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Flash Concept SLM
Flash Concept SLM
Flash Concept SLM
Mortel
IV – St. Dominic
1. What is flash?
Web users with Intel Pentium or Power Macintosh processors can download Flash
Player to view Flash content, which performs across multiple browsers and
platforms. Flash is lauded for being one of the Web's most accessible plug-in.
According to an independent study cited by Macromedia, 89.9 percent of Web
users already have Flash Player installed.
"If you ever think Flash is difficult to use, you should try drawing with a
joystick on an Apple II before the concept of undo was invented. That will
test your patience." Jonathan Gay, Creator of Flash
Jonathan Gay got his break in professional programming while still in high
school. When his Apple II was replaced with a Macintosh, Gay and his father
began attending early Macintosh Users Group meetings, where his father
bragged to the organizer of the group about his science fair project. As it
turned out, the organizer was Charlie Jackson who was planning to launch a
Macintosh software company under the name Silicon Beach Software.
Although at the time Charlie did not have a lot of funding for the project, he
purchased a $10,000 Lisa for Gay to program on. It was on this computer
that Gay wrote Airborne!, the first Macintosh game that used digital sound
and smooth (for its era) animation. For a time, it was a big seller.
When work began on a second game, a professional artist was hired and
Dark Castle was born. Dark Castle was a big hit and paid Gay's way through
college. After Dark Castle, came Beyond Dark Castle. Writing games became
an important part of Gay's programming education by challenging him to
combine animation with digital sound and synchronize the two elements.
Most importantly, the concept of fast and responsive software became Gay's
first priority.
After Beyond Dark Castle, Gay began working on SuperPaint II (the follow up
to his science fair project) in which he implemented PostScript style drawing.
After SuperPaint II and graduating from college, Gay went to work for Silicon
Beach Software full time and began to develop technology for creating a new
generation of graphics software. It would be written in C++, and would use
an object-oriented framework to make development easy and to enable it to
run on the Macintosh and Windows.
A change in plans
GO, as it turned out was better at spending money than then it was making
money and were acquired by AT&T. Shortly after, in January of 1994, AT&T
pulled the plug on GO and left FutureWave's software without a market. The
only opportunity for survival was to take the software and rebuild it for
Windows and Macintosh. From there SmartSketch was marketed as a better
way to draw on the computer and had little success in an established market
domineered by Illustrator and Freehand.
About this time, a new concept called the Internet (as well as the World Wide
Web) was making its debut into the public eye. In theory, it seemed possible
that the web would become popular enough that user would want to send
and display graphics or animation thus creating a market for FutureWave to
create a profitable two dimensional computer animation product.
With this in mind, work began on SmartSketch to add animation and use Java
to render a web player, which in the beginning was frightfully slow.
FutureWave continued developing and in the fall, Netscape came out with
their plug-in API, which now provided a way to extend from the web browser
with decent performance.
Talks about shipping SmartSketch Animator began until it was realized that
SmartSketch didn't have much brand recognition and should focus less on
drawing and more on animation, so the program was renamed CelAnimator.
For fear of being labeled cartoon creation software, the name was changed
again to FutureSplash Animator.
Almost married to Adobe
In the summer of 1996, the FutureSplash Animator software was shipped and
began to gain public interest. FutureWave's biggest success was in August of
1996, when Microsoft was working on their web version of MSN and they
wanted to create the most television like experience possible on the Internet,
FutureSplash was their solution. FutureWave's other high profile client
besides Microsoft was Disney Online. Disney was using FutureSplash to
create animation and interface for their subscription based online service
Disney's Daily Blast.
The Macromedia Flash authoring tool was originally an animation tool, but it
is so much more than that today. From the early days when it was known as
FutureSplash to the Flash 8 version today, Flash has always excelled as a
vector-drawing and animation tool. Even though animation is still a large part
of what Flash does, now it is only a fraction of the Flash toolset.
Vector graphics - Vector drawings are made up of many lines and curves
and fills, each defined by a set of coordinates and the paths along them.
These paths-vectors-are described via mathematical functions. Because
mathematical formulas are used to store and create the image, they are
resolution independent and can be resized arbitrarily smaller or larger with
no loss of quality. Also, images based on calculations are generally smaller in
file size than bitmap images, which is an advantage for bandwidth-limited
Web delivery.
Animation - Flash is an excellent tool for vector animation, given that the
native file format is vector-based. Color and alpha effects can be applied
over time by using Flash's built-in tweening, by using a series of manually
modified keyframes, or by controlling symbols with
ActionScript. Time-based animations can also be streamed so that playback
can begin before the entire Flash movie has downloaded into the Flash
Player.
Raster Graphics
A bitmap is basically an array of pixels with
values indicating the color. The bitmap sizes
are defined in pixels. BMP, TIF, GIF, JPG, PNG
and most other graphics formats are raster
graphics. Since the sizes are measured in
pixels, the print dimension depends on the
resolution of the printer. BMP records every
pixels in the image, so the size is very big even
for small images. Other formats use
compression algorithm to reduce the file size
without causing great visual degrading, but remember the barcode is read by
machines other than human. Overall, you need to keep the physical size
unchanged otherwise you will run into problems.
For example, you generate a barcode with 1 inch wide and 0.75 inch tall. The
display device usually has a dpi of 96, which translate 96 pixels per inch. If you
save the image into raster graphics format, you get a bitmap array with 96
pixels wide and 72 pixels in height. When you print from a laser printer at 600
dpi, the image shrink to 1/6 of the original size and becomes un-readable. In
our Barcode Studio and ActiveX control products, you can set the target
resolution. Still when you copy the image form one machine to another, the
same problem may arise again.
Vector Graphics
A vector graphic contains the drawing
instructions other than the color value in pixels.
In Windows platform WMF is most widely used
vector graphic format that is supported by all
printers. The best feature about WMF is that
the dimension measures are completely device
independent. It can be easily scaled without
losing any characteristics( most likely you will
not use the scale feature). We strongly
recommend that you save your barcode image
in this format. In our Barcode Studio/ActiveX
products copy/paste operation is based on WMF
format which preserves all the information.
Other vector graphics formats include EPS
(Encapsulated PostScript), SVG (Scalable Vector
Graphics) format. To use EPS, you need to have a printer with postscript
enabled. SVG is designed to use with World Wide Web, but they are not
widely accepted. WMF is only supported in Windows platforms.
About Fonts
True type fonts are vector graphics. The font file contains directions
(contours) to draw the character (called glyph in typological term). A contour
can be either a line or a curve. Not all fonts used in Windows are true type
fonts, these raster fonts consisting of bitmap definitions of each glyph can
not be scaled to very large size, but they generally have the bitmaps for
most used point sizes. True type fonts can be used in both Microsoft and
Macintosh platforms. Since a font glyph must be scaled in the same ratio
horizontally and vertically, you should be aware that if you increase the point
size to increase the width, the height is also increased as well. On the other
side, when you move one document from one computer to another, you need
to make sure that the destination computer has the same font installed. This
generally requires another user license. To avoid end user license issue, you
can have the fonts embedded in the document.
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