiful and integrate it with your Flash Den components. Read More …
FlashDen has long been on a quest to become the greatest library of Flash files around. And we’re currently coming up to a big milestone on this path - 5,000 Flash files for sale. As I write this we are sitting at about 4,850 so it won’t be long now!
To celebrate this milestone, we’d like to give one lucky buyer $500 to spend here on FlashDen, after all there’s certainly plenty of files to choose from! To enter our little contest all you have to do is place a comment with a link to your all-time favourite item on FlashDen as well as a FlashDen username for us to credit. At 11:59PM of the day we pass the 5,000 mark I’ll close the entries and we’ll randomly select a winner.
Anyone besides Envato staff and reviewers may enter, and each person can enter only one time. It’s that easy!
Our newest Envato Marketplace - ThemeForest - is now open to the public after a short 3 week beta period. As is the case with AudioJungle, your FlashDen account will work on the new site in exactly the same way!
To kick off the site, we’re giving away three sets of $600 prizes to authors who can upload the most approved items in September, you can get more details here. As with our other sites, we also have a great referral program offering 50% and at this early hour there are plenty of people out there just waiting to be referred! So if you have a hole in your ad rotation, grab a banner and send some traffic over!
I’m very excited about this launch and we’ve already got some great files on offer, so mozy on over and check it out!
We’ve made some tweaks to the Flash file upload instructions, so all Flash authors please take note! The changes have been made in order to improve our file review/approval process which will help Flash file reviewers review your files even quicker. If we have less files uploaded that have to get rejected, it means we can spend more time approving acceptable files!
New rules will take effect from September 1st, 2008. Please familiarize yourself with the full set of new instructions. Any new files (not already in the queue) uploaded from September 1st that do not meet our new guidelines risk getting rejected. In the meantime, here is a quick overview of the changes:
Above: Name your preview files correctly!
Preview File (Regular, 590px x 300px)
- Your preview SWF MUST always be named “preview.swf”
- Do not link to any external sites. This includes your own personal Web site or any minor or major external site. For example, you cannot link to Google.com or Yahoo.com. If you have to link to an external site to demonstrate functionality, you can only link to Flashden.net pages. You are welcome to link to your own Flashden portfolio if you like.
Preview File (Full Screen)
- For any preview that needs to be displayed larger than 590px wide x 300px high, you MUST provide:
- a preview SWF named “preview.swf”
- your original file in .FLA format
- and an HTML document which MUST be called “index.html” which calls preview.swf.
General Updates/Notifications
- You CANNOT upload PHP, ASP or any type of server side script files to Flashden as part of your preview file. If your preview uses some kind of dynamic server side script, we suggest you stub it
out in the preview (i.e. make it load a static data.xml instead of getting it from
generate_xml_data.php), OR, create a preview that links to an externally
hosted version (on your own site) of the file you are selling.
- In the Comments to Reviewer field, your information will NOT be publicly viewable. It is simply an opportunity for you to communicate any special instructions or image/video/audio licensing notifications to the reviewers. Please state URLs and details for any source images, code, video, audio or other items that you have used in the file, even if you have taken the photographs yourself. Information about source files that you provide here will be used by reviewers to assess whether your file meets FlashDen copyright requirements.
- Ensure any ActionScript, comments and library asset names are in English. Non-English Flash files are not accepted at Flashden and will be rejected.
- Documentation is now required for ALL Flash files. Read our blog post for more information. Your help file can be in TXT, HTML, DOC or PDF format. You can also provide instructions via video, but you will still need to provide written documentation.
- Do not create or upload files in RAR format. If you create a RAR file, it will be rejected. We only accept files in ZIP format.
As always, please let us know if you have any feedback about these changes or perhaps if you have any suggestions or ideas that you would like to see tweaked in our approval process. We may not respond to everything, but we do read through all your cool ideas!
As you may have seen in our latest newsletter, it’s coming up on our birthday in just two days - yep back on August 21st 2006 FlashDen was born!
As they say, it’s always better to give than to receive, so we’re going to celebrate with a week of giving! All authors on FlashDen, AudioJungle and (the upcoming) ThemeForest will automatically earn 50% commisisons all week long regardless of their exclusivity or sales count. So if you’re going to make some big sales, that’s the week to do it in!
It’s our way of saying a big thank you to the authors that make these sites as brilliant as they are! We hope to keep improving and building on them long into the future! I wonder what we’ll be announcing in our twentieth birthday 
The Exact Dates & Times:
Start = 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time)
End = 27 Aug 2008 23:59:59 AEST
Rate for everyone, exclusive and non-exclusive during the period = 50%.
Happy Birthday!
EDIT: This competition is now closed. Thanks to all who entered! We’ll be announcing the winners in the next few days.
FITC Seoul is a one-day flash design event featuring seven of the world’s top designers and developers. Among those scheduled to appear are perennial favorites Joshua Davis and Erik Natkze, creative guru Kyle Cooper (Imaginary Forces), Papervision 3D team member Ralph Hauwert, digital storyteller and creative director Euna Seol (PostVisual.com), and from Adobe Richard Galvan and Marcos Weskamp. Simultaneous translations from English to Korean and Korean to English (for Euna Seol’s presentation) will be provided throughout the event.
AND WE’VE GOT TWO TICKETS TO GIVE AWAY!!!!!
All you need to do is win the tickets and get to Korea and you’re on your way to having the Flash experience of a lifetime!
What do you need to do to score this awesome prize? Simply tell us why you’d like to go to FITC Seoul in the comments below. The two best answers will each win one ticket!
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Flash rival Silverlight in the Spotlight
Microsoft’s Silverlight technology will get the exposure it has been hoping for this month as it will be used by NBC in the United States to deliver their entire video content during the Beijing Olympics. Silverlight will also be used by the Democratic National Convention at the end of August. And, if you’re still not convinced that Flash is about to get some strong competition from Silverlight, MS Silverlight will also be provided video for the forthcoming season of the NFL.
Flash Gaining Traction in the Enterprise
Using Flash to produce Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) has been mentioned in the news quite a lot recently. It appears as though more and more companies are turning to Flash, Flex and Adobe Air to deliver both Web-based and desktop applications. Both InfoWorld and eWeek provide more in-depth commentary.
ActionScript APIs
Here’s a superb collection of resources for AS2 and AS3 application programming interfaces (APIs) for Flash/Flex/AIR designers and programmers.
Why Flash is not available on the iPhone
Media and Technology commentator James Gardiner from the JamieG Analysis gives a lot of valid thoughts and reasons why Steve Jobs is not currently allowing, and probably will not allow Adobe Flash player on the iPhone.
FlyPaper - Simplifying Flash file Maintenance?
Watch out Flash developers! New application FlyPaper, with a $3.5 million investment, aims to assist non-programmers to easily maintain and update Flash content without the need to even touch Adobe Flash. CNET and MarketWatch have the lowdown.
ABC, Easy as 1-2-3
Don’t know your Adobe Air from your Flex? Always mix your Zend Framework with your ZK? Then you need this little refresher course of alphabetized Web technology terms to help you out, courtesy of EnetLive.Net
Search Cloud
Not sure why this is developed in Flash when it does not offer anything more visually dynamic than something that could easily be reproduced in any number of JavaScript based technologies, Search Cloud gives a different slant on the search engine. Type keywords, assign each word a priority, and then search. Be sure to watch the demo video if you get stuck as it’s not as straight forward as one might think!
ActionScript Cheat Sheets
AS3, PaperVision, Flex… All the Flash cheat sheets you could ever want!
