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UNC student reflects on importance of multimedia programming
UNC multimedia student Grace Koerber blew me away during the SND portfolio review when she showed her latest multimedia interactive — a class project from Donny Lofland’s multimedia programming class. Having taken this class several years ago, I am impressed by the breadth of programming knowledge that multimedia journalists are now being asked to learn. Of course I could always preach about the importance of this skill set, but I asked Grace to give us an outside perspective. In this post she writes about her experience learning how to program, this project, and how she feels programming will help her as a journalist.
Example files and tips for deeplinking with Flash SWF Address
Back in October I wrote a tutorial on how to utilizing deep links in Flash files. This post has consistently been the most viewed page on the site and I have been receiving several emails asking for help fixing bugs. Although I am happy to help individual cases, I decided it might be best to provide my files as well as publish other II reader’s trials, tribulations and success stories to help everyone out there who is also working with SWF Address.
Flash Tip: Migrating from AS2 to AS3
Actionscript 3.0 is fundamental to integrating more robust interactive applications into your Flash presentations. I have been putting it off for some time now (aren’t we all a bit resistant to change?), but today I took the giant leap and taught myself AS3. And, now I wish I would have done it sooner. Here are the major differences between AS2 and AS3 and what you need to know to start learning AS3 today.
Flash Tip: Detecting end of videos
I finally sat down today to watch “Remember Me,” a great multimedia project by Concord Monitor. Brent Foster of Visual Journalist posted the behind-the-scenes story, and I knew I wanted to spend quality time with it. As I ate lunch, I watched the presentation. The only problem was that nothing happened at the end of each of the six videos, disrupting my viewing experience as I had to manually start the next. For those who want to sit back and watch, it would have been nice to add a feature that detects the end of one video to immediately start the next. Here’s how to do it …
Flash Tip: URLs in XML
One of my first assignments here at The Roanoke Times was to create a package detailing Virginia Tech’s 2007 football season, with links to archival stories, photo galleries and videos. I knew I wanted to use XML, but I wasn’t sure how to put a URL link in XML and have it show up as a link in Flash. Why I bring this up is because a recent assignment made me go back to these files to familiarize myself with the code, so I wanted to share it with you all in case you ever get stumped.
Flash Tip: Deep linking with SWFAddress
Ever been annoyed when someone clicks the “back” button while viewing a Flash presentation? Your initial reaction is, “You can’t do that in Flash!” Or, even more frustrating, you want to show someone a cool component within a Flash project, but it’s too confusing to say, “Go to this URL, then click “Videos,” then click “My video.” etc etc? Actually, neither of these quirks should arise anymore. Let me introduce you to SWFAddress and SWFObject, which enable the back/forward buttons of your browser AND allow for deep linking.
Personal lesson to the advantages of object-oriented programming
OOP can be confusing at first (why all these class files anyways??) but, when done right, is extremely handy when it comes time to create templates to be customized at a later date. Here is a case-in-point to the benefits of object-oriented programming.
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