Posts filed under 'Adobe'
A major part of what I do is to teach people to run courses in creative applications and languages, including Flash. I’ve been teaching Flash since version 3.0, and in fact began using it when it was still FutureSplash… I still have a few of those early efforts on my hard drive ( I hate throwing things away), and some of them are still relevant - an animated clock, a ‘white lines’ animation that looks like you’re driving along a road, and a few early experiments with interactivity.
I taught Actionscript courses as well for a while, but now I tend to concentrate on the animation and multimedia side of the application. You know; the bits that don’t necessarily require coding to make them work, and I leave the scripting stuff to Richard Lord, who’s a proper programmer. I deliver the two day Introduction to Flash course that covers the stuff you need to know to make good looking animation, and we throw in bitmaps, sound, video and text into the pot, just to make sure that we’ve covered all the bases. The problem though, is what to do about Actionscript.
Is it acceptable on an introductory Flash course to completely ignore Actionscript? Personally, I don’t believe it is. Even the most visually-oriented graphic designer, with a phobia of all things code-related, will eventually want to make a button do something apart from change colour. Furthermore, the demographic of Flash users is changing, and moving heavily into online advertisers and marketeers, who will want to make their ads clickable at the very least.
So, I include a bit of scripting, mostly towards the tail end of the course, and I show people how to make a banner ad go to a URL, and how to make a simple navigational menu using ‘goTo’ commands. All pretty easy and straightforward, and if you use Script Assist mode, everybody is happy, and impressed that you don’t really need to program to make this kind of thing work. So, I probably spend around half an hour to 45 minutes at most on Actionsctript on an Introductory Flash course .
Enter Actionscript 3.0
Here’s the problem; as soon as you move over to AS3, things become much more difficult, in fact, we came to the conclusion that it would take around half a day just to show people how to do the above - namely, make a button go to a URL or go to another frame in the timeline. Given that there are no Behaviours in AS3 movies, this essentially precludes doing any scripting at all, or sticking for now at least, to AS2 movies only, which is actually how I solve the problem.
Looking ahead
Obviously, this situation can’t continue, and I’ll have to move over to working with AS3 based movies at some point, because it will have become the de facto standard. In conclusion, I on’t want to drop scripting from my Intro courses, so I really hope Adobe decide to include behaviours in the next version. The general word is that having catered heavily to the coders in CS3, CS4 will include more designer-oriented features, so I’m optimistic.
August 21st, 2008
So, Adobe have made a public beta of DW CS4 & Fireworks available to anyone who has an existing serial number. Of course, I was in there like a shot, never having been one to hold back on trying new stuff. Point in case: I tried Hake the other day. They (apparently) eat a lot of hake (merluza) in Spain, and I’m learning Spanish, so I felt like I should make the effort, but Hake is now definitely not on my (admittedly steadily increasing) list of Fish I Can Eat Without Feeling Sick.
Now I haven’t felt ill once while using DWCS4, although I was a little disconcerted by a few definitely beta-like oddities, which I put down to non-optimisation of code. Things like not being able to switch between code and design view on occasion, or the nifty little HTML/CSS button on the properties panel not having any effect. But hey, intermittent and frankly minor issues.
Spry
My main area of interest these days, that keeps me fiddling with the computer way after I should have stopped, is Spry. Adobe have done some very clever stuff with Spry, and the implementation in DW has improved a lot. In particular, I want to mention working with Spry Datasets. You can now create pretty complex master/detail relationships with XML or HTML data very easily indeed. It writes all the JS and CSS for you, while making all of this stuff transparent enough for anyone with intermediate CSS skills to completly customise the appearance. I was very pleased to find that I could drop an HTML table into a document, point Spry at it for it’s data source, and have it construct a nice little menu system with no additional coding on my part. HTML data sources are a relatively recent addition to the Spry framework, allowing you to work with either external or internal data tables. This cuts out the necessity of working with more complex XML data, and means that existing tables can be repurposed. Having had to do the same thing by hand a few months ago for an educational website, I can safely say that this is quite a time-saver and a welcome addition to Dreamweaver. There’s much more going on Spry-wise, and I plan to talk about it more in the future, but this is one of those features that will get static-page developers moving over to working with data with minimal learning curve climbing.
Related Files
Initially, I thought that this looked confusing. After a few weeks of working with it though, it’s an invaluable feature. The basic idea is that any CSS, JS files etc. are displayed by name at the top of the document window. If you are working in Split view, as I often do, you can flip between, for example, the HTML and the CSS document, and make changes to the CSS while continuing to preview the HTML file. This obviously removes the necessity in previous versions to have both documents physically open if you wanted to hand-edit your CSS files. Same thing works with Javascript files, and here’s another great new feature that works perfectly in conjunction with Related Files:
Live View
Live view does what you might expect: It turns your preview (actually it works for the code as well) into a real preview, so what you get is actually what you see. Everything from Spry to embedded Google Gadgets works just as it would in a browser (of course if it’s not going to work because you’ve made an error and there are bugs in your code, you’ll see that too). Funnily enough, simple links don’t seem to work, but perhaps that’s intentional, I’m not sure.
I’ll be having more thoughts on Dreamweaver CS4 soon, I’m sure.
July 22nd, 2008
We are currently experiencing an enormous interest in Illustrator. People are almost fighting to get onto scheduled courses. It’s a little hard to pinpoint exactly what’s brought this on, but a lot of our clients in the fashion design industry are telling us that it’s now a ‘must have’ skill on your CV, and I’m sure it’s the same story in other areas.
Personally, I think this resurgence is long overdue. Illustrator is often overshadowed by Photoshop, which of course is considered to be the ‘be all and end all’ when it comes to computer graphics. Hold on though. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to tell people on Photoshop courses that they may well be using the wrong program. Try assigning Pantone colours in Photoshop, try drawing a map, or even mocking up a web page, and you’ll know what I mean. Illustrator makes this kind of thing easy, while in Photoshop (much as I love it to death), it can be a struggle.
For example, Illustrator features such as Live Trace & Live Paint save time and effort for people who like to sketch, trace and apply colour fills. Fashion designers can design and use custom patterns, and even create their own personal sketching styles. Package designers can create 3D elements, complete with mapped artwork.
Of course, fundamental features like using the Pen tool to draw Beziér curves, compound shapes and pattern design, are still at the heart of Illustrator, and these are implemented better in Illustrator than in any other program I’ve used.
Illustrator CS3 brings a few new features along, with a new and very comprehensive colour design section, and it certainly does more for screen-based designers, but fundamentally, Illustrator is still all about creating professional artwork, and the freedom to do almost anything you want, as accurately as you want.
May 16th, 2007