Flash 3 Sleek Web Animations

By Bob Schmitt
July 1998

Macromedia Flash 3.0
Rating:	Thumbs Up
Summary	A maturing product with innovative ways to get more bang for your bandwidth.
Platform/ Price	Windows, Mac/$299 (street), upgrade $99
Company Contact	Macromedia (415) 252-2000; www.flash.com

The streaming, vector-based animation format gets you places where video doesn’t fit, while doing much more than the humble animated GIF. Now that Macromedia is making Flash available for licensing, it has a chance to become a real standard. Toolmakers and developers alike are eyeing the latest release.

Flash 3 looks very similar to 2, but there’s a small but powerful core of new and reworked features. A new stand-alone Flash player lets you create a self-contained executable for CD-ROM or other media. Since the projector adds just 144KB, it’s possible to fit a Flash presentation on a floppy. For Web delivery, previewing your movies has gotten easier; you can run a movie right in the authoring environment and even see how users will experience playback at different connection speeds. Of course, to see your Flash 3 movies, users will have to upgrade, too. (They’ll need a Java player, a plug-in, or ActiveX control.)

Version 3 offers new ways to leverage your graphics and keep file sizes down. With alpha effects, you can control the opacity of any element, including bitmaps. Masking layers let you use one layer as a mask over another layer for a spotlight effect and other interesting possibilities. And with shape blending, you can morph two shapes, letting Flash do the tweening.

Flash 3’s new alpha effects let you set the
transparency levels of your graphics to change over
time, for eye-catching fade-in and –out effects.

Essential features have also been revamped. Interactive elements (called symbols in Flash) can now be bitmapped graphics or movie clips, in addition to buttons. For instance, a movie clip can be a self-contained movie – like Dirfilm – complete with interaction. And symbols now behave independently of the timeline, so they play in a single frame.

And though Flash’s "actions" don’t match the power of Director’s Lingo, they are getting better. Particularly useful are Tell Target, which lets one object control the actions of another, and a couple of memory-management actions. You can also attach more than one action to a button or frame.

Flash 3 also adds the ability to generate movies in real time, for specialized applications like stock tickers or graphs. You can build a template that – when processed by Flash Generator on the server-side – dynamically creates Flash movies from external image and text files. The server piece wasn’t available for testing yet but was set to be in public beta by May. While Flash is shaping up as a serious Web tool, there are still a few annoying leftovers from its beginnings as Cell Animator. It would be nice to see the Flash timeline fit the mold of Director and Dreamweaver and its toolbar adhere to standards like Adobe Photoshop. Perhaps the coming year will see other companies develop tools for Flash, further extending its capabilities and usability.