Course Web Site Development:
Additional Website Components:
Web Based Animation Tools:
Macromedia Flash

Before you start, it is recommended that you install Flash on your computer.  To do this, follow these directions.

After you have installed Flash, you should download and install the Macromedia learning extensions.  These extensions will allow you to create simple quizzes and tests without the hassle of complex programming.  To install the learning extensions, follow these directions.

Contents

Getting Started

Exercises

 

What is Flash?

The current state of the web imposes a stringent set of limitations on potential applications.  Most of these limitations come in the form of bandwidth.  It takes time to transmit information across the Internet, so the larger the amount of information, the longer it will take to transmit.

Flash came into being to attempt to fill the long vacant niche of web based animation.  Traditional computer generated animation came along with the price tag of huge file sizes, mainly due to the fact that they stored graphical information as a series of bitmaps.  For every individual pixel, one or more bits had to be allocated to store a color value.  Flash stores information as a set of vectors, or mathematical equations.  This allows a significant reduction in the amount of space needed to store a graphical object.  Consider the following example:

The graphic above is a bitmapped circle.  The computer must store a set color values for each discrete point on, around, and inside the circle.  When the circle expands in size, so do the points, and thus quality is lost.

The computer must allocate a 15x15 grid of pixels to store the circle.  That's 225 individual pixels.  If we were using 8 bit color (256 colors), we need exactly 1,800 bytes to store the image above.

A vector based rendition of this circle would contain the following:

4 = x2 + y2 , 0000FF

All we need to do is to store the mathematical equation for a circle and the hexadecimal color value of the object.  This equates to a highly significant reduction in the amount of space needed to store the circle.  And, as an added bonus, vector based images are fully scalable.  As you increase their size, their edges do not get "pixilated" due to the enlarging on individual pixels.  The mathematical equation simply gets recalculated using higher values to generate the same smooth curve.

The other feature that makes Flash so suitable for web delivery is that it also has a built in ability to create "streaming" animations.  A Flash movie will begin playing before the entire file has downloaded.  The remaining portion of the movie will download in the background automatically, thus freeing the end user from a lengthy download.

 

Demonstrations

Listed below are three different demonstrations of how Flash can be used.