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At
no point in here am I going to mention a price for any of the software,
prices do fluctuate, and wholesalers do sell the software cheaper
and there is also student discount for these titles, however there
are direct links to all of the software.
The packages to be covered are...
- Macromedia Flash 3
- Macromedia Director 6.0
Guess your slightly surprised that there aren't so many more, well
there are a couple more, but they really don't do anything that
these two don't do ten times better. On with the show....
Macromedia Flash3
Flash 3 is a vector based graphics & animation package, vector graphics
are basically postscript files, that packages such as Corel Draw,
Illustrator and freehand use, although Corel uses Bitmap graphics
as well (for a better description see the mini lexicon).
Postscript files are extrmemly small in size even with huge amounts
of vector graphics in the file, This makes it an ideal concept for
use on the web.
Sound and bitmaps can also be used, but the latter is not recommended
as it increases the size and doesn't look as good as the vector
based graphics.
So when you start Flash 3 your faced with something that looks like
a score board with a timeline, on this you can have any number of
layers, (it's recommended to have a layer for each item just in
case).
Flash 3 has it's own built in drawing package which is actually
pretty good, considering it's built in, although it can't compete
with the dedicated vector drawing packages, it's still perfectly
usable and produces good results.
A nice feature to flash 3 is that you can have libraries that store
all of your graphics and then you just drag and drop them onto the
stage and you can then scale and rotate these library objects.
Text is fantastic in Flash, not only can you use any font that you
want without having to keep the font on the WWW server when you
put it up, but you can also make an outline of the font and manipulate
it very easily, this you can't do with bitmap graphics.
Flash 3 In summary
There are loads of great features in Flash3, but you need to really
be something of an artist to get really great results, but it's
simple to use and I don't see a problem with anyone using it at
all...
A real plus is the fact that the file sizes are extremely small,
for such a rich content of graphics, and am added bonus for graphic
artists is that there is no real programming involved, you only
need to add one line of HTML to your page and it works.
It's pretty cheap as well !!!! ( I still won't mention a price)
Macromedia Director 6.0
Director 6 is THE industry standard multimedia package, (have you
noticed that Macromedia have a bit of a strong hold in the Multimedia
area).
This is an extremely powerful package, that can be used by many
people all at different levels of ability, from those who just want
to make slideshows to those who like to program and link into databases,
and a lot in the middle...
Once you start up Director your faced with a main window which is
your stage where all of the action will happen, then you have several
other windows that are necessary to create your interactive wonder...
The score window where you control everything on the stage including
an amount of the scripting (if any), a cast member window, where
any files you import or create are kept so that you can find them
easily, and finally a behaviours window which allows you to store
many commonly used behaviours such as rollovers and so on....
Director 6 as does flash uses the shockwave plugin to work on the
web, and again can be used as a streaming media, which means that
people aren't waiting for your 1mb movie to download before they
get to see anything, this allows for a much richer environment and
is a big plus for Director 6.
Here's the list of what Director can do on the web.
-Streaming Shockwave
-Authoring control over streaming
-Live Internet authoring
-Shocked CDs (hybrid CD+Internet applications)
-Browser scripting support: JavaScript, ActiveControl, LiveConnect
-Communication between Shockwave movies
-Dynamically link to Internet content at run time
-Director, projectors, and Shockwave all play Shockwave movies
-Save as Shockwave movie
-URLs everywhere
-Link cast members and casts to files on the Internet
Pretty impressive abilities, but if you just want to display some
graphics in a different way on the web is it worth forking out the
money for it?
Probably not, Director is only worth the money if you produce CD-ROM
based content as well, but your better off with DHTML for a lot
of picture stuff, otherwise your director file could get way too
heavy and be almost impossible for most people to download in it's
entirety.
This package is great for the web, but not for the web alone....
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