The Essential Guide To Flash Cs4 Air Development

We all know what a great tool Flash is for creating dynamic, engaging web content, and Adobe's CS4 release just makes it even better. Among the newer features is the ability to take all the power of Flash for the Web and put in on the desktop using AIR. AIR capability is built right into the Flash CS4 integrated development environment, which means you can start writing desktop applications right away. This book not only covers the essentials of using Flash with AIR (and AIR with Flash), but also shows you how to extend application functionality in new ways. Once you've got Flash on the desktop, you're no longer constrained by the limitations of running inside a web browser. You'll have access to the local desktop file system, and AIR adds SQLite functionality for native database support. And just as Flash animations have a consistent look and feel across browsers, AIR allows you to create applications that work consistently across operating systems—Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. For any Flash developer who wants to go from the Web to the desktop (and who doesn't?), this book is required reading. It not only tells you how to do it, but is full of practical, easy-to-follow examples that will have you building desktop AIR applications with Flash in no time. Expanding your existing Flash skills with the Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development will make you an even more potent and indispensable force on any development team!

For any professional designer or developer working in the world of web technologies or multimedia, Flash is the must-have application, and knowing how to use it effectively is vital. Add in ActionScript 3.0, and Flash becomes an even more powerful tool for the development of high-performance web applications. The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 with ActionScript introduces and explores the possibilities available to you by using Flash CS4. You will learn the basics of Flash's working environment and, using a step-by-step approach, work through the features of Flash and ActionScript needed to quickly achieve results. From navigating the interface to using graphic tools to write scripts and troubleshoot, you'll master deploying highly interactive applications with rich audio, video, and animation. Written for the beginning-to-intermediate Flash user, this book uses complete examples that highlight best practices that you can apply to your daily work as a developer or designer in today's rich media world.

If you're familiar with the basics of Flash, then The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 will take you further in all aspects of the application, animation, sound, 3D, inverse kinematics, the drawing tools, ActionScript, and much more. This book takes all the good bits of Flash CS4 and demonstrates them in methodical and intuitive exercises full of hints and tips for streamlining the creative process. Jump straight into Flash CS4 and start working on real life examples that you can customize to suit your needs. Demystifies Flash CS4—explaining new features deep diving through old favorites Streamlines the production of cutting-edge Flash CS4 animations and applications Provides a unique commercial perspective in compelling Flash productions This book is for intermediate Flash CS4 users as well as the more advanced user who wants to learn about using Flash CS4's awesome new capabilities, such as motion tweening and kinematics poses. Each chapter has a number of exercises that contribute to an overall project. The exercises are fun and compelling and allow you to place your own creative stamp on them, while still following the steps to completion. The final chapter focuses on bringing the exercise output together in an overall campaign consisting of a website featuring advanced flash components and advertising banners. An underlying theme of the book is marketing a website online. It discusses industry standards for banner campaigns (banner weight, frames per second, etc), effective website marketing techniques, and delves into search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Creating games in Flash is a never-ending journey of exploration, learning, and most of all, fun. Once you’ve mastered the basics, a new world is opened up to you, enabling you to take your existing skills to the next level and discover new skills that will in turn open new doors. This book is a direct continuation of Foundation Game Design with Flash, and is a complete point-by-point roundup of the most important skills a Flash game designer needs to know. You’ll increase your ActionScript knowledge and your game design skills while creating some excellent example games. You’ll learn advanced collision detection skills; professional AI and pathfinding; and how to load and save game data, create destructible environments, and build and switch game levels. Each chapter highlights a new advanced technique illustrated by practical examples. Examples of games are given in a variety of genres, all of which take an object-oriented programming approach. Advanced game design topics are covered, including vector-based collision reaction, pathfinding, billiard ball physics, and modeling game data.

CSS3 brings a mass of changes, additions, and improvements to CSS across a range of new modules. Web designers and developers now have a whole host of new techniques up their sleeves, from working with colors and fonts accurately, to using media queries to ensure correct styling across a multitude of devices. But all of these new technologies bring more tags to learn and more avenues for things to go wrong. CSS3 Solutions provides a collection of solutions to all of the most common CSS3 problems. Every solution contains sample code that is production-ready and can be applied to any project.

AdvancED Flash on Devices begins with a discussion of the mobile development landscape—the different players, tools, hardware, platforms, and operating systems. The second part of the book covers Flash Lite and how to take advantage newer features supported in Flash Lite 3.x. Then, the book covers AIR applications for multiple screens and includes topics such as: How to utilize new features of AIR 1.5 and Flash 10 as well as pitfalls to be aware of when building an AIR application for mobile How to include platform and context awareness for better adaptation How to adopt an application on multiple devices using dynamic graphical GUI Creating two full working real life touch screen mobile application The last part of the book covers creating Flex applications running Flash 9 and 10 in mobile device browsers and includes topics such as: How to adopt Flex for multiple mobile device browsers How to create various video players for Flash Lite and Flash 10 and optimize your content. How to take advantage of Flash Media Server Experienced Flash and ActionScript programmers who want to extend their skills to mobile platforms should find this book a great help in developing in this exciting and expanding marketplace.

With most U.S. households having Internet connections, more people than ever are looking to develop their own sophisticated Web sites. The need for easy-to-grasp information on how to make an interactive and well-designed site has never been higher as more people need to learn or improve their Web skills. For the busy professionals whose boss wants them to jazz up their Web site, or the student burning the midnight oil to put together some Web animations for a class, Creating a Web Site with Adobe Flash CS4 Professional: Visual QuickProject Guide is just the book they need to start creating Flash sites in an instant. Pared down to just the essentials, this book shows readers who are short on time just what they need to know to accomplish their first project in Flash. Topics covered include using the Flash authoring tool, creating and animating graphics, tweening, loading dynamic data, and adding sound and video, plus coverage of new Flash CS4 features. It’s everything readers need to know to develop their Web site using Adobe Flash! The book’s companion Web site offers project files and updates.