50 Fast Flash MX Techniques
By Ellen Finkelstein, Gurdy Leete
* 50 cool techniques that will take your Flash animations to the next level. Includes topics such as Simulating a 3D Cube, Creating an Explosion, Building Letters from an Images, Making Mono Clips Sound Like Stereo, Creating a 3D Morph, Triggering Speech Bubbles, Building a User-response Form, Putting a Flash Movie onto a PDA.
Review
&inspires you to push yourself using the techniques within&well-written, detailed and accessible& -- Practical Web Projects, August 2003
“…inspires you to push yourself using the techniques within…well-written, detailed and accessible…”(Practical Web Projects, August 2003)
Review
“…inspires you to push yourself using the techniques within…well-written, detailed and accessible…”(Practical Web Projects, August 2003)
From the Back Cover
If you’re a Web designer, Macromedia Flash can help you create interactive effects that’ll reel in site visitors–and keep them coming back for more. Using lots of example movies, clear step-by-step instructions, and 32 pages of vivid color illustrations, Gurdy Leete and Ellen Finkelstein walk you through 50 of today’s coolest, fastest, "stickiest" Flash techniques, from amazing 2D and 3D animations and text effects to astonishing user interfaces and mini-applications.
Your Easy Guide to Macromedia Flash MX Tricks and Techniques
- Create talking cartoon heads, image morphs, and other attention-grabbing animations
- Go 3D with a rotating logo or globe
- Make text come alive with warping, swarming dots, and other effects
- Amaze viewers with interactive effects like scrolling panoramas and draggable masks
- Enhance the user experience with mouse trails, animated buttons, preloaders, and other interface techniques
- Build applications for news tickers, music keyboards, MP3 players, and more
CD-ROM includes example Adobe Photoshop Elements tryout version, Macromedia Flash MX trial version and more
Very disappointing book
This book looks like you will learn a lot as there are 50 tutorials.
Unfortunately, many are redundant, many are not really significant (not really useful, just funny), and the last one is a filler as it teaches you how to make a projector.
If you are buying this book from a library, take your time to review the center page that display each "Technique" in color.
It is worth half the price it costs. Not a great deal anyway. At least, you get the source files.
This book is for beginner who wants to have a bit of fun.
not the best
Highly disappointed with this book... it has many techniques that (while colorful) are just not useful ... such as creating bubbles or a kaleidoscope.
The one or two techniques I DID find useful... I was unable to properly do it in the way it was instructed. However when looking in similar books, I found instructions much more useful elsewhere. I recommend Macromedia's Flash MX Bible - which although doesn't have step by step instructions for these type of flash functions - it does have more efficient and reliable methods of instruction.
This book also spent quite a bit of time talking about vector and bitmap images, which we all know can easily be done in alternate programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, and although Flash may allow us to do it... I don't see the point as making such a big fuss on how to do it.
I would have been much more satisfied had there been techniques I could actually USE on a professional website, rather than cheesy techniques intended for beginner personal flash sites.
This book also covers cascading menus, progress display bars, creating a clock, a 3D book as an interface, form validation (this is a good one but I couldn't figure it out), scrolling virtual panoramas (I ended up buying a program to do this for me since their instruction was hard to understand), swarming dots into text, rotating 3D logos (really really cheesy), tabbed menus, draggable menus, creating ripples, drawing lines with a hand, an onscreen paint program, even a drumset.
Get the book if you want... maybe good for beginners just wanting to play with flash features. But not something intermediate users can learn a whole lot from.
Easy to learn
I think this is a great book for beginners. They give you some easy plans to follow step-by-step (so you don't screw-up) so hopefully by the end of the book you can really do some damage by yourself. Bonus: They give you all the source codes and pictures so you don't have to start from scratch.
The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because some of the techniques are really useless like creating a calculator!
