Third Thursday of the month at 6:30pm
Our latest podcast is out! Episode 13. We chat about Sound.computeSpectrum, the Rectangle Class, the Wii and Flash and more! Check it out.
iTunes users: Click here.
Direct Feed URL: http://www.pittmfug.com/podcast/podcast.xml. If you don’t listen to podcasts or subscribe you can always download the mp3 itself here.
Following some of the talk on the recent podcast (to be posted soon), I thought it would be helpful to post some links to you MFUGers. Below is transcript from my post on Pixelfumes:
The following is an initial attempt to wrangle all of the useful knowledge from blogs and sites throughout the community concerning Flash and the Nintendo Wii. If you have a useful link that you believe is missing from this list – please leave a comment and let me know.
As you may know, the Nintendo Wii currently runs an Opera-based web browser. It can currently display Flash 7 files within the browser as well. As time passes people have been able to write code to recognize gestures with the remote as well as basic tracking of the Wii remote. Below is a compiled list of topics concerning writing Flash for the Wii and the marriage of the two in general:
Opera Browser
Wikipedia Information of the Opera-based Wii Web Browser
Programming (Wiimote)
Flash Wii Gesture Recognization
Wiimote buttons in Flash – Aral Balkan
Wiimote buttons in Flash – wii.teamxlink.co.uk
Design
Wii Web Design Guide
Funny Wii Safety: Missing Pages
Videos
Video Showing Apparent Full Support of the Wiimote in Flash at DustyPixels
It was a great meeting! Thanks to all of you who attended. Last night we covered the Rectangle and Point Classes with Wayne Lincoln and talked about the new ActionScript 3 Sound.computeSpectrum with myself (Ben Pritchard).
Josh Sager gave us an overview of a sweet place that is soon to open in Bellevue. The Creative Treehouse sounds like an awesome place for creatives to get together, work on freelance, have a show, develop film, shoot film, etc. The grand opening is slated for March. There will be a monthly membership fee of around $25. Day passes will also be available. Stay tuned to the PittMFUG blog and to Josh’s blog for details.
We also talked a bit about the following links as well:
Flash Element TD Game
http://www.papervision3d.org/
Sound Spectrum Contest Winners
Files
Here are the files from the meeting that we have available:
Adobe (Macromedia) Studio 8 Review
By Ben Pritchard
I have been in the web development and design field for awhile now and until recently never really took any of the “Studio” packages for a test drive as a whole. Recently I had the opportunity to get my hands on a copy of Studio 8 and now, after using the package for awhile I thought I would detail my findings.
Studio is comprised of 5 programs. The package includes Flash Professional 8, Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3 and Flash Paper 2. The whole idea behind the Studio package is equipping you with programs you will use everyday in your development and design processes. These programs are unique in the fact that they are all very compatible with and tied into one another. I thought it would be helpful to give you a broad understanding of each of the programs packaged with Studio 8 along with an overview of some of the more outstanding features of each.
Flash Professional 8
Flash Professional 8 is the true gem of the Studio 8 package in my opinion. I am a Flash Developer by trade so I may be a little biased on this one.
Flash 8 Professional is a huge step up from Flash 7 in many ways. It has many new features including: blending modes for layers, filter support for great looking effects such as blurs, drop shadows, bevels and glows. Flash 8 also boast a great new text rendering engine that improves the legibility and versatility of text within your Flash movies.
The new features add very little to file size which greatly add to the whole user experience. Small files and great visual appeal meet here. Performance in Flash 8 .swf files has grown phenomenally over that of its predecessor. Flash 8 now supports the ability to render movieclips as bitmaps using the new .cacheAsBitmap property. This allows the .swf to render a movieclip as a bitmap freeing up memory , thereby improving overall performance and limitations of previous versions of Flash.
ActionScript has been given some very nice new features. BitmapData is by far a favorite of mine. Pixel-level code can be written now allowing you to check and modify individual pixels via ActionScript. All of the new filters can be controlled via ActionScript as well. Some nice new additions are the Displacement and Convolution filters. Flash 8 Professional is a very solid application and really helps developers move closer and closer to true OOP programming.
Macromedia also provided a huge step in the realm of Flash video. FLVs can now be encoded using either the Sorenson codec as in Flash MX 2004 or the new On2 codec. The new On2 codec adds support for alpha channels within FLVs. You can now import keyed video into your Flash movies. Overall the On2 codec also provided superior video though at a bit of a hike in processor usage.
Flash 8 also makes great use of screen real-estate allowing the user to easily dock and collapse pallets while truly making the environment their own.
Overall Flash 8 is a huge step up from MX 2004 and is a must have.
Dreamweaver 8
Dreamweaver 8 is by far my web editor of choice. Many new features have been added to Dreamweaver as well. Great XHTML/web standards support has been added. It is great top be able to create a new XHTML web document and hit the ground running. Tag completion is a great compliment to helping you write compliant code.
XML and CSS support have been improved upon as well. You can open the new tabbed window to take a look at the CSS definitions. XML editing and tag completion is also very excellent. Support for XSL is built in as well. Adobe has some great tutorials for getting started with many of these new features.
Back-end development is not an every day event for me but when the need arises I can rely on the support of Dreamweaver 8 again. Whether you are writing .NET, classic ASP, PHP or JSP; Dreamweaver more than likely will be a great tool for you even if it just for the great support of syntax highlighting.
Newbies will also appreciate the design view which actually allows you to zoom in to pixel level and make modifications to your pages visually. You can also split the view to watch visually how your code is affecting the display of your page.
Again, a huge step above the previous version of Dreamweaver. This is another very solid app which is only second to Flash in the amount of usage it gets from me.
Fireworks 8
Fireworks 8 was new for me so this might be a bit of a review for you long time loyal users. I used Fireworks for the first time in Studio 8 and I was surprised that more people have not pushed it. Fireworks 8 makes easy work of graphic optimization, animated GIF creation and general preparation of graphics for display within web pages.
My favorite feature of Fireworks 8 is the support and output of PNG-8 files with Alpha transparency. Fireworks 8 can push out semi-transparencies in a PNG-8 file as well. Naturally there is some quality loss depending on what your PNG entails but when you are cutting a 300kb PNG-32 down to 30kb it is well worth it.
Fireworks follows Flash also supports many new filters that can be applied to bitmaps. The best part about Fireworks is that it seems to be a very “light” application; opening quickly and running very smoothly. If you are looking for a way to optimize your graphics this is the way to go.
Contribute 3
Contribute is a sweet little tool that I feel like most people ignore. If you need to set a site up for a client that requires the ability to be updated and maintained; Contribute just might be your ticket. WYSIWG editing of static websites is what Contribute does. The great thing about it is that you can setup different users whom have different levels of access.
You can lock down the CSS or certain pages and allow other content to be added or modified. Using Contribute, you can take the site you just developed in Dreamweaver, setup an email-able key, email it to the client and voila! The client simply opens the key with their copy of Contribute and they are in.
This is a great tool for those who want to keep their websites updated without knowing HTML or without spending loads on HTML editors themselves.
Flash Paper 2
Rounding up the Studio 8 package is a sweet little application called Flash Paper 2. Flash Paper basically takes any Microsoft Office document and converts it into a .swf file. You can then load that .swf file into your own Flash movie and make API calls against the document to change pages, zoom, etc.
Flash Paper is a lot like a light version of Acrobat Distiller. You can print to Flash Paper just like a real printer or Distiller. The result is a .swf file that contains your document within the Flash Paper chrome.
The beautiful part about using Flash Paper is that most likely the user already has the Flash Player installed and will therefore not need to install another plug-in such as Acrobat Reader. It generates lightweight, searchable and easily viewable swf versions of just about any document you print. >
Conclusion
In conclusion, I could not work without Studio 8. It is the de facto standard in web and multimedia/interactive development. With Studio 9 on the verge it may make sense to familiarize yourself with Studio 8 and all of the great benefits and features it provides.
Studio 8 is available for $999 or $399 for the upgrade. You can also download a free trial of the programs contained here.