APPENDIX B

Next Steps

So, you’ve read this book, practiced using Flash, and successfully passed the Rich Media Communication with Adobe Flash Professional Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) exam. Good for you!

What are your next steps? Fortunately for you, there are a myriad of areas for you to explore. Since its inception, Flash has been the go-to product for web-based animations, so there is an extensive body of knowledge that designers and developers have built around it. Simply garnering a web education in Flash will take up all of your waking moments. But what are some of the specifics you should be looking at?

Interaction of Animation and Code

A beginner’s guide to Flash cannot begin to do justice to a comprehensive discussion of ActionScript. Many (most?) of the complex animations on the Web are actually the compilation of some great on-stage designs with solid AS3 code backing them up. Want to create a game spinner similar to the one in the child’s game Chutes and Ladders? The design is relatively rudimentary, but the code is well beyond beginner level. Want to make things magically appear and reappear? While you can certainly leverage tweens to the hilt, at some point you’ll likely rely on AS3 code.

The code’s the thing, but the code has to have objects to manipulate or it’s not worth anything.

In my classes I give students this advice all the time: We no longer live in a world where straight good design principles can get you where you need to go. You must develop a strong understanding of the technology, especially when it comes to code, so that you can leverage those design attributes. The people who have strong skills in both design and code but who live primarily at the sweet spot where those skills merge are the ones who find the most success in our disruptive, volcanic, web-centric world.

Determine to become a code wonk!

Oh, and by the way, garnering a huge body of knowledge in AS3 will be very good for you in other realms. For example, considering the powerful troika of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, your AS3 skills will make you feel right at home in the JavaScript world because AS3 is simply a dialect of JavaScript. You’ve been learning it all along and didn’t know it!

Also, gathering a solid body of knowledge with regard to AS3 will allow you to do more in code and less on the stage, which speeds up your rich media efforts. And as an added benefit, you might want to investigate developing Adobe AIR apps as a sideline to your rich media work.

Dispense with the Written Narrative

As a writer, it pains me to say this, but when it comes to text, less is more. As good as the information age has been, its one big downfall has been the flood of text one is invited to read. People are simply too busy to read (and more important, comprehend) all of the text they’re faced with on a daily basis. Therefore, it’s to your benefit to find ways to show what you want to say while at the same time using very little, if any, text. Flash is an ideal tool for this.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is a very good big band jazz and swing group of international acclaim. Consider their Flash-based site: www.bbvd.com/theatre_home.html. There’s very little text on the main page, but you clearly understand what you’re looking at: the door to some kind of theater with marquees on both sides of the theater entrance providing you with rich media information about who and what is involved. Investigate further, navigating to other pages, and you find the same kind of thinking. As you venture inside, you’ll find that the designers have kept the theater analogy. You’re seated at the Cab Calloway cocktail table, which in reality is a preview sampling of BBVD’s tribute to the legendary big band leader.

Here’s the thing the BBVD site does: It causes you think that you’re going inside a theater, sitting at a table. You’re actively engaged in the site, not simply reading some static text pages. That is the entire point of rich media.

So, put on your designer hat and take that viewer inside your experience. Instead of letting them read the menu, show them the goodies you have to offer.

Integrate Music and Video Into Your Work

Because you can so easily bring music and videos into your work, you now have lots of opportunities to decide when and where those elements are important to your rich media story.

Have you ever visited a site and were startled by some loud blaring music you didn’t really care about? Have you become frustrated searching around on such a site for some sort of “Volume = Off” button only to find none?

The trick to integrating music and video into your work is to do it in such a way that it is timely for your viewers. Set the mood with your music, provide a video that instructs further, and you’ve enhanced the document. Stomp into the room with 76 trombones and you’ll likely turn off your viewers.

You’ve invited someone into your environment. Now what music and video moments do you think are important to share with them?

Don’t Think of Flash as the Be-All and End-All

I love Flash. I mean, I really love Flash. This is an amazing product. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s a tool—okay, a pretty cool tool—in your web development world.

The problem is that the smaller computers—the smartphones and tablets of the world—may not be able to run Flash. Adobe has recently announced it will no longer continue developing Flash Player for these devices.

When Steve Jobs came out on stage and declared that he would not allow Apple to run Flash on the iPhone and iPad, he also explained why: HTML5 can do the same thing.

What he meant was that the combination of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript can do the same thing.

And he was right.

But here’s the thing: You have a huge, beautiful rich media development tool in front of you in the form of Flash. When you’re doing web development for PCs, it’s smart to think Flash because your time to product delivery is reduced.

However, when working on apps for smaller devices, you may want to consider the HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript alternative. Check out Adobe Edge as a tool that will assist you in developing rich media content using this troika.

In the end, it’s safe to say you can trust Adobe—with its rich legacy of bringing forward industry-standard web development and rich media tools—to help you navigate through the changes into the next, new Internet developments.