If a blog falls in the forest...

It's been a busy few months here at ETS. Not only has the BLI been keeping me active, but with the release of Adobe's CS3 suites I've had to take some time to reacquaint myself with the apps I use most. The improvements in Flash CS3, in particular, have been amazing. I'm hoping to post a full review in a future blog post, but I will say that from a very high level, it seems like the folks at Adobe have started from scratch - improving and adding a lot of things that should've been improved/added a while ago. The pen tool, for example, is now actually usable within Flash - it works just like the pen tool in Illustrator, so now Flash developers can finally click, hold down the spacebar, and drag our anchor points with pride (although it still does some random funky things for no reason). My favorite new feature, though, is the ability to turn off publishing hidden layers. This has been huge for me, because now I can create several .swf versions from a single .fla file just by hiding and unhiding experimental or version-specific layers. VERY cool.

Anyway, enough with the gushing. On to some work examples...

ASTRO
We finally wrapped up the ASTRO course at the end of September. The last animation I did was designed to show the Density Wave Theory of star formation. I used a few bitmaps inside the swf - which I tend to shy away from because the swf loses its scalability when bitmaps are involved (they get all bitmappy), but as long as nobody tries to resize it or open the swf file in a browser instead of the html file its embedded in, it should be ok...

NUTR
This summary of the TCA Cycle is designed to manage tons of text that the faculty member wanted to display for each clickable step. Flash loads an external text file into the scroll panes for each item. The text fields within the scroll panes are dynamically generated, so scroll bars will appear and disappear automatically depending upon how much text is loaded into them. So, if the faculty member decides to change the text after the project launches, she doesn't have to open Flash to edit it or change the formatting. Thanks to Flash displaying the code-hidden boxes briefly on browser refresh, I had to use a campy fade effect when the swf loads (maybe Adobe will fix that one for CS4?)