G etting to know flash professional
One of the small joys of working in the field of Web page design happens to be the opportunity to work in a Flash environment. This is not to say that working in Flash doesn't take some skill and some practice, well, lots of practice.
My first Flash program was version 4. I'd open the program, look at it from every angle, scratch my head, and then quietly close the program. I figured life's too short to spend that much time trying to figure out what the hell it was all about.
My next try was with Flash 5, I even managed to take a class at the American River College from the Art Department. I was teaching at that college at the same time. Well to make matters a little more difficult, the Art Department just so happened to have Flash 5 installed on MACs. I'm a PC person, so I spent a few days trying to train myself to stop looking for the damn right button, it's not there! But, I did finally get the button thingie figured out and proceeded to get down to business.
I had fun, I even pulled off a couple of cute little Flash movies which I have linked here, just to keep me humble.
A Short Story I made this Flash Movie in version MX, it's an add for Chrysler's Crossfire Sport Car. I did create my main Web site in Flash MX 2004 and finished in Studio 8 after many students requested it. I kept getting "How come you don't have a full Flash Web site yet?" So I started working on it while I was on a Spring Break in Florida. I developed the ideas, created the Art work and put together a Beta version, not much later it was up and running as the profal.com site.
I even built a Flash Web site for a friend while I was on vacation in the Lake country. (Only, when I wasn't doing anything more important of course). I tried my best to make an interactive site with sound buttons and everything. For my first, I think it was cool. And, my friend did too. So I'm giving you a link to that site here: Bad Jazzy Rags This site began with Flash 5 but was rebuilt with Studio 8 later on.
Then the Sierra College asked me to consider teaching a class during the summer with some software from Macromedia. It had Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX, and Flash MX, this was around 2002. The truly sad part was, I received the software about 10 days before the class started, so I had to develop a course and learn the software in a very short time. I think I managed to stay at least one day ahead of the class during this time. Well anyway, I found out that you cannot teach all three of these programs in a short six week summer course! I don't know how the students and I survived that short course, but somehow we all banded together and pulled ourselves through. However, we resolved that it should never, never happen again!
That Fall Semester I was to offer it again but at least it was a full semester. We have been offering this class since but have moved through Flash MX, Flash MX 2004, Flash Studio 8 Pro, Flash CS3 Pro, and next term Flash CS4.
Adobe is now the owner of the software and they have made a lot of changes to the program. Keeping up with the changes and the bad timing of the releases has afforded me a few more gray hairs, well at least the ones I haven't pulled out yet!
I have several pages in this section that covers some elements you should know about, a few videos sprinkled here and there, and whatever came to mind. Hope you like.
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