How Do They Do That? Nine Mind Blowing Flash Animations

Flash animation still represents the cutting edge of Internet animation. Here are nine of the best on the net at the moment.

Whether you are new to Flash or a seasoned professional, these sites will make you sit back in wonder:

1. Bird on a Journey

A little bird flies on his way home to his lady, avoiding some pitfalls on the way. This brilliant animation combines drawing and photography to stunning effect, together with a weird and wonderful soundtrack.

2. Drum Machine

If you love oriental music – and drums – then you will love this animation. Seven Japanese drummers deliver the goods in this beautifully constructed piece of Flash. The skill and time that went in to this beggars belief!

3. Online Shopping

Be patient with this one. At first glance it looks like just another website that offers you household goods to buy. But hold on a second – didn’t that mug on special offer just fall over! That’s just the beginning of the fun – a joy to watch!

4. Icon War

These desktop icons decide that they don’t like each other any more. War bre

aks out! Who will be the ultimate winner as icon fights icon! Oh, the humanity! Extremely

entertaining flash animation.

5. Kaleidoscope

This is an amazing pattern generating piece of flash an

imation. You can choose from lots of different varieties and the patterning effect follows your mouse around in a myriad of colors and shapes. Inspirational!

6. Silhouette Sounds

A single silhouette becomes several then becomes many, with each producing a different sound to produce a tune. Fantastic black and white animation is eye catching and very, very different!

7. Doorway

All the guy wants to do is get through the door! Unfortunately, there are lots of things that do not wish to grant him passage. Superb European style flash animation you will want to watch again and again.

8. Falling Dude

Superbly irritating but extremely watchable, this animation has a roughly drawn boy falling, and falling – oh, and then falling some more! You wil

l love it!

9. Jackson Pollock

Ever seen a Jackson Pollock painting and thought “I can do that!” Well, here is your chance! Let your mouse do the walking as you produce works of art that the Saatchis will be after in no time at all!

Source: http://webupon.com/web-design/how-do-they-do-that-nine-mind-blowing-flash-animations/

Adobe, Google, Yahoo Team for Flash Search

Adobe, Google and Yahoo join to make Flash content searchable. Adobe, Google and Yahoo immediately make Flash and other dynamic content that runs in Adobe Flash Player on thousands of Web sites visible to search.

In a move long in the making, Adobe Systems is teaming up with search engine leaders to make Flash content more searchable.

Eric Wittman, director of client distribution and business development in Adobe's Platform Business Unit, said the company is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

Adobe announced the news July 1, sharing its plans to try to dramatically improve search results dynamic Web content and RIAs (rich Internet applications).

The move will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. In addition, RIA developers and rich Web content producers will not need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable, said Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player. They can be confident that their Flash-based content can now be found by users around the globe, Everett-Church said.

"We've wanted to make an announcement of this impact for several years now," Wittman said. "There are millions of things built in Flash and there have been concerns because of search engine compatibility. We have a piece of technology to remedy this and we’re working with Google and Yahoo. Google has integrated it and Yahoo will in a period of time."

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, put it:

"So what does that mean? We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information."

"This is a pretty important breakthrough to highly creative and interactive sites such as Disney and Tiffany.com built with Flash and Rich Internet Applications can now be found, crawled indexed and ranked," said Bill Hunt, president of Global Strategies International, a search engine optimization consultancy. "For years, those with Flash sites have been conflicted with reducing the amount of flash or resorting to any number of less than optimal workarounds to get their content included in search engines let alone getting high rankings."

Many major brands and creative developers have been critical of the search engines for not working with them or Adobe to develop a solution to index and score their content, Hunt said.

"These developers and search engine optimization firms like Global Strategies have spent a lot of time and resources -- financial and manpower -- to code alternative sites and workarounds to get the exposure commensurate to their brand positions in the marketplace," he said.

Source: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Adobe-Teams-with-Google-Yahoo-for-Flash-Search/

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Flash CS4 - Mask in Mask

1. Create a mask layer
2. Create a simple layer put something on it and then drag the key frame on the mask layer
3. Drag it under the mask

Motion Tween in Flash

First, let's imagine that you place a box on the table. Now, imagine, that after 10 seconds, the box suddenly disappears and magically appears again a few inches to the right of where it had been originally. Pretty strange isn't it?

Well, if you could rewind your past minute and watch it again, what will you see? You will see the box suddenly disappear and appear again in a different position with no cohesion or "animation" in the 10 seconds that elapsed. Here is where motion tweening comes in. With motion tweening, instead of the square disappearing and reappearing, you will instead see the square slowly moving itself to its new position - no disappearing acts at all! A motion tween, simply put, fills in the missing sequences between a starting position and the ending positions to create a full animation.

This tutorial will explain how to create a motion tween in Flash MX 2004, and hopefully you will understand more about motion tweens.

Steps:

1. First, launch Flash MX 2004. Once the program loads, you should see a new, blank area called your workspace. If you do not see anything resembling a white box, create a new animation by going to File | Flash Document. There, you should be all set!
   
2. Now, click on the Rectangle tool from the set of icons on the left.
   
3. Once you have clicked the Rectangle tool icon, go to your drawing area, and draw a square by clicking your mouse and dragging - then releasing once you have a square. Try to ensure that your square is close to or hugging the left edge of your white drawing area
   
4. After the square has been drawn, take a peek at your timeline. Your timeline is the large area toward the top with numbers and small, vertical boxes. 
   
5. The solid dot signifies that something substantial exists on that frame - Frame 1. In our case, the "something substantial" is the square you created! Now, look a little to your right and find the number 20. Right click directly at the box under the number label 20 and select "Insert Keyframe"
   
6. Once you select Insert Keyframe, you will see another black dot appear in Frame 20. Don't worry - that's a good thing! Now, make sure you select the keyframe on Frame 20 by clicking it with your mouse pointer.
   
7. With the keyframe selected, go down to your square again. Notice that your entire square is also selected. Now, press your Right arrow (on the keyboard) a few times to make it move a few centimeters from the right-most edge of your movie area
   
8. Now, with your mouse pointer, click on Frame 1 of your movie in the timeline. Notice where the square is! It is on the left. Without hesitation, now click on Frame 20. Notice that the square is to the right. Click anywhere else on Frame 10, and notice the square finds its way back to its original, left position
   
9. Enough of me chattering, It's time to motion tween! Click on Frame 1 and highlight all the frames between Frame 1 and Frame 20. While all the frames are highlighted, right click and select "Create Motion Tween"
   
10. If everything worked out well, your highlighted frames will take on a purplish color with a large arrow leading from Frame 1 to Frame 20. Click anywhere on the timeline, and notice that you can "track" the square's position through its 20 frame journey.
    
11. Go to File | Save to save the animation. From there, go to File | Publish Preview | HTML. You should see your square gradually moving from the left toward the right.