In their first full-cycle release since acquiring Macromedia you don’t have to be a detective on CSI Miami to see Adobe’s fingerprints all over Flash CS4. In a live product demonstration broadcast on Adobe TV this morning we got to see a preview of the direction Adobe will be going with Flash and it’s all about seamless integration.
One of the first things I noticed is how similar the new features compare to AfterEffects. The Motion Editor in AfterEffects is excellent and you’ll see it’s basically identical. Object based animation is also very similar to that in AfterEffects in essence giving each symbol it’s own timeline. Another useful feature straight from AfterEffects will show you a series of dots, each representing frames of your path giving you precise control of your animations.
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With Creative Suite 4 and Flash 10 just over the horizon it seems a good time to reflect on where we’ve come from. I’m going to share my story of how I fell in love with Flash and what I was watching at the time. Everyone is welcome to share their personal story by posting a comment. Here goes.
Sometimes you just know. Like, when you meet the girl of your dreams something hits you and says this is the one! That’s how it was for me anyway. Way back when Zach Morris (Marc Paul Gosselaar) was pleading with Mr. Belding to put an oil derrick on school grounds (bonus points to anyone who remembers that episode) I started developing social communities. I did the front-end with Java Applets and I even went through the trouble of creating a native XML database to store friends, save conversations, and keep track of election results. The community functioned but it wasn’t extend-able and worst of all, it was dreadfully slow. This prompted dreams of greener pastures with fast, stable, graphics-rich environments.
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After seeing the Discovery Channel documentary on the making of Spore I’d like to nominate Will Wright for smartest person on earth. He’s the creative genius behind the Sim City franchise, The Sims and now Spore. What can Flash designers, animators & developers learn from Spore? Lots! Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts’ Games, states “What’s so beautiful about Spore is that it’s extremely malleable… you could take it to different platforms, like playstation, Wii, and flash games…” Seriously, Spore in Flash? (more…)
While tinkering with Flash 10 and anxiously awaiting the release of Flash CS4 and Gumbo (Flex 4) I stumbled upon Degrafa. Degrafa is a flex graphics framework that allows you to markup graphics in MXML. It’s super easy to use and comes with some awesome samples. Use it to make your site beautiful and integrate it with your Flash Den components. (more…)
FlashDen has long been on a quest to become the greatest library of Flash files around. And we’re currently coming up to a big milestone on this path – 5,000 Flash files for sale. As I write this we are sitting at about 4,850 so it won’t be long now!
To celebrate this milestone, we’d like to give one lucky buyer $500 to spend here on FlashDen, after all there’s certainly plenty of files to choose from! To enter our little contest all you have to do is place a comment with a link to your all-time favourite item on FlashDen as well as a FlashDen username for us to credit. At 11:59PM of the day we pass the 5,000 mark I’ll close the entries and we’ll randomly select a winner.
Anyone besides Envato staff and reviewers may enter, and each person can enter only one time. It’s that easy!
Our newest Envato Marketplace – ThemeForest – is now open to the public after a short 3 week beta period. As is the case with AudioJungle, your FlashDen account will work on the new site in exactly the same way!
To kick off the site, we’re giving away three sets of $600 prizes to authors who can upload the most approved items in September, you can get more details here. As with our other sites, we also have a great referral program offering 50% and at this early hour there are plenty of people out there just waiting to be referred! So if you have a hole in your ad rotation, grab a banner and send some traffic over!
I’m very excited about this launch and we’ve already got some great files on offer, so mozy on over and check it out!
