Initial Flash: The First Steps / Site Design and Graphics / WebDeveloper.com ®

Initial Flash: The First Steps
(Part 2)

More Flash features and some resources

In-built Support for Sound

HTML can provide support for very basic sound effects, but browsers must also support these extensions to HTML. Flash, on the other hand, has support for sound and music built in. Nearly any trigger or event can have sound attached to it within a Flash file. This can give designers the opportunity to help create a mood or provide cues using sound on a Web site flawlessly for the first time.

Mostly Platform Independent

Basic HTML is inherently platform independent. Its content can be rendered on all platforms for which a simple Web browser has been produced. Netscape and Microsoft have added various 'enhancements' to HTML which has caused it to become less platform independent in some cases. Flash, controlled nearly entirely by Macromedia, currently has no such issues. Shockwave content, and hence Flash, can be rendered on any platform with a viewer developed for it. Unfortunately only a small number of platforms (although they're the most popular ones) have viewers, but Macromedia has wisely produced a Java viewer for use on platforms without support.

Not Complex to Produce Animations

While inflexible, initial HTML specifications were fairly easy to use. You could produce simple pages without too much trouble. Nowadays, however, it requires a good deal of aptitude and skill to produce a high quality page. Pages can incorporate JavaScript and style sheets, a real mixture of technologies. Flash needn't be as difficult to produce even though Flash can produce more advanced effects than HTML or JavaScript can. All that's required is being able to use Macromedia Flash (the program used to create Flash files) well.

Many designers hail the simplicity of developing animations within Flash as one of its best features. Since design elements are stored in vector format, it is easy to apply mathematical functions to the co-ordinates of the elements over periods of time. This makes animation a non-demanding process in regards to file sizes especially. A simple vector instruction such as 'move rectangle 1 to location 500 by 300 over next 12 frames' is immensely easier than redrawing and recapturing every frame as a bitmapped image, plus with a bitmapped image we'd lose many of the scaling possibilities.

Conclusion

So now we've taken the initial steps in getting ready to produce Flash content. The reason we have taken the initial issues at a slow pace is to allow the general functionality of Flash to be clear to you. With this initial background knowledge, you'll find that once you start to use the Flash program, things will seem slightly more apparent to you, especially when we come to producing full animations later on in the series.

In the next segment of the Initial Flash series I'll cover some of the terminology and techniques you'll need to use with Flash. We'll also download Macromedia's Flash program and install it before launching into creating a first animation. Keep tuned to Webdeveloper.com

Here are some resources for Flash which you may wish to check out: