Flash is your friend - An introductory level guide for getting acquainted with Flash
I know a lot of people are dying to learn Flash, but feel intimidated by the program, so I decided to do an introductory level workshop going over Flash in general and a couple very basic tutorials. Our marketing department has been doing these “crossover” type workshops now for over a month and I find them very useful. I think it improves team-building and gives you a view into the minds of the other designers and developers on how they approach their work.
Some of the team have never touched flash so I wanted to start at the beginning on how Flash was born. Jonathan Gay, the brain child behind Flash developed the idea in college, which eventually evolved into the vector-based program called FutureSplash Animator. Macromedia acquired the software and renamed the program Flash, which was taken from the names “Future” and “Splash”. It is now Adobe Flash and has gained popularity due to interactivity to web pages, creating animations, advertisements , integrating video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich internet applications.
According to Adobe, Flash has over a 98 percent market penetration for desktop users. The flash technology is utilized to display and stream video on popular video portals like YouTube and Google Video. After going over some advantages and disadvantages that Flash has on the Web, I outlined the tools and the “dreaded” timeline. Hopefully, it made the team a little more eager to learn Flash and give it a try.
If you’re interested in the past and future of Flash you can view the Flash Tenth Anniversary showcase or check out this blog here by Kevin Lynch - Chief Software Architect at Adobe.
Hopefully, this quick workshop made our team feel more at ease with Flash and bring some understanding on what Flash is and where to get started. Take the challenge and start learning Flash today!
Here are some links to basic concepts and tutorials to get acquainted with Flash:
About Flash Symbols
Motion Tweening
Creating a Simple Animation
Check out the slideshow below.
Download the Flash is your friend slides (PDF 772k)
