Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Making video games is a lot of peoples’ dreams nowadays, and there is certainly something to be said for looking at an interactive, moving game and thinking, “I made that!” While I don’t enjoy the process of writing video games as much as I do website design and other graphic design, the final result is very rewarding. If you have ever thought about getting into video game creation, Flash is a great way to get started! The workflow is shorter than some other mediums, and you can post your work on the Internet for virtually anyone to see.
Practically everything I know about video game development, and many of my other skills, came from tutorials over at CartoonSmart. I can say from first-hand experience that these are absolutely fantastic tutorials that will have you cranking out great content in no time! So, if you want to get into video game creation, what better time than now? Click away to some of the best game-making tutorials out there.
If you have any comments about CartoonSmart, or want to share any other resources you have found to be helpful, feel free to post a comment!
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
WebKit, the rendering engine that has brought CSS3's explicit animation to the web for the first time!
Today we as web designers and developers get a rare chance to look into the future. The latest nightly build of Webkit (the rendering engine for browsers Apple Safari and Google Chrome) includes some new support for CSS3. Specifically, explicit animations using CSS. Up until now, developers have either had to rely on Flash and all its drawbacks, or bite the bullet and write out a long piece of JavaScript just to get a box to slide in elegantly. JQuery alleviated the problem somewhat, but nothing compares to the visual approach of writing a CSS document.
CSS animation will enable developers to spend much less time on animation which, to the end user, may seem trivial. And it will do so with cleaner, simpler, more robust code that will load significantly faster and run smoother for the end user. Read on to see a preview of how it works, and when you can expect to be able to use this on an actual web page.
[click here to read the rest of the article]
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008
One of my most popular services is my ability to work with Flash. I believe in Flash, and what it can do. But that’s not what this article is about. Just because I believe in and use something doesn’t mean it’s the end-all, be-all to web design and development! In fact, Flash has a TON of downsides that I think should be taken into consideration every time you’re thinking about using Flash on your website.
The logo for Adobe Flash CS4
For those of you who don’t know, Adobe Flash, formerly Macromedia Flash (and before that, “FutureSplash”), is a web plugin technology. Developers make animations, games, and other media using any of the Flash Authoring Environments (most notably Flash itself). The end-user downloads the plugin for their browser, and then views the content integrated or embedded into the page.
Flash has been around for quite a while now, and through the years it has been used for animation, games, all kinds of other interactive media, and even full-on websites or web applications. Rightly or wrongly, Flash has been adopted by both consumers and developers as the standard for all of these things. This is evidenced by the fact that today 99 out of 100 Internet-capable computers have Flash plugin installed (statistic provided by Adobe).
Both designers and business owners alike should seriously weigh their options when it comes to implementing Flash as part or all of their website.
[click here to read the rest of the article]
