Any who, this week, I thought I'd talk less about what I've been doing here at Fjord West, and more about what I've learnt during my time here, and what I'd suggest/recommend for the rest of you doing practicum, or even those who are in Year 1 (Just finished), or next years Year 1's.
Let's start of with one great informational nugget of recommendation. If someone tasks you with creating a Flash Banner, by god, don't do the animation in code. I was originally asked to edit another persons ads for the creation of a new set of ads similar to the originals.
He had done everything in code, which was fine in the case of the original set of ads and mine, as all the code was doing was pulling in 3 pictures at random, in between a defined start and end picture. But when I was tasked with creating another set of ads that had actual animation in it, I never thought anything of it, and created the new ones using the first set I created as a base. Since all the animation was done in code, this took much longer then it would have to animate the ad on the timeline in Flash.
When I was finished, I felt smarter for doing it all in code (Lot's of x and y coordinate definitons, GreenSock tweens, alpha transitions, etc.), but dumber for wasting Fjords time with what could have been done much quicker, and much faster had I done all the animation on the timeline.
So with out of the way, it's now time for me to recommend some programs for everyone to use, or the teachers to get for next year! (That means you Derek!)
- Adobe Flex Builder 3
Adobe Flex Builder is basically a Dreamweaver for ActionScript. You can set up multiple projects, with each keeping track of every file within your Flash applications. The best feature I've found so far is the ability to press the "Ctrl" button while hovering over variable names and other crazy AS code, and by clicking on said code, it will automatically take you to the location of the define variable, be it within the same .as file, or within any .as file inside your define project folder! (Derek, you seriously need to get the school to buy this if there's ever any really heavy ActionScript coding in the course.) - EditPlus 3
This is just a simple "everything" editor like Notepad++. Not really a recommendation, but just a suggestion if your looking for something else. It's all I've really used here at Fjord to edit anything code wise, excluding ActionScript code. - Firebug (With the Google Page Speed plugin)
Basically, Firebug is another awesome Web Development tool for Firefox, but all I use it for is Google's Page Speed plugin which scores your site's download speed based upon a range of different tests, such as file size optimization, tag usage, document combination (Combining multiple CSS/JS files into one file reduces the amount of requests to the server, resulting in a faster loading site for the end user), etc. I've been able to reduce the file size of some of my HTML, CSS, and JS documents by up to 50% of their original size, resulting in faster download times for visitors to my site. - Google Chrome
Yes, I drank the Kool-Aid, and it was damn tasty! :P
Well, that's all for this week. Sorry for pushing everyone else's posts below the proverbial "fold"! Hope to hear from everyone soon!
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