The Thing That Kills Flash As A Viable Web Solution

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 04:02:42 -0800, Onideus Mad Hatter
wrote:

We’re talkin shit for precision alignment:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations.png
Even when you max out all the quality settings, even when you set it to align with nothing but pixels (apparently Flash doesn’t quite comprehend pixels) and even when you MANUALLY ENTER VALUES based on the EXACT POSITIONING you got from whatever graphics proggie you like…yeah…any possible file savings, techniques or custom effects that require split form images…yer pretty much fucked.
And it’s not like I’m usin JPGs here, the source split forms are 8 bit PNGs with a single color transparency…there shouldn’t be any room for guess work, but somehow Flash still finds a way to fuck it all up.
Oh well, so much for my nifty loader idea…Unless I make it a Javascript/CSS/HTML loader for the Flash content…but then I lose out on the whole point of Flash which is greater cross compatibility.

I take it back…partially. I reconstructed all the original PNG fragments using HTML and CSS and I found 5 small errors when I was splitting the original image, which accounts for the 5 fragments in the version I made with Macromedia…BUT, the SwishMax one (made with version 2.03) is just completely fucked. Further, although the Macromedia one can reconstruct them accurate it still tends to blur the whole image slightly:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations2.png

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 05:00:29 -0800, Onideus Mad Hatter
wrote:

Even when you max out all the quality settings, even when you set it to align with nothing but pixels (apparently Flash doesn’t quite comprehend pixels) and even when you MANUALLY ENTER VALUES based on the EXACT POSITIONING you got from whatever graphics proggie you like…yeah…any possible file savings, techniques or custom effects that require split form images…yer pretty much fucked.
And it’s not like I’m usin JPGs here, the source split forms are 8 bit PNGs with a single color transparency…there shouldn’t be any room for guess work, but somehow Flash still finds a way to fuck it all up.
Oh well, so much for my nifty loader idea…Unless I make it a Javascript/CSS/HTML loader for the Flash content…but then I lose out on the whole point of Flash which is greater cross compatibility.

I take it back…partially. I reconstructed all the original PNG fragments using HTML and CSS and I found 5 small errors when I was splitting the original image, which accounts for the 5 fragments in the version I made with Macromedia…BUT, the SwishMax one (made with version 2.03) is just completely fucked. Further, although the Macromedia one can reconstruct them accurate it still tends to blur the whole image slightly:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations2.png

Okay, I reconstructed it in SwishMax with the new images and then I turned off the image smoothing option under "View" and this is what I got:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png

It’s not ~too~ bad, I think if I increase the height of some of the image parts by .5 it’ll be acceptable.

I like working in SwishMax more than Macromedia because the interface is much more intuitive…actually everything in SwishMax is more intuitive compared to Macromedia.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

We’re talkin shit for precision alignment:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations.png

Flash does have some quirks when it comes to alignment of bitmaps, but given the power it delivers to the end user and the developer it’s not worth crying over and hardly warrants your tabloid post title. Before you completely spit out your dummy over something pretty straight-forwards to resolve, perhaps you should take some time to look how Flash actually works.

Even when you max out all the quality settings, even when you set it to align with nothing but pixels (apparently Flash doesn’t quite comprehend pixels) and even when you MANUALLY ENTER VALUES based on

Flash really isn’t pixel based, that’s why. It’s a vector based system that has some support for bitmaps and excellent support for video.

the EXACT POSITIONING you got from whatever graphics proggie you like…yeah…any possible file savings, techniques or custom effects that require split form images…yer pretty much fucked.

If you’re a n00b to Flash, maybe. Given the "fucked" nature of flash, perhaps explain how a site like www.eight8.jp exists? Perhaps it’s the user rather than Flash 😉

And it’s not like I’m usin JPGs here, the source split forms are 8 bit PNGs with a single color transparency…there shouldn’t be any room for guess work, but somehow Flash still finds a way to fuck it all up.

Flash is really weird to work with, and I seriously hate it’s authoring tool – even in Flash 8 it’s super-sucky. But once you start to "think" like Macromedia – I mean, Adobe 😉 – it does sort of make sense. You really have to plan well before you start a Flash project, and it DOES handle bitmaps just fine if you are careful.

Oh well, so much for my nifty loader idea…Unless I make it a Javascript/CSS/HTML loader for the Flash content…but then I lose out on the whole point of Flash which is greater cross compatibility.

Well before you give up, why not send me your FLA file and I’ll take a look. I know how frustrating Flash was when I started out. I spend a LOT of time with it now working on interactive videos and other scary stuff with my clients. Even now I get completely lost in it fairly regularly!

JS is not really an alternative for this sort of thing. In *theory* more people have Flash enabled than JS enabled.

Something else to keep in mind is next year is really THE year for this sort of technology. With Flash 8.5 and Microsofts Metro technology we’re going to see broadband internet sites change dramatically, and user expectations will sky-rocket along with this new technology. Now is the time to get good with Flash/ActionScript, XAML/Metro!

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 05:00:29 -0800, Onideus Mad Hatter
wrote:

Even when you max out all the quality settings, even when you set it to align with nothing but pixels (apparently Flash doesn’t quite comprehend pixels) and even when you MANUALLY ENTER VALUES based on the EXACT POSITIONING you got from whatever graphics proggie you like…yeah…any possible file savings, techniques or custom effects that require split form images…yer pretty much fucked.
And it’s not like I’m usin JPGs here, the source split forms are 8 bit PNGs with a single color transparency…there shouldn’t be any room for guess work, but somehow Flash still finds a way to fuck it all up.
Oh well, so much for my nifty loader idea…Unless I make it a Javascript/CSS/HTML loader for the Flash content…but then I lose out on the whole point of Flash which is greater cross compatibility.

I take it back…partially. I reconstructed all the original PNG fragments using HTML and CSS and I found 5 small errors when I was splitting the original image, which accounts for the 5 fragments in the version I made with Macromedia…BUT, the SwishMax one (made with version 2.03) is just completely fucked. Further, although the Macromedia one can reconstruct them accurate it still tends to blur the whole image slightly:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations2.png

Okay, I reconstructed it in SwishMax with the new images and then I turned off the image smoothing option under "View" and this is what I got:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png
It’s not ~too~ bad, I think if I increase the height of some of the image parts by .5 it’ll be acceptable.

I like working in SwishMax more than Macromedia because the interface is much more intuitive…actually everything in SwishMax is more intuitive compared to Macromedia.

SwishMax is really basic though. It wont take you long to totally outstrip its capabilities and be more trapped by it than freed. Yes the Flash Authoring tool is awful, but soon as you get into scripting (and you WILL have to if you want to go anywhere with Flash) you’ll be lost in anything else.

Animation is one tiny part of Flash – actually I’d go as far as saying animation is the smallest part of Flash. The Flash player is actually a complete virtual machine of sorts, which a programming language that pretty much lets you do anything. I’ve seen complete replicas of a Windows-like desktop built in Flash with a Macromedia Flex back-end that are just astounding, and almost all of it is coded rather than "drawn". Give it time 🙂 You’ll learn to love it like um… an ugly cousin 🙂

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

Didums didums didums.
Yourest your head.
Theres a good boy.
PHheeeee.

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 14:16:39 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 05:00:29 -0800, Onideus Mad Hatter
wrote:

Even when you max out all the quality settings, even when you set it to align with nothing but pixels (apparently Flash doesn’t quite comprehend pixels) and even when you MANUALLY ENTER VALUES based on the EXACT POSITIONING you got from whatever graphics proggie you like…yeah…any possible file savings, techniques or custom effects that require split form images…yer pretty much fucked.
And it’s not like I’m usin JPGs here, the source split forms are 8 bit PNGs with a single color transparency…there shouldn’t be any room for guess work, but somehow Flash still finds a way to fuck it all up.
Oh well, so much for my nifty loader idea…Unless I make it a Javascript/CSS/HTML loader for the Flash content…but then I lose out on the whole point of Flash which is greater cross compatibility.

I take it back…partially. I reconstructed all the original PNG fragments using HTML and CSS and I found 5 small errors when I was splitting the original image, which accounts for the 5 fragments in the version I made with Macromedia…BUT, the SwishMax one (made with version 2.03) is just completely fucked. Further, although the Macromedia one can reconstruct them accurate it still tends to blur the whole image slightly:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations2.png

Okay, I reconstructed it in SwishMax with the new images and then I turned off the image smoothing option under "View" and this is what I got:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png
It’s not ~too~ bad, I think if I increase the height of some of the image parts by .5 it’ll be acceptable.

I like working in SwishMax more than Macromedia because the interface is much more intuitive…actually everything in SwishMax is more intuitive compared to Macromedia.

SwishMax is really basic though.

How so?

It wont take you long to totally
outstrip its capabilities and be more trapped by it than freed.

If you’re talking about default transition effects maybe, but when you play on my level that stuff is pretty meaningless.

Yes the Flash Authoring tool is awful, but soon as you get into scripting (and you WILL have to if you want to go anywhere with Flash) you’ll be lost in anything else.

….actually when it comes to scripting either is fine, I mean, you don’t really need an interface to type code. Although I’d still say that Swish is easier, at least from my experience. In Swish when you add objects each one *IS* its own layer, where as in Macromedia you can add multiple objects to a single layer…how you view those objects after you add them or how you label them or view them on the outline form…I haven’t figure that out yet (again, Swish is MUCH more intuitive)…that’s assuming of course you can…maybe you can’t.

Animation is one tiny part of Flash – actually I’d go as far as saying animation is the smallest part of Flash. The Flash player is actually a complete virtual machine of sorts, which a programming language that pretty much lets you do anything. I’ve seen complete replicas of a Windows-like desktop built in Flash with a Macromedia Flex back-end that are just astounding, and almost all of it is coded rather than "drawn". Give it time 🙂 You’ll learn to love it like um… an ugly cousin 🙂

Yer makin some awfully big ASSumptions, Kiddo…my skill in ActionScript is well beyond anything you’re personally familiar with I can assure you.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 14:10:20 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

We’re talkin shit for precision alignment:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations.png

Flash does have some quirks when it comes to alignment of bitmaps, but given the power it delivers to the end user and the developer it’s not worth crying over and hardly warrants your tabloid post title. Before you completely spit out your dummy over something pretty straight-forwards to resolve, perhaps you should take some time to look how Flash actually works.

You seem to enjoy jumping…to conclusions that is.

Even when you max out all the quality settings, even when you set it to align with nothing but pixels (apparently Flash doesn’t quite comprehend pixels) and even when you MANUALLY ENTER VALUES based on

Flash really isn’t pixel based, that’s why. It’s a vector based system that has some support for bitmaps and excellent support for video.

WRONG!

….well, not everything you said, but parts of what you said…try and guess which parts. ^_^

the EXACT POSITIONING you got from whatever graphics proggie you like…yeah…any possible file savings, techniques or custom effects that require split form images…yer pretty much fucked.

If you’re a n00b to Flash, maybe.

Kid, YER the n00b, trust me on this one.

Given the "fucked" nature of flash,
perhaps explain how a site like www.eight8.jp exists? Perhaps it’s the user rather than Flash 😉

In your case it is. Kids like you are often easily impressed by things that you don’t understand. Once you know how such sites were created they suddenly don’t seem so impressive. Oh hey, look, I can integrate video segments in Flash too:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain/ Ooo…how impressive. *rolls eyes*

And those craptastic dancing colored lines…yeah, come on, that sort of coding was old back in Win3.11 trippin on the fuckin Mystify screensaver. It’s like, WOW, he added a fade to it! I bet THAT took a lot of effort.

Hey look, I can do it too!
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/bats/ (except I can do it in Javascript and I can use graphics as a base)

WOAH, math is teh HARD, yo!

And it’s not like I’m usin JPGs here, the source split forms are 8 bit PNGs with a single color transparency…there shouldn’t be any room for guess work, but somehow Flash still finds a way to fuck it all up.

Flash is really weird to work with, and I seriously hate it’s authoring tool – even in Flash 8 it’s super-sucky. But once you start to "think" like Macromedia – I mean, Adobe 😉

And ya see, that’s the primary problem right there, it’s like Adobe just can’t release a product unless it has a HORRIBLE interface. One of the reasons I’m still using Paint Shop Pro. It’s the ~little~ things that get to ya. Like in Paint Shop Pro if you’re on a layer with a transparency, you can use the selection tool, make a box around an area and then click once inside the box to autoselect all the active pixels on that layer…can’t do that in Photoshop. Or like in Paintshop you can actually save selections as separate files and then easily use them in other images…where as in Photoshop it binds them into the file itself, which is just annoying and then forces you to save all your files in their proprietary shit format. I guess if you "grew up" with Adobe products that stuff doesn’t matter much…sorta like if you were born blind, you wouldn’t miss not seeing.

– it does sort of make sense. You
really have to plan well before you start a Flash project,

….well, not if you’re using Swishmax. You can easily manipulate any object you’ve added, move them around on the timeline with ease, encapsulate objects as sprites, group them, break them apart, etc, etc, etc.

and it DOES handle bitmaps just fine if you are careful.

Yeah I hear you talkin, Kiddo…lots of kids like you talk though. Let me know when you put up a Flash file that uses split form images, then maybe I’ll take you seriously.

Oh well, so much for my nifty loader idea…Unless I make it a Javascript/CSS/HTML loader for the Flash content…but then I lose out on the whole point of Flash which is greater cross compatibility.

Well before you give up, why not send me your FLA file and I’ll take a look. I know how frustrating Flash was when I started out. I spend a LOT of time with it now working on interactive videos and other scary stuff with my clients. Even now I get completely lost in it fairly regularly!

At this point my problem isn’t with Flash, it’s with SwishMax, for some reason turning off image smoothing (on the image properties, not under "view") doesn’t seem to have any effect. Basically, my current method works great when previewing within Swish and keeping image smoothing turned off under "view", but when you export…yeah, not so good (unless you zoom in at 200 percent or higher).

I could use Macromedia (Flash) but the lack of control over objects is just absolutely unacceptable. Please, if you can, explain this: http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Where.p ng

….no, REALLY. o_O

JS is not really an alternative for this sort of thing. In *theory* more people have Flash enabled than JS enabled.

Most people who have JS disabled probably have Flash disabled too.

Something else to keep in mind is next year is really THE year for this sort of technology. With Flash 8.5 and Microsofts Metro technology we’re going to see broadband internet sites change dramatically, and user expectations will sky-rocket along with this new technology. Now is the time to get good with Flash/ActionScript, XAML/Metro!

….I’m already one of the best:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/
Not too worried about it…take that site you posted, hell they weren’t even doing anything with alpha transparencies fer fuck sake…*shakes head*…pathetic.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

but given the power [flash] delivers to the end user

What "power"?? I can’t turn it off at the browser level. I can’t go to individual frames. I can’t skip forward or back. The entire presentation has to load. It leaves me open to advertisers, and fosters theft of attention.

All these rants would be moot if I could go to my browser preferences and checkmark "Flash on/off" like I can with animation, video, sound, graphics, java, scripting, and a bunch of other stuff.

Flash TAKES POWER AWAY from the user.

</rant>

Jose
—
You can choose whom to befriend, but you cannot choose whom to love. for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 16:26:05 GMT, Jose
wrote:

but given the power [flash] delivers to the end user

What "power"?? I can’t turn it off at the browser level. I can’t go to individual frames. I can’t skip forward or back. The entire presentation has to load. It leaves me open to advertisers, and fosters theft of attention.

All these rants would be moot if I could go to my browser preferences and checkmark "Flash on/off" like I can with animation, video, sound, graphics, java, scripting, and a bunch of other stuff.

Flash TAKES POWER AWAY from the user.

</rant>

Not to mention it solves browser incompatibility by giving Macromedia a monopoly…which isn’t so good. The Flash ads are the absolute worst, popup blockers can’t stop them, they can make it so you can’t close them, the can include audio with jacked up volume that’ll blow yer speakers, hitting the "stop" button in your browser has no effect on their loading capability, etc, etc.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Animation is one tiny part of Flash – actually I’d go as far as saying animation is the smallest part of Flash. The Flash player is actually a complete virtual machine of sorts, which a programming language that pretty much lets you do anything. I’ve seen complete replicas of a Windows-like desktop built in Flash with a Macromedia Flex back-end that are just astounding, and almost all of it is coded rather than "drawn". Give it time 🙂 You’ll learn to love it like um… an ugly cousin 🙂

Yer makin some awfully big ASSumptions, Kiddo…my skill in ActionScript is well beyond anything you’re personally familiar with I can assure you.

I’ve not seen any of your sites showing that off, so I’m sorry. Got any fun examples? I was kinda thrown in the ActionScript deep-end about 2 months ago and had to learn really quickly. We’re doing some pretty fab stuff with websockets and java-generated Flash (Macromedia Flex server taking MPEG videos and real-time assembling interactive Flash conainers around them and spitting the whole thing out to Flash movies running on end-users (web) browsers. It’s exciting, but way over my head much of the time. In Jan I’ll be working on my own Java classes for Flex… that’ll be frightening as I’m NOT a programmer at heart LOL. Have you played with AS3 yet?

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

Jose wrote:

but given the power [flash] delivers to the end user

What "power"?? I can’t turn it off at the browser level. I can’t go to individual frames. I can’t skip forward or back. The entire presentation has to load. It leaves me open to advertisers, and fosters theft of attention.

All these rants would be moot if I could go to my browser preferences and checkmark "Flash on/off" like I can with animation, video, sound, graphics, java, scripting, and a bunch of other stuff.

Flash TAKES POWER AWAY from the user.

</rant>

Jose

Blame the author of your Flash movie. Flash isn’t presentational software; it’s rich interactive media. Non-linear stuff – presentations tend to be linear. Last week in finished up a short pseudo presentation (heavy animation and videos in it) which had forward, back and menu buttons in it. It’s easy to do. gotoAndPlay and loadMovie() are your friends 🙂

BTW, with Flash 8 & Flex the browser forward/back buttons work within a Flash movie just fine. It more to do with how a project is authored – and just like a bad web site a bad Flash movie can really suck for the end user to use.

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

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The real problem with the way flash is used is that there is way too much exact and fixed pixeling used. (you know, those sites with tiny-tiny text and acres of blank space.

Flash is mostly scalable, if more folk used percentages, flash would be more palatable.

Frank /~ http://newmex.com/f10
@/

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 14:16:39 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

Animation is one tiny part of Flash – actually I’d go as far as saying animation is the smallest part of Flash. The Flash player is actually a complete virtual machine of sorts, which a programming language that pretty much lets you do anything. I’ve seen complete replicas of a Windows-like desktop built in Flash with a Macromedia Flex back-end that are just astounding, and almost all of it is coded rather than "drawn". Give it time 🙂 You’ll learn to love it like um… an ugly cousin 🙂

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 16:26:05 GMT, Jose
wrote:

but given the power [flash] delivers to the end user

What "power"?? I can’t turn it off at the browser level. I can’t go to individual frames. I can’t skip forward or back. The entire presentation has to load. It leaves me open to advertisers, and fosters theft of attention.

All these rants would be moot if I could go to my browser preferences and checkmark "Flash on/off" like I can with animation, video, sound, graphics, java, scripting, and a bunch of other stuff.

Flash TAKES POWER AWAY from the user.

</rant>

Not to mention it solves browser incompatibility by giving Macromedia a monopoly…which isn’t so good. The Flash ads are the absolute worst, popup blockers can’t stop them, they can make it so you can’t close them, the can include audio with jacked up volume that’ll blow yer speakers, hitting the "stop" button in your browser has no effect on their loading capability, etc, etc.

Blockers can block them. FireFox 1.5 blocks popups triggered from inside Flash movies fine (it was one of the features added in this version).

The monopoly ends next year – Microsofts Metro (or whatever they call it now) will directly compete with Adobe’s next-gen Flash player. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Flash player was shipped with Windows; given MS have their own flash-like technology in next years Windows Vista (the next major release of Windows, due in… August?), I can’t see them wanting to ship Flash player out-of-the-box. So, unless a user specifically downloads Flash they wont see it… but they WILL see Metro pages without ANY download. Also, who knows what will come next with the Flash player – Adobe no doubt will want to re-engineer it for PDF support (?), or will they integrate the Flash player into Acrobat? (hope not!).

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

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Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

Flash really isn’t pixel based, that’s why. It’s a vector based system that has some support for bitmaps and excellent support for video.

WRONG!

…well, not everything you said, but parts of what you said…try and guess which parts. ^_^

Humor me. You seem to be the expert.

Kid, YER the n00b, trust me on this one.

hehe, well I’m not an expert that’s for sure, but I’m not a TOTAL beginner.

Given the "fucked" nature of flash,
perhaps explain how a site like www.eight8.jp exists? Perhaps it’s the user rather than Flash 😉

In your case it is. Kids like you are often easily impressed by things that you don’t understand. Once you know how such sites were created they suddenly don’t seem so impressive. Oh hey, look, I can integrate video segments in Flash too:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain/ Ooo…how impressive. *rolls eyes*

Um, are you REALLY comparing the two? Yes getting video into Flash is pretty easy, but the design and interactive elements are NOT so easy, not when you are starting out. Once you start getting into AS it becomes a little more logical (personally, I still think it’s a horrible language tho… blah).

Flash is really weird to work with, and I seriously hate it’s authoring tool – even in Flash 8 it’s super-sucky. But once you start to "think" like Macromedia – I mean, Adobe 😉

And ya see, that’s the primary problem right there, it’s like Adobe just can’t release a product unless it has a HORRIBLE interface.

Well you have to cut them some slack there – after all they didn’t do the interface to Flash, that was Macromedia. They only just bought Macromedia, so hopefully Flash will gain some of the simplicity of Photoshops UI.

One
of the reasons I’m still using Paint Shop Pro. It’s the ~little~ things that get to ya. Like in Paint Shop Pro if you’re on a layer with a transparency, you can use the selection tool, make a box around an area and then click once inside the box to autoselect all the active pixels on that layer…can’t do that in Photoshop.

Yes you can. Just hit CTRL and click the layer in the layer palette. All active pixels are selected. Tad easier, no? Photoshop is a far deeper program – but a lot of the functionality is initially obscure because of just how MUCH it can do – there cant be a pretty button for everything. Anyway, I guess that’s just my opinion – I know designers who use other tools, but most use some version of PS in their workflow. I dont think that’s just "because" (Photoshop is very expensive after all).

Or like in

Paintshop you can actually save selections as separate files and then easily use them in other images…where as in Photoshop it binds them into the file itself, which is just annoying and then forces you to save all your files in their proprietary shit format. I guess if you "grew up" with Adobe products that stuff doesn’t matter much…sorta like if you were born blind, you wouldn’t miss not seeing.

I guess I did because I know the above isn’t true. Perhaps you used older versions of PS? PhotoShop has smart objects that can be embedded PhotoShop or Illustrator files. They can be stuck into other files. Update the smart object and all files that use that image are updated without you ever having to open them. This works in all the major Adodbe products – you can embed PhotoShop objects in Illustrator, then take the combined Illustrator document and embed that in InDesign. Everything is still editable. Edit any one of those file outside of InDesign and your InDesign document is also updated automatically. It’s very cool.

– it does sort of make sense. You
really have to plan well before you start a Flash project,

…well, not if you’re using Swishmax. You can easily manipulate any object you’ve added, move them around on the timeline with ease, encapsulate objects as sprites, group them, break them apart, etc, etc, etc.

I’ll take another look at it. It’s been ages! Anything that will save me time is fine 🙂

and it DOES handle bitmaps just fine if you are careful.

Yeah I hear you talkin, Kiddo…lots of kids like you talk though. Let me know when you put up a Flash file that uses split form images, then maybe I’ll take you seriously.

I cant think of a good reason why anyone would actually want to do that – especially if your project is for the Internet. The results would be to large, or to slow to play on an old computer. I tend to avoid bitmaps in Flash if I can help it.

Well before you give up, why not send me your FLA file and I’ll take a look. I know how frustrating Flash was when I started out. I spend a LOT of time with it now working on interactive videos and other scary stuff with my clients. Even now I get completely lost in it fairly regularly!

At this point my problem isn’t with Flash, it’s with SwishMax, for some reason turning off image smoothing (on the image properties, not under "view") doesn’t seem to have any effect. Basically, my current method works great when previewing within Swish and keeping image smoothing turned off under "view", but when you export…yeah, not so good (unless you zoom in at 200 percent or higher).

Weird 😐 Well I’ll grab a trail of Swish over the holidays and have a play myself.

I could use Macromedia (Flash) but the lack of control over objects is just absolutely unacceptable. Please, if you can, explain this: http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Where.p ng
…no, REALLY. o_O

JS is not really an alternative for this sort of thing. In *theory* more people have Flash enabled than JS enabled.

Most people who have JS disabled probably have Flash disabled too.

I’m not so sure, but I don’t have evidence either way other than personal experience.

…I’m already one of the best:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/

heheh okay. When you get a site on here, I will believe you

http://www.thefwa.com/

Until then, you’re just playing with Flash like me regardless of what you might say 🙂

Not too worried about it…take that site you posted, hell they weren’t even doing anything with alpha transparencies fer fuck sake…*shakes head*…pathetic.

lol. There were a few, when the Japanese girl appears. Also, lots of video-alpha going on (but of course… you know all about chroma keying being a Flash expert and all :P)

Talking of which, we’re doing some blue-screen stuff just before new years – I’ll try remember to post the Flash demo here. Unless it’s totally rubbish anyway (there’s a fair chance of that).

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

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On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 17:21:05 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

Blockers can block them. FireFox 1.5 blocks popups triggered from inside Flash movies fine (it was one of the features added in this version).

….that’s not actually what I meant.

The monopoly ends next year – Microsofts Metro (or whatever they call it now) will directly compete with Adobe’s next-gen Flash player. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Flash player was shipped with Windows; given MS have their own flash-like technology in next years Windows Vista (the next major release of Windows, due in… August?), I can’t see them wanting to ship Flash player out-of-the-box. So, unless a user specifically downloads Flash they wont see it… but they WILL see Metro pages without ANY download.

….only if they’re using Windows though…Windows Vista at that…pretty small portion of the net.populous. It’ll take them close to a half decade just to get the numbers up to current level of XP users.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 17:21:05 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

Blockers can block them. FireFox 1.5 blocks popups triggered from inside Flash movies fine (it was one of the features added in this version).

…that’s not actually what I meant.

The monopoly ends next year – Microsofts Metro (or whatever they call it now) will directly compete with Adobe’s next-gen Flash player. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Flash player was shipped with Windows; given MS have their own flash-like technology in next years Windows Vista (the next major release of Windows, due in… August?), I can’t see them wanting to ship Flash player out-of-the-box. So, unless a user specifically downloads Flash they wont see it… but they WILL see Metro pages without ANY download.

…only if they’re using Windows though…Windows Vista at that…pretty small portion of the net.populous. It’ll take them close to a half decade just to get the numbers up to current level of XP users.

Yeah, true. I meant more that it’ll push Adobe into being a little more creative with the technology they have acquired – if they just sit around without some decent innovation in the authoring tools the likes of Microsoft Sparkle could end up mopping the floor with them in the long term. It’ll be a while until a significant number of users have even upgraded to Flash 8, let alone 8.5 or Metro.

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
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On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 10:16:27 -0700, Frank Vuotto
wrote:

The real problem with the way flash is used is that there is way too much exact and fixed pixeling used. (you know, those sites with tiny-tiny text and acres of blank space.

Flash is mostly scalable, if more folk used percentages, flash would be more palatable.

….um…no. If Flash was MORE exact then it would BE more scalable. For example my perfect liquid website prototypes:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/alt.2600/
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/liquid/ (still need to add server side image caching to improve performance)

Go ahead and try resizing your browser, see what happens. My hybrid PHP/Javascript code can accurately resize images and reposition them with absolute precision…you can’t do that with Flash…at least not with split form images.

Why use split form images?

Well take my blog site:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog/

The main display is made up of nothing more than this:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/all.png

And takes up only about 38 Kilobytes. If you wanted to use solid form images, even if you relied heavily on vector objects with gradients in Flash (which would take more time and effort to impliment and for most complex objects wouldn’t look as good) you STILL wouldn’t be able to reach that level of site compression.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Blame the author of your Flash movie.

The author does not affect whether or not I can turn it off at the browser level. That is by agreement between the browser publisher and Macromedia. Since Macromedia makes its money on flash from the authoring software, not the rendering software, they are beholden to the authors. Most flash authors DO NOT want you to be ABLE to turn it off. Most flash is advertising.

Guess who wins that one.

Jose
—
You can choose whom to befriend, but you cannot choose whom to love. for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Yer makin some awfully big ASSumptions, Kiddo…my skill in ActionScript is well beyond anything you’re personally familiar with I can assure you.

Put that guy in your killfile and forget about him. He is a disturbed sociopath quite likely headed for jail soon.

In article , Onideus Mad
Hatter took the hamburger, threw it on the grill, and I said "Oh wow"…

…. is you using it.

—
Merry Christmas, from Santa’s middle finger.

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 17:46:25 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

Flash really isn’t pixel based, that’s why. It’s a vector based system that has some support for bitmaps and excellent support for video.

WRONG!

…well, not everything you said, but parts of what you said…try and guess which parts. ^_^

Humor me.

Well let’s take video for example. Unless you want to use the Sorenson codec Flash doesn’t support shit. Let me know when you can embed specialized codecs, like Xvid into Flash…then maybe you can say it has excellent support for video.

You seem to be the expert.

I’ve never claimed to be an expert…there are ALWAYS higher levels of understanding. Even if you memorize every single function, every filter, every tool…that doesn’t mean fuck all. There are a near infinite numbers of ways those tools, filters, etc can be used to achieved new techniques and designs. An expert? Nah, but I do have quite a number of specialized techniques and designs…most of which could only be replicated by a very limited number of people…and even then, they would be developing their own methodologies for achieving the end result.

Kid, YER the n00b, trust me on this one.

hehe, well I’m not an expert that’s for sure, but I’m not a TOTAL beginner.

To me you’re a beginner, because you don’t seem to recognize something (look at what you typed right below).

Given the "fucked" nature of flash,
perhaps explain how a site like www.eight8.jp exists? Perhaps it’s the user rather than Flash 😉

I used to be like you…until my skill level reached a point where I came to recognize certain…truths. When you learn to analyze and break apart other peoples techniques and methods based on the end result you’ll understand it too.

In your case it is. Kids like you are often easily impressed by things that you don’t understand. Once you know how such sites were created they suddenly don’t seem so impressive. Oh hey, look, I can integrate video segments in Flash too:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain/ Ooo…how impressive. *rolls eyes*

Um, are you REALLY comparing the two?

Yup.

Yes getting video into Flash is pretty easy,

….yeah if you want to do a shit job of it. You know, like they did on that link you gave (those poor bastards couldn’t properly encode video to save their lives).

but the design and interactive elements are NOT so easy,

….well, I suppose it depends on what you’re using:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Where.p ng

You never did explain. However on my own I found you can right click on objects in Macromedia and convert them to symbols…quite deficient compared to SwishMax’s interface.

not when you are starting out. Once you start getting into AS it becomes a little more logical (personally, I still think it’s a horrible language tho… blah).

….what would you need any real code for? No offense but if you’re writing a butt load of code to create interactive video you’re REALLY doing something wrong. Check out the downloads section on the main Backwater site…that didn’t require any sort of serious code at all.

Again though, this is all related to what I was talking about earlier…you see things…and for some strange reason you think they’re so complicated…when in most cases the effects are achieved by rather simple means…simple once you understand the techniques involved.

Flash is really weird to work with, and I seriously hate it’s authoring tool – even in Flash 8 it’s super-sucky. But once you start to "think" like Macromedia – I mean, Adobe 😉

And ya see, that’s the primary problem right there, it’s like Adobe just can’t release a product unless it has a HORRIBLE interface.

Well you have to cut them some slack there – after all they didn’t do the interface to Flash, that was Macromedia. They only just bought Macromedia, so hopefully Flash will gain some of the simplicity of Photoshops UI.

Photoshop has a horrible interface…not as bad as say AfterEffects, but it’s right up there.

One
of the reasons I’m still using Paint Shop Pro. It’s the ~little~ things that get to ya. Like in Paint Shop Pro if you’re on a layer with a transparency, you can use the selection tool, make a box around an area and then click once inside the box to autoselect all the active pixels on that layer…can’t do that in Photoshop.

Yes you can. Just hit CTRL and click the layer in the layer palette. All active pixels are selected. Tad easier, no?

Actually no and it’s less intuitive. Less keyboard shortcuts is generally a better thing in most cases and why do you need to click on the image preview portion of the layers box in order to do it? What does that have to do with SELECTION…you see, less intuitive. In Paint Shop the function is tied into the SELECTION TOOL, which, you know MAKES SENSE.

Photoshop is a far deeper
program –

WRONG!

Here, let me continue. The scroll wheel on yer mouse…in Paint Shop Pro the scroll wheel can be used to zoom in and out of the image and you get precision control over it as it’ll center in on the position of the mouse…in Photoshop all you have is the Navigator box…which requires more movement of the mouse, is less intuitive and doesn’t give you as much direct control.

I’m not done yet. Paint Shop Pro also comes bundled with Animation Shop…Photoshop, not even CS2 has anything like that.

Oh here’s my favorite…that gawd damn fuckin "step back" piece of shit. Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is not to be able to just hit Ctrl+Z for multiple undo levels? I mean, practically every gawd damn fuckin proggie on the PLANET uses Ctrl+Z as the universal undo shortcut and let’s you undo, in most cases, as much as you like. In Photoshop though…no, you get ONE level of undo with Ctrl+Z and then you have to "step back" and use a three button command shortcut – Ctrl+Alt+Z…now how gawd damn Jesus killing stupid is that? I mean, honestly.

Oh and Paint Shop’s scripting interface is like LIGHT YEARS easier and more intuitive than Photoshop’s.

but a lot of the functionality is initially obscure because of just how MUCH it can do

….you seem to be confused, Honey. I’m not really talking about FUNCTION, so much as FORM. All in all both proggies are pretty much equal as far as what they can do…I’m just saying that in Paint Shop what you can do is VASTLY easier to figure out and implement because the interface wasn’t designed by someone who OBVIOUSLY isn’t a graphic designer.

– there cant be a pretty button for
everything.

….why not? Why can’t the interface be improved? Why do you think it has to be obscure and difficult? You have a pretty backwards line of thinking if you ask me. Hell, personally I’d like to see em include undo and redo functions that are tied into your mouse’s back and forward buttons (well I suppose you could configure that yourself via your mouse’s setup…but it’d be nice if it was a prebuilt function).

Anyway, I guess that’s just my opinion – I know designers who use other tools, but most use some version of PS in their workflow. I dont think that’s just "because" (Photoshop is very expensive after all).

The only real use I have for Photoshop is it’s "Sheer" filter…although I’m sure at some point I’ll find a 3rd party filter that can do everything it can. I also like the brush controls in Photoshop CS2…but on the other hand I haven’t used the latest version of Paint Shop so I can’t really make any direct comparisons.

Or like in

Paintshop you can actually save selections as separate files and then easily use them in other images…where as in Photoshop it binds them into the file itself, which is just annoying and then forces you to save all your files in their proprietary shit format. I guess if you "grew up" with Adobe products that stuff doesn’t matter much…sorta like if you were born blind, you wouldn’t miss not seeing.

I guess I did because I know the above isn’t true.

….you’re claiming you can save selections in Photoshop as individual files, eh?

Perhaps you used older versions of PS?

No, I’ve got CS2.

PhotoShop has smart objects that can be embedded
PhotoShop or Illustrator files.

….those aren’t selections, Honey.

They can be stuck into other files.
Update the smart object and all files that use that image are updated without you ever having to open them.

*snicker*

Yeah, and how does THAT seem like a good idea. *shakes head*

Typical Adobe, trying to make their products "think" for you. I don’t want any program updating or altering ANY file of mine. If *I* want to change something then *I’LL* change it. That sort of functionality that you described is just a disaster waiting to happen.

– it does sort of make sense. You
really have to plan well before you start a Flash project,

…well, not if you’re using Swishmax. You can easily manipulate any object you’ve added, move them around on the timeline with ease, encapsulate objects as sprites, group them, break them apart, etc, etc, etc.

I’ll take another look at it. It’s been ages! Anything that will save me time is fine 🙂

The way SwishMax works is just elegant:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Where.p ng

It’s so smooth in operation that often times you don’t even need the preview window. You have the timeline, the outline and the transform box. It’s very easy to make complex, interactive content via the use of sprites, scenes, groups, containers, buttons, etc. You give each object on the outline a name and then it works off a very simple hierarchy structure…in Macromedia you have to like…convert each object in a "symbol" or something before you can even see it on the outline.

and it DOES handle bitmaps just fine if you are careful.

Yeah I hear you talkin, Kiddo…lots of kids like you talk though. Let me know when you put up a Flash file that uses split form images, then maybe I’ll take you seriously.

I cant think of a good reason why anyone would actually want to do that – especially if your project is for the Internet. The results would be to large, or to slow to play on an old computer. I tend to avoid bitmaps in Flash if I can help it.

Because you don’t know how to do it. The nifty split form loader I’m working on:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png

Total size of all the image content is only 15 Kilobytes…so even on dialup it won’t take the loader more than 3 seconds to load.

….of course my skill in image encoding methodology is nothing short of God like, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for your average user…well at least that’s what I think anyway. The people who make the PNG format think otherwise, they said that most of the stuff I’m doing is impossible from the perspective of average users…but I dunno…maybe they just need a tutorial or something. It’s not THAT difficult to make content with fully cross compatible PNG alpha transparencies without the use of Flash…
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/transmov e/

*shrugs*

Well before you give up, why not send me your FLA file and I’ll take a look. I know how frustrating Flash was when I started out. I spend a LOT of time with it now working on interactive videos and other scary stuff with my clients. Even now I get completely lost in it fairly regularly!

At this point my problem isn’t with Flash, it’s with SwishMax, for some reason turning off image smoothing (on the image properties, not under "view") doesn’t seem to have any effect. Basically, my current method works great when previewing within Swish and keeping image smoothing turned off under "view", but when you export…yeah, not so good (unless you zoom in at 200 percent or higher).

Weird 😐 Well I’ll grab a trail of Swish over the holidays and have a play myself.

Careful, its interface will spoil ya rotten.

JS is not really an alternative for this sort of thing. In *theory* more people have Flash enabled than JS enabled.

Most people who have JS disabled probably have Flash disabled too.

I’m not so sure, but I don’t have evidence either way other than personal experience.

Every person whom I’ve talked with that’s had Javascript disabled has had Flash disabled too…that’s been my personal experience.

…I’m already one of the best:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/

heheh okay. When you get a site on here, I will believe you
http://www.thefwa.com/

Until then, you’re just playing with Flash like me regardless of what you might say 🙂

I would never submit any of my sites to a screw job like that. Their own site looks and operates like shit and to me what their doing is no better than the sort of tweenage muppet fuckery that produces crap like this:
http://members.tripod.com/JCouchenour/award004s.jpg

Not too worried about it…take that site you posted, hell they weren’t even doing anything with alpha transparencies fer fuck sake…*shakes head*…pathetic.

lol. There were a few, when the Japanese girl appears.

….uh…yeah I’d like to see the source footage, that’s loading WAY too fast to be on the fly alpha transparent video, looks like it’s been prerendered to me.

Here ya go, kiddo, here’s a REAL example of on the fly alpha transparent video:
http://dev.themakers.com/fp8/video/alpha.html

Standard works pretty good, but even on my dual Xeon system it starts gettin jittery with the higher end filters.

Also, lots of video-alpha going on (but of course… you know all about chroma keying being a Flash expert and all :P)

….what does it have to do with Flash?

Talking of which, we’re doing some blue-screen stuff just before new years – I’ll try remember to post the Flash demo here. Unless it’s totally rubbish anyway (there’s a fair chance of that).

If it is, put up yer source stuff, I’ll show ya how to do it up proper. `, )

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 19:49:03 -0600, Noodles Jefferson
wrote:

In article , Onideus Mad
Hatter took the hamburger, threw it on the grill, and I said "Oh wow"…
… is you using it.

*Hatter opens a bottle of port and pours himself a glass*

Hey Noodle dick…still hard at stupid I see. What the fuck have you produced lately? Oh yeah, that’s right…NOTHING. ^_^

Oh and btw…
http://www.deviantart.com/view/26753427/
Batman hates you…he really does.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

Okay, I reconstructed it in SwishMax with the new images and then I turned off the image smoothing option under "View" and this is what I got:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png
It’s not ~too~ bad, I think if I increase the height of some of the image parts by .5 it’ll be acceptable.

I like working in SwishMax more than Macromedia because the interface is much more intuitive…actually everything in SwishMax is more intuitive compared to Macromedia.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an idiot."

The problem is, you’re still confusing dpi and lpi, or was it spi and ppi? -o

On Sun, 25 Dec 2005 22:08:35 -0500, oldami
wrote:

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

Okay, I reconstructed it in SwishMax with the new images and then I turned off the image smoothing option under "View" and this is what I got:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png
It’s not ~too~ bad, I think if I increase the height of some of the image parts by .5 it’ll be acceptable.

I like working in SwishMax more than Macromedia because the interface is much more intuitive…actually everything in SwishMax is more intuitive compared to Macromedia.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an idiot."

The problem is, you’re still confusing dpi and lpi, or was it spi and ppi?

Or was it hiv and std…oh wait, no we’re not talkin about your mom are we?

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

Or was it hiv and std…oh wait, no we’re not talkin about your mom are we?

oh, that hurt…not.
this lame response is the best you can do?
You’re getting lazy.

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 17:46:25 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

Flash really isn’t pixel based, that’s why. It’s a vector based system that has some support for bitmaps and excellent support for video.

WRONG!

…well, not everything you said, but parts of what you said…try and guess which parts. ^_^

Humor me.

Well let’s take video for example. Unless you want to use the Sorenson codec Flash doesn’t support shit. Let me know when you can embed specialized codecs, like Xvid into Flash…then maybe you can say it has excellent support for video.

You seem to be the expert.

I’ve never claimed to be an expert…there are ALWAYS higher levels of understanding. Even if you memorize every single function, every filter, every tool…that doesn’t mean fuck all. There are a near infinite numbers of ways those tools, filters, etc can be used to achieved new techniques and designs. An expert? Nah, but I do have quite a number of specialized techniques and designs…most of which could only be replicated by a very limited number of people…and even then, they would be developing their own methodologies for achieving the end result.

Kid, YER the n00b, trust me on this one.

hehe, well I’m not an expert that’s for sure, but I’m not a TOTAL beginner.

To me you’re a beginner, because you don’t seem to recognize something (look at what you typed right below).

Given the "fucked" nature of flash,
perhaps explain how a site like www.eight8.jp exists? Perhaps it’s the user rather than Flash 😉

I used to be like you…until my skill level reached a point where I came to recognize certain…truths. When you learn to analyze and break apart other peoples techniques and methods based on the end result you’ll understand it too.

In your case it is. Kids like you are often easily impressed by things that you don’t understand. Once you know how such sites were created they suddenly don’t seem so impressive. Oh hey, look, I can integrate video segments in Flash too:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain/ Ooo…how impressive. *rolls eyes*

Um, are you REALLY comparing the two?

Yup.

Yes getting video into Flash is pretty easy,

…yeah if you want to do a shit job of it. You know, like they did on that link you gave (those poor bastards couldn’t properly encode video to save their lives).

but the design and interactive elements are NOT so easy,

…well, I suppose it depends on what you’re using:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Where.p ng
You never did explain. However on my own I found you can right click on objects in Macromedia and convert them to symbols…quite deficient compared to SwishMax’s interface.

not when you are starting out. Once you start getting into AS it becomes a little more logical (personally, I still think it’s a horrible language tho… blah).

…what would you need any real code for? No offense but if you’re writing a butt load of code to create interactive video you’re REALLY doing something wrong. Check out the downloads section on the main Backwater site…that didn’t require any sort of serious code at all.

Because you are living in client-side land. If you want to do anything with services, or use XML, process user input etc, you cannot do ANY of this without coding. But really, your statement demonstrates a real lack of knowledge about how Flash works beyond animation and perhaps stop(); ?? All the really creative sides are as much about good use of AS as design-smarts.

Again though, this is all related to what I was talking about earlier…you see things…and for some strange reason you think they’re so complicated…when in most cases the effects are achieved by rather simple means…simple once you understand the techniques involved.

Flash is really weird to work with, and I seriously hate it’s authoring tool – even in Flash 8 it’s super-sucky. But once you start to "think" like Macromedia – I mean, Adobe 😉

And ya see, that’s the primary problem right there, it’s like Adobe just can’t release a product unless it has a HORRIBLE interface.

Well you have to cut them some slack there – after all they didn’t do the interface to Flash, that was Macromedia. They only just bought Macromedia, so hopefully Flash will gain some of the simplicity of Photoshops UI.

Photoshop has a horrible interface…not as bad as say AfterEffects, but it’s right up there.

It’s not brilliant I admit, but then there’s nothing that really does what it does quite so well.

Yes you can. Just hit CTRL and click the layer in the layer palette. All active pixels are selected. Tad easier, no?

Actually no and it’s less intuitive. Less keyboard shortcuts is generally a better thing in most cases and why do you need to click on the image preview portion of the layers box in order to do it? What does that have to do with SELECTION…you see, less intuitive. In Paint Shop the function is tied into the SELECTION TOOL, which, you know MAKES SENSE.

You can ALSO do it from the select tool honey. It’s a choice. When you become a PhotoShop poweruser you run full screen with NO TOOLS visible at all. That’s how everyone in our studio works. It’s so much faster.

Photoshop is a far deeper
program –

WRONG!

Here, let me continue. The scroll wheel on yer mouse…in Paint Shop Pro the scroll wheel can be used to zoom in and out of the image and you get precision control over it as it’ll center in on the position of the mouse…in Photoshop all you have is the Navigator box…which requires more movement of the mouse, is less intuitive and doesn’t give you as much direct control.

Have you ever use PhotoShop? Scrollwheel zooms the image in PhotoShop. Duh 🙂

I’m not done yet. Paint Shop Pro also comes bundled with Animation Shop…Photoshop, not even CS2 has anything like that.

Photoshop comes shipped with ImageReady (since version 6, and we’re now on version 9). It’s a fully fledged animation/web tool.

Oh here’s my favorite…that gawd damn fuckin "step back" piece of shit. Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is not to be able to just hit Ctrl+Z for multiple undo levels? I mean, practically every gawd damn fuckin proggie on the PLANET uses Ctrl+Z as the universal undo shortcut and let’s you undo, in most cases, as much as you like. In Photoshop though…no, you get ONE level of undo with Ctrl+Z and then you have to "step back" and use a three button command shortcut – Ctrl+Alt+Z…now how gawd damn Jesus killing stupid is that? I mean, honestly.

That’s because unlike many other editing programs PhotoShop has non-linear undo. So if I wanted to undo an effect I did 4 hours ago but NOT change the things I did after that, I can with a few clicks. How else would you do it? You cant use CTRL+Z to magically select an event out of 10000s of events to undo. It cant read your mind just yet 🙂

Oh and Paint Shop’s scripting interface is like LIGHT YEARS easier and more intuitive than Photoshop’s.

At some things yes. There are a few things I like about it.

but a lot of the functionality is initially obscure because of just how MUCH it can do

…you seem to be confused, Honey. I’m not really talking about FUNCTION, so much as FORM. All in all both proggies are pretty much equal as far as what they can do…I’m just saying that in Paint Shop what you can do is VASTLY easier to figure out and implement because the interface wasn’t designed by someone who OBVIOUSLY isn’t a graphic designer.

– there cant be a pretty button for
everything.

…why not? Why can’t the interface be improved? Why do you think it has to be obscure and difficult? You have a pretty backwards line of thinking if you ask me. Hell, personally I’d like to see em include undo and redo functions that are tied into your mouse’s back and forward buttons (well I suppose you could configure that yourself via your mouse’s setup…but it’d be nice if it was a prebuilt function).

Because there would be a 1000 buttons on the UI.

Anyway, I guess that’s just my opinion – I know designers who use other tools, but most use some version of PS in their workflow. I dont think that’s just "because" (Photoshop is very expensive after all).

The only real use I have for Photoshop is it’s "Sheer" filter…although I’m sure at some point I’ll find a 3rd party filter that can do everything it can. I also like the brush controls in Photoshop CS2…but on the other hand I haven’t used the latest version of Paint Shop so I can’t really make any direct comparisons.

Or like in

Paintshop you can actually save selections as separate files and then easily use them in other images…where as in Photoshop it binds them into the file itself, which is just annoying and then forces you to save all your files in their proprietary shit format. I guess if you "grew up" with Adobe products that stuff doesn’t matter much…sorta like if you were born blind, you wouldn’t miss not seeing.

I guess I did because I know the above isn’t true.

…you’re claiming you can save selections in Photoshop as individual files, eh?

Perhaps you used older versions of PS?

No, I’ve got CS2.

Dont believe you 🙂 You list of things you claimed PhotoShop didn’t do proves you cant have had more than a casual glance at PhotoShop, or you’re just a beginner :p

PhotoShop has smart objects that can be embedded
PhotoShop or Illustrator files.

…those aren’t selections, Honey.

But they can contain selections. So it’s a whole new level of functionality. You can save 100s of selections, objects inside objects etc and contain them in files that can be "included’ inside other files.

They can be stuck into other files.
Update the smart object and all files that use that image are updated without you ever having to open them.

*snicker*

Yeah, and how does THAT seem like a good idea. *shakes head*
Typical Adobe, trying to make their products "think" for you. I don’t want any program updating or altering ANY file of mine. If *I* want to change something then *I’LL* change it. That sort of functionality that you described is just a disaster waiting to happen.

Its useful. Imagine this; you are working on designs for a company web site. You integrate their pretty logo into letter heads, web sites, brochures etc. The company then changes their mind about their logo. Do you really want to have to edit ALL those documents by hand? No – with objects you can. You simply edit the logo file and all of their documents are updated. It’s not "thinking for you", it’s helping your workflow. If you ever work on large projects you’ll find this sort of thing invaluable – and certainly the "must buy" feature in CS2 I think. Well, that and the improved camera raw support.

Because you don’t know how to do it. The nifty split form loader I’m working on:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png
Total size of all the image content is only 15 Kilobytes…so even on dialup it won’t take the loader more than 3 seconds to load.

I do know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to. I’ve done several shorts that are bitmap based, but to me that’s not where the real elegance of Flash lays.

…of course my skill in image encoding methodology is nothing short of God like,

Oh really lol.

http://www.thefwa.com/

Until then, you’re just playing with Flash like me regardless of what you might say 🙂

I would never submit any of my sites to a screw job like that. Their own site looks and operates like shit and to me what their doing is no better than the sort of tweenage muppet fuckery that produces crap like this:
http://members.tripod.com/JCouchenour/award004s.jpg

Well, that’s one way to look at it, but you’re aiming pretty low. My freelance clients range from record labels and popular bands for Universal to interactive sites for Yell. Home-bru sites have their market, but not if you’re after the kind of clients that are willing to let you play with more cutting edge stuff (and pay for the time it takes to do it).

lol. There were a few, when the Japanese girl appears.

…uh…yeah I’d like to see the source footage, that’s loading WAY too fast to be on the fly alpha transparent video, looks like it’s been prerendered to me.

Here ya go, kiddo, here’s a REAL example of on the fly alpha transparent video:
http://dev.themakers.com/fp8/video/alpha.html

More of the same.

Standard works pretty good, but even on my dual Xeon system it starts gettin jittery with the higher end filters.

Yeah, that’s where careful design comes in and avoiding frame-based content. Scripting movies tends to be smoother as it’s not tied into the timeline as much.

Also, lots of video-alpha going on (but of course… you know all about chroma keying being a Flash expert and all :P)

…what does it have to do with Flash?

Lots. You can’t do video-alpha without it. Unless you think video-alpha is simply adding an alpha fade to the video object? Video alpha is filming your video against a blue/green background then letting Flash replace that background with anything (another video, for example). The same trick they use in movies. Flash can do all of this real-time now, but you need a video that has an alpha channel before you can begin.

Talking of which, we’re doing some blue-screen stuff just before new years – I’ll try remember to post the Flash demo here. Unless it’s totally rubbish anyway (there’s a fair chance of that).

If it is, put up yer source stuff, I’ll show ya how to do it up proper. `, )

Sounds fun 🙂 I’ll try post when we’re done filming. Not that we’ve even started yet! 😮

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 16:40:29 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

…well, I suppose it depends on what you’re using:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Where.p ng
You never did explain. However on my own I found you can right click on objects in Macromedia and convert them to symbols…quite deficient compared to SwishMax’s interface.

Still haven’t touched on that one…are you avoiding it on purpose or what?

…what would you need any real code for? No offense but if you’re writing a butt load of code to create interactive video you’re REALLY doing something wrong. Check out the downloads section on the main Backwater site…that didn’t require any sort of serious code at all.

Because you are living in client-side land. If you want to do anything with services, or use XML, process user input etc, you cannot do ANY of this without coding. But really, your statement demonstrates a real lack of knowledge about how Flash works beyond animation and perhaps stop(); ?? All the really creative sides are as much about good use of AS as design-smarts.

I thought we were talking about interactive video, now suddenly you’re talking about XML…what the fuck time zone are you in exactly?

I mean, interactive video…let’s think about this…
on (rollOver) { yourcontainer.loadMovie("video_number"); }

Woah…boy that’s sure some COMPLICATED code, innt? *snicker*

Photoshop has a horrible interface…not as bad as say AfterEffects, but it’s right up there.

It’s not brilliant I admit, but then there’s nothing that really does what it does quite so well.

Uh…yeah, Paint Shop Pro. Are you even READING my posts or are you just skimming through them?

Actually no and it’s less intuitive. Less keyboard shortcuts is generally a better thing in most cases and why do you need to click on the image preview portion of the layers box in order to do it? What does that have to do with SELECTION…you see, less intuitive. In Paint Shop the function is tied into the SELECTION TOOL, which, you know MAKES SENSE.

You can ALSO do it from the select tool honey.

Yeah…with a keyboard command. You’re like…slow…or something. Here, let me try explaining to you the S..L..O..W way:

Photoshop – select a box area, hold down CTRL, then move your mouse slightly and hope to I love you don’t accidentally move the selection out of place in the process.

Paint Shop – select a box area, click once inside of it.

o_O

Where the fuck is your head, Kiddo?

It’s a choice.

Giving options where you don’t need any only causes confusion and makes the interface less user friendly and less intuitive. You don’t need 8 different ways of doing something, you only need ONE WAY, the best way. If you’re so deficient that you can’t figure out what the best way is…yeah, you probably shouldn’t be designing an interface.

When you become a PhotoShop poweruser

….a what? A "PhotoShop poweruser"?! What in the fuck is that? Some kiddie club of retards? Do you have sekrat decoder rings? Poweruser…give me a fuckin break.

you run full screen with NO TOOLS visible at all. That’s how everyone in our studio works. It’s so much faster.

Kiddiekins, I bet I’m faster than every person in your studio COMBINED and, huh, I have the tools visible.

WRONG!

Here, let me continue. The scroll wheel on yer mouse…in Paint Shop Pro the scroll wheel can be used to zoom in and out of the image and you get precision control over it as it’ll center in on the position of the mouse…in Photoshop all you have is the Navigator box…which requires more movement of the mouse, is less intuitive and doesn’t give you as much direct control.

Have you ever use PhotoShop?

Have you?

Scrollwheel zooms the image in PhotoShop. Duh 🙂

Uh, no it doesn’t. Maybe on the Mac is does, but it sure as fuck doesn’t on the PC…but then what would you be using a Mac for…*snicker*…

I’m not done yet. Paint Shop Pro also comes bundled with Animation Shop…Photoshop, not even CS2 has anything like that.

Photoshop comes shipped with ImageReady (since version 6, and we’re now on version 9). It’s a fully fledged animation/web tool.

Oh, Photoshop FINALLY got an anima-er…wait…wait…no, no it really doesn’t. I mean, if you want to make an uber simple 3rd rate animated GIF okay…but I don’t see any frame transitions…no frame effects…no text transitions…no text effects…you can only export video in Quicktime…um…I think maybe you missed the point, Powerluser.

Oh here’s my favorite…that gawd damn fuckin "step back" piece of shit. Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is not to be able to just hit Ctrl+Z for multiple undo levels? I mean, practically every gawd damn fuckin proggie on the PLANET uses Ctrl+Z as the universal undo shortcut and let’s you undo, in most cases, as much as you like. In Photoshop though…no, you get ONE level of undo with Ctrl+Z and then you have to "step back" and use a three button command shortcut – Ctrl+Alt+Z…now how gawd damn Jesus killing stupid is that? I mean, honestly.

That’s because unlike many other editing programs PhotoShop has non-linear undo.

*whispers* no it doesn’t *whispers*

o_O

….not by default anyway…and boy there’s a REAL good reason why.

So if I wanted to undo an effect I did 4 hours ago but
NOT change the things I did after that, I can with a few clicks. How else would you do it? You cant use CTRL+Z to magically select an event out of 10000s of events to undo. It cant read your mind just yet 🙂

There are far easier ways of achieving such results with far less effort and far less…mess. You’re relying far too much on the program to think for you and not enough on your own ability to organize what you’re doing directly. To me, most of what you’re doing and most of what you proposed says one thing…uncreative. *shrugs*

Oh and Paint Shop’s scripting interface is like LIGHT YEARS easier and more intuitive than Photoshop’s.

At some things yes. There are a few things I like about it.

…why not? Why can’t the interface be improved? Why do you think it has to be obscure and difficult? You have a pretty backwards line of thinking if you ask me. Hell, personally I’d like to see em include undo and redo functions that are tied into your mouse’s back and forward buttons (well I suppose you could configure that yourself via your mouse’s setup…but it’d be nice if it was a prebuilt function).

Because there would be a 1000 buttons on the UI.

No, no, see that’s YOUR idea of an improved interface, Little Miss I-Need-6-Different-Ways-To-Select-All-The-Active-Pixels.

You know what REALLY kills Photoshop though?

This:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/PNG_Opt ions.png

Paint Shop has the most powerful PNG optimization controls I’ve ever seen…Photoshop has nothing even remotely like it…I wouldn’t expect Powerlusers to know anything about image encoding methodology though.

Oh hey, Spacey, for fun why don’t you post the link to one of your studios sites, for fun I’ll reap the fucker and then rebuild it at half the size…LOL…

Perhaps you used older versions of PS?

No, I’ve got CS2.

Dont believe you 🙂 You list of things you claimed PhotoShop didn’t do proves you cant have had more than a casual glance at PhotoShop, or you’re just a beginner :p

I think you’re confusing the Mac version with the PC edition, Spacey.

PhotoShop has smart objects that can be embedded
PhotoShop or Illustrator files.

…those aren’t selections, Honey.

But they can contain selections.

Uh…no, they can’t actually. o_O

What part of the definition of "selection" are you not grasping exactly?

The closest you can come to saving selections in Photoshop is to save the selection as a new image and then to save that image as a PSD file…which coincidentally is HUGE in size and much harder to manage.

Its useful. Imagine this; you are working on designs for a company web site. You integrate their pretty logo into letter heads, web sites, brochures etc. The company then changes their mind about their logo. Do you really want to have to edit ALL those documents by hand?

Yes…and if the client changes their mind about the logo…guess whose gonna pay for it…not only the logo change but updating all the letter heads, web sites, brochures, etc…yeah, THE CLIENT.

Because you don’t know how to do it. The nifty split form loader I’m working on:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/Flash_L imitations3.png
Total size of all the image content is only 15 Kilobytes…so even on dialup it won’t take the loader more than 3 seconds to load.

I do know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to. I’ve done several shorts that are bitmap based, but to me that’s not where the real elegance of Flash lays.

Uh huh:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain/

You can talk kid…but I’ve yet to see you post anything like the loader I built for the prototype above.

…of course my skill in image encoding methodology is nothing short of God like,

Oh really lol.

Like I said, post the link to one of your sites…I’ll reap the fucker and rebuild it at half the size…LOL…yer Powerluser program doesn’t even have proper image encoding options for PNG files fer fuck sake.

I would never submit any of my sites to a screw job like that. Their own site looks and operates like shit and to me what their doing is no better than the sort of tweenage muppet fuckery that produces crap like this:
http://members.tripod.com/JCouchenour/award004s.jpg

Well, that’s one way to look at it, but you’re aiming pretty low. My freelance clients range from record labels and popular bands for Universal to interactive sites for Yell. Home-bru sites have their market, but not if you’re after the kind of clients that are willing to let you play with more cutting edge stuff (and pay for the time it takes to do it).

….it’s sad that you need clients to "play with more cutting edge stuff"…tsch, tsch, tsch…sounds to me like you have no love of the art…just another "professional" with mediocre skills.

Standard works pretty good, but even on my dual Xeon system it starts gettin jittery with the higher end filters.

Scripting movies tends to be smoother as it’s not tied into the timeline as much.

….seriously, get SwishMax already, you’re making things WAY harder than they need to be.

Also, lots of video-alpha going on (but of course… you know all about chroma keying being a Flash expert and all :P)

…what does it have to do with Flash?

Lots. You can’t do video-alp<snip>

No, no, I think you misunderstood…again. My point was that you were trying to make it sound like chroma keying didn’t even exist before Flash…my point is that it’s been around for a LOOOONG time…WAAAAAY before Flash was even conceived of. The fact that you’re only finding a use for it NOW and just with Flash kinda says a lot about yer skillz, Kiddo.

Talking of which, we’re doing some blue-screen stuff just before new years – I’ll try remember to post the Flash demo here. Unless it’s totally rubbish anyway (there’s a fair chance of that).

If it is, put up yer source stuff, I’ll show ya how to do it up proper. `, )

Sounds fun 🙂 I’ll try post when we’re done filming. Not that we’ve even started yet! 😮

You’re too slow:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain2/

I’ve run into a couple problems, but I should have em sorted out within the next 24/7:

http://forums.swishzone.com/index.php?showtopic=29875&st =15&gopid=134028

Doing it with SwishMax requires a bit more creativity than using Macromedia Flash, but I would never give up the SwishMax UI for it.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 16:40:29 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

You never did explain. However on my own I found you can right click on objects in Macromedia and convert them to symbols…quite deficient compared to SwishMax’s interface.

Still haven’t touched on that one…are you avoiding it on purpose or what?

Because I’ve not used Swish yet, so I cant really comment on it to be honest.

…what would you need any real code for? No offense but if you’re writing a butt load of code to create interactive video you’re REALLY doing something wrong. Check out the downloads section on the main Backwater site…that didn’t require any sort of serious code at all.

Because you are living in client-side land. If you want to do anything with services, or use XML, process user input etc, you cannot do ANY of this without coding. But really, your statement demonstrates a real lack of knowledge about how Flash works beyond animation and perhaps stop(); ?? All the really creative sides are as much about good use of AS as design-smarts.

I thought we were talking about interactive video, now suddenly you’re talking about XML…what the fuck time zone are you in exactly?

Because it’s all part of it. at least, we tend to build sites that aren’t static, and rather than building every single video into Flash by hand we spit out XML from a database that contains info (such as location) for the video. This is then parsed by Flash and it loads the correct FLV. It’s pretty much the best way I think as if we choose a different way of distributing video in the future (perhaps Metro?) XML is universal.

I mean, interactive video…let’s think about this…
on (rollOver) { yourcontainer.loadMovie("video_number"); }
Woah…boy that’s sure some COMPLICATED code, innt? *snicker*

That sort of level is easy, yes. I’m not saying the basics aren’t simple – anyone could use Flash 8’s encoder. But anyone could draw a box in 3D Studio Max that doesn’t make them the next John Lassiter (sp?).

Photoshop has a horrible interface…not as bad as say AfterEffects, but it’s right up there.

It’s not brilliant I admit, but then there’s nothing that really does what it does quite so well.

Uh…yeah, Paint Shop Pro. Are you even READING my posts or are you just skimming through them?

Skimming 🙂

Actually no and it’s less intuitive. Less keyboard shortcuts is generally a better thing in most cases and why do you need to click on the image preview portion of the layers box in order to do it? What does that have to do with SELECTION…you see, less intuitive. In Paint Shop the function is tied into the SELECTION TOOL, which, you know MAKES SENSE.

You can ALSO do it from the select tool honey.

Yeah…with a keyboard command. You’re like…slow…or something.

There’s no reason to start name calling really is there?

BTW, you can right click on a layer in the layer pal and click "select" and it’ll select it for you – there’s nothing in PhotoShop that requires you to use keyboard shortcuts.

Here, let me try explaining to you the S..L..O..W way:

Photoshop – select a box area, hold down CTRL, then move your mouse slightly and hope to I love you don’t accidentally move the selection out of place in the process.

Pretty much sums it up. What professional uses Photoshop with a mouse!? Really ends the discussion right there 😉 Buy yourself a graphics tablet for gods sake 😛

Paint Shop – select a box area, click once inside of it.

You can do all of that from the select menu – or how about vector masks? Or perhaps use the alpha channels, or then again a quickmask. The reason sometimes the functionality is not quite so obvious is because there is SO much of it. Right there I’ve listed 4 masking tools, each of which can be used in combination and each of which have their own specific functionality, and there’s reason for it – each do different tasks that could not be combined into a single tool Either that or you’d have 8 different masking buttons on the toolbar – which I think would be VERY confusing.

o_O

Where the fuck is your head, Kiddo?

On top of my pretty neck?

It’s a choice.

Giving options where you don’t need any only causes confusion and makes the interface less user friendly and less intuitive. You don’t need 8 different ways of doing something, you only need ONE WAY, the best way. If you’re so deficient that you can’t figure out what the best way is…yeah, you probably shouldn’t be designing an interface.

No, you need the best way for that PROJECT. When it comes to masking, often the quickest way to test a design is to use a vector mask – vector masks are easy to draw, but not generally good enough for production. So you’d convert that to a raster mask (alpha channel) when you are happy. Perhaps then you want to tweak some elements of the mask so you’d switch to quickmask and paint on the mask with a pen. Generally this is how professional photographers work.

When you become a PhotoShop poweruser

…a what? A "PhotoShop poweruser"?! What in the fuck is that? Some kiddie club of retards? Do you have sekrat decoder rings? Poweruser…give me a fuckin break.

Okay, perhaps a little glib. I meant "experienced user".

you run full screen with NO TOOLS visible at all. That’s how everyone in our studio works. It’s so much faster.

Kiddiekins, I bet I’m faster than every person in your studio COMBINED and, huh, I have the tools visible.

If you say so. Wanna name a few clients?

Scrollwheel zooms the image in PhotoShop. Duh 🙂

Uh, no it doesn’t. Maybe on the Mac is does, but it sure as fuck doesn’t on the PC…but then what would you be using a Mac for…*snicker*…

Fix your mouse driver. Photoshop 6, 7, 8 & 9 all support scrollwheel on the PC, and 8 & 9 do on the Mac.

I’m not done yet. Paint Shop Pro also comes bundled with Animation Shop…Photoshop, not even CS2 has anything like that.

Photoshop comes shipped with ImageReady (since version 6, and we’re now on version 9). It’s a fully fledged animation/web tool.

Oh, Photoshop FINALLY got an anima-er…wait…wait…no, no it really doesn’t. I mean, if you want to make an uber simple 3rd rate animated GIF okay…but I don’t see any frame transitions…no frame effects…no text transitions…no text effects…you can only export video in Quicktime…um…I think maybe you missed the point, Powerluser.

I didn’t say it was any good. You just said there wasn’t one and that was somewhat inaccurate as there has been one for about 6 years. It does some very basic animation things, and it’s really designed for chopping up images for web pages – which it’s not actually very good at either. We tend to stick to PhotoShop. Cant remember the last time I used ImageReady for anything serious.

That’s because unlike many other editing programs PhotoShop has non-linear undo.

*whispers* no it doesn’t *whispers*

o_O

…not by default anyway…and boy there’s a REAL good reason why.

I think it would confuse the hell out of new Photoshop users if it was turned on by default. It’s incredibly useful though. I dont actually know if PaintShop does that, maybe it does.

So if I wanted to undo an effect I did 4 hours ago but
NOT change the things I did after that, I can with a few clicks. How else would you do it? You cant use CTRL+Z to magically select an event out of 10000s of events to undo. It cant read your mind just yet 🙂

There are far easier ways of achieving such results with far less effort and far less…mess. You’re relying far too much on the program to think for you and not enough on your own ability to organize what you’re doing directly. To me, most of what you’re doing and most of what you proposed says one thing…uncreative. *shrugs*

That IS the danger, but then clients are hard to predict. Especially the sorts we have – often we can get RIGHT to the end of a project and they decide to use a different colour on an album cover. So how do you fix all the art quickly? Well assuming you saved image states it’s easy. I wish you could save complete histories sometimes, but I guess the files would be VAST.

Oh and Paint Shop’s scripting interface is like LIGHT YEARS easier and more intuitive than Photoshop’s.

At some things yes. There are a few things I like about it.

…why not? Why can’t the interface be improved? Why do you think it has to be obscure and difficult? You have a pretty backwards line of thinking if you ask me. Hell, personally I’d like to see em include undo and redo functions that are tied into your mouse’s back and forward buttons (well I suppose you could configure that yourself via your mouse’s setup…but it’d be nice if it was a prebuilt function).

Because there would be a 1000 buttons on the UI.

No, no, see that’s YOUR idea of an improved interface, Little Miss I-Need-6-Different-Ways-To-Select-All-The-Active-Pixels.

There isn’t one! I dont like PhotoShops UI particularly (although I do like PhotoShop CS2 better than the earlier versions, and I much prefer it on OSX rather than Windows). The best UI? No UI at all. I use PhotoShop full-screen with no tools at all and a graphics tablet. It’s far faster, and no icons or palettes on the screen to confuse.

You know what REALLY kills Photoshop though?

This:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/PNG_Opt ions.png
Paint Shop has the most powerful PNG optimization controls I’ve ever seen…Photoshop has nothing even remotely like it…I wouldn’t expect Powerlusers to know anything about image encoding methodology though.

Yeah I wish it had better PNG support. But…

PNG isn’t really viable just now on the Internet – end of 2006-2007 when enough people have either IE7 or Fx.

Oh hey, Spacey, for fun why don’t you post the link to one of your studios sites, for fun I’ll reap the fucker and then rebuild it at half the size…LOL…

Hmm www.garbage.com www.redhotchillipeppers.com www.yell.com www.bowie.net etc…

Perhaps you used older versions of PS?

No, I’ve got CS2.

Dont believe you 🙂 You list of things you claimed PhotoShop didn’t do proves you cant have had more than a casual glance at PhotoShop, or you’re just a beginner :p

I think you’re confusing the Mac version with the PC edition, Spacey.

Nope – I use CS2 on Windows XP about 80% of the time, and 20% of the time on a Apple PowerBook with OSX. I tend to only do video work in Flash on the Windows machine though as it’s much faster.

PhotoShop has smart objects that can be embedded
PhotoShop or Illustrator files.

…those aren’t selections, Honey.

But they can contain selections.

Uh…no, they can’t actually. o_O

Yes they can. They’re just PSD files really. You can save as many alpha channels was you want inside them.

What part of the definition of "selection" are you not grasping exactly?

Selection is just an alpha channel.

The closest you can come to saving selections in Photoshop is to save the selection as a new image and then to save that image as a PSD file…which coincidentally is HUGE in size and much harder to manage.

Because it’s a photo-editing program it has to save channels against something, so yes, alpha channels do have to be saved inside a PSD and cannot be saved externally. But that’s not really a problem. If you are working with production media size is hardly an issue is it? Some of our PhotoShop production files can be 200mb+ (raw images inside them).

Its useful. Imagine this; you are working on designs for a company web site. You integrate their pretty logo into letter heads, web sites, brochures etc. The company then changes their mind about their logo. Do you really want to have to edit ALL those documents by hand?

Yes…and if the client changes their mind about the logo…guess whose gonna pay for it…not only the logo change but updating all the letter heads, web sites, brochures, etc…yeah, THE CLIENT.

Of course – but if you have lots of clients you have be be efficient and it’s a huge pain in the arse if you have to go change all those files. Talk about mind-bendingly dull.

Uh huh:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain/
You can talk kid…but I’ve yet to see you post anything like the loader I built for the prototype above.

We have plenty of commercial sites. Take a look at Geffen’s artists.

…of course my skill in image encoding methodology is nothing short of God like,

Oh really lol.

Like I said, post the link to one of your sites…I’ll reap the fucker and rebuild it at half the size…LOL…yer Powerluser program doesn’t even have proper image encoding options for PNG files fer fuck sake.

With all the xml, php, asp, database, restricted access, logging, search engine optomisation etc…?

Well, that’s one way to look at it, but you’re aiming pretty low. My freelance clients range from record labels and popular bands for Universal to interactive sites for Yell. Home-bru sites have their market, but not if you’re after the kind of clients that are willing to let you play with more cutting edge stuff (and pay for the time it takes to do it).

…it’s sad that you need clients to "play with more cutting edge stuff"…tsch, tsch, tsch…sounds to me like you have no love of the art…just another "professional" with mediocre skills.

I do love the art – I only do this because I love it, but I have one I on what the Internet COULD be. Music clients tend to want something that stands out. This often means playing with things that no many people have done. That’s why we’re pushing all the time. Sadly we’re not always as cutting edge as we’d like to be :/

Lots. You can’t do video-alp<snip>

No, no, I think you misunderstood…again. My point was that you were trying to make it sound like chroma keying didn’t even exist before Flash…my point is that it’s been around for a LOOOONG time…WAAAAAY before Flash was even conceived of. The fact that you’re only finding a use for it NOW and just with Flash kinda says a lot about yer skillz, Kiddo.

It didn’t exist in Flash. I know keying has been around forever – but this is the first time it can be done real-time in something so small to distribute.

Sounds fun 🙂 I’ll try post when we’re done filming. Not that we’ve even started yet! 😮

You’re too slow:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain2/
I’ve run into a couple problems, but I should have em sorted out within the next 24/7:

I dont see any video on there? None of the links do anything. Film something with a video camera and then show me.

We just encoded about 40 MPEGs for a band site as Flash8 FLV, but none of them contain alpha grrrr. Gimme time 🙂 This is supposed to be a holiday!

Doing it with SwishMax requires a bit more creativity than using Macromedia Flash, but I would never give up the SwishMax UI for it.

Yeah, point and click 🙂

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

SpaceGirl wrote:
<snip>

Here, let me try explaining to you the S..L..O..W way:

Photoshop – select a box area, hold down CTRL, then move your mouse slightly and hope to I love you don’t accidentally move the selection out of place in the process.

Pretty much sums it up. What professional uses Photoshop with a mouse!? Really ends the discussion right there 😉 Buy yourself a graphics tablet for gods sake 😛

<snip>

Professional what? I’m a professional photographer and I use a mouse with Photoshop. I used to have a Wacom tablet and used it for years. Everyone said that was the way to go. "All the pros do it that way." Well, not necessarily.

Years ago in college, I took a class in drawing. The mutual conclusion that my teacher and I came to was "stick to photography". i.e. I have the eye and the creativity, but not the hand for art.

Guess what, tablets take that same hand skill. I kept frustrating myself. For example, I would hit a spot using the Healing Brush or Rubber Stamp and get a different result every time. That had to do with the pressure sensitive feature of tablets. My hand couldn’t get just exactly the right amount of pressure consistently.

With a mouse I automatically got the same hit every time. I just keep my left hand on the [ & ] keys to quickly adjust the size of the brush.

Since I only edit photographs and never "draw" or "paint" in Photoshop, I don’t need the pressure sensitive feature of a tablet. As this is the big reason to use a tablet, I have found that a mouse works better for me. So, I sold my tablet and lived happily ever after.

I’m sure that most professional Photoshop users have artistic hands and would find that tablets work better for them, not all of us. Once again, broad, sweeping statements that declare universitality are proven wrong.

Clyde

Clyde wrote:

SpaceGirl wrote:
<snip>

Here, let me try explaining to you the S..L..O..W way:

Photoshop – select a box area, hold down CTRL, then move your mouse slightly and hope to I love you don’t accidentally move the selection out of place in the process.

Pretty much sums it up. What professional uses Photoshop with a mouse!? Really ends the discussion right there 😉 Buy yourself a graphics tablet for gods sake 😛

<snip>

Professional what? I’m a professional photographer and I use a mouse with Photoshop. I used to have a Wacom tablet and used it for years. Everyone said that was the way to go. "All the pros do it that way." Well, not necessarily.

Years ago in college, I took a class in drawing. The mutual conclusion that my teacher and I came to was "stick to photography". i.e. I have the eye and the creativity, but not the hand for art.

Guess what, tablets take that same hand skill. I kept frustrating myself. For example, I would hit a spot using the Healing Brush or Rubber Stamp and get a different result every time. That had to do with the pressure sensitive feature of tablets. My hand couldn’t get just exactly the right amount of pressure consistently.

With a mouse I automatically got the same hit every time. I just keep my left hand on the [ & ] keys to quickly adjust the size of the brush.
Since I only edit photographs and never "draw" or "paint" in Photoshop, I don’t need the pressure sensitive feature of a tablet. As this is the big reason to use a tablet, I have found that a mouse works better for me. So, I sold my tablet and lived happily ever after.

I’m sure that most professional Photoshop users have artistic hands and would find that tablets work better for them, not all of us. Once again, broad, sweeping statements that declare universitality are proven wrong.
Clyde

Okay. Well the ones *I* know – but that’s not representative of the entire industry for sure. You dont need artistic skills to use a tablet – all you are doing is tracing (mostly) when you are editing photos. Once you have spent a day with a tablet you never look back – it’s so much faster and more accurate. How can you do things like pressure without one? Well you cant, so right away you’re massively reducing the tools available in PhotoShop to help you do your job.

On the other hand I know lots of webby people who dont use a tablet, but they tend not to use PhotoShop quite so much.

We dont do artworking here beyond graphics for web sites, or to be incorporated into multimedia – essentially most of what we do is retouching of promotional shots, gig photos etc – and for that I cannot imagine not using a tablet. I’m no artist!

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

In article , SpaceGirl
wrote:

There isn’t one! I dont like PhotoShops UI particularly (although I do like PhotoShop CS2 better than the earlier versions, and I much prefer it on OSX rather than Windows). The best UI? No UI at all. I use PhotoShop full-screen with no tools at all and a graphics tablet. It’s far faster, and no icons or palettes on the screen to confuse.

What tablet are you using? I’m looking to get a new one to replace my Intuos2 6×8 . . . sorry for being OT.

—
Constance Pierce
principal/designer

"you can’t polish a turd."

In article , SpaceGirl
wrote:

Hmm www.garbage.com www.redhotchillipeppers.com www.yell.com www.bowie.net etc…

Just so Hatter doesn’t come back and flame you for having a crappy search engine site, you mispelled "redhotchilipeppers" – you gave it two "l"s . . .

Awesome sites, though!! Did you take classes in Flash or are you self-taught? Probably a dumb question, but I’m trying my damndest to learn F8. I think that if you tell me that you went to school for it, I’ll give up on the DIY books and take a class or two, or ten. Means driving an hour and a half away, but it would be so worth it!! ( :

And BTW, wasn’t H lauding you as the most talented person in the group just a month or two ago? What happened? * :

—
Constance Pierce
principal/designer

"you can’t polish a turd."

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 14:52:23 -0600, Constance Pierce wrote:

And BTW, wasn’t H lauding you as the most talented person in the group just a month or two ago? What happened? * :

What happened is that Hatter is a fucking retard. No offense intended to retarded people.

—
JDS |
| http://www.newtnotes.com
DJMBS | http://newtnotes.com/doctor-jeff-master-brainsurgeon/

Constance Pierce wrote:

In article , SpaceGirl
wrote:

Hmm www.garbage.com www.redhotchillipeppers.com www.yell.com www.bowie.net etc…

Just so Hatter doesn’t come back and flame you for having a crappy search engine site, you mispelled "redhotchilipeppers" – you gave it two "l"s . . .

Heh… I was getting bored of typing that post, I didn’t check my links LOL. There’s a new site launching soon…

Awesome sites, though!! Did you take classes in Flash or are you

Thank you! … Self taught, but I have booked a week long course for Flash 8 next month. I’m no hardcore Flash-er! Ahem. Yet, anyway. I seem to be spending more and more time working with Flash at my "day job".

self-taught? Probably a dumb question, but I’m trying my damndest to learn F8. I think that if you tell me that you went to school for it, I’ll give up on the DIY books and take a class or two, or ten. Means driving an hour and a half away, but it would be so worth it!! ( :

Stick at it! The only formal training I’ve ever had is… well art-school. I didn’t go to university.

And BTW, wasn’t H lauding you as the most talented person in the group just a month or two ago? What happened? * :

Yes *sigh*.

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

SpaceGirl wrote:

Clyde wrote:

SpaceGirl wrote:
<snip>

Here, let me try explaining to you the S..L..O..W way:

Photoshop – select a box area, hold down CTRL, then move your mouse slightly and hope to I love you don’t accidentally move the selection out of place in the process.

Pretty much sums it up. What professional uses Photoshop with a mouse!? Really ends the discussion right there 😉 Buy yourself a graphics tablet for gods sake 😛

<snip>

Professional what? I’m a professional photographer and I use a mouse with Photoshop. I used to have a Wacom tablet and used it for years. Everyone said that was the way to go. "All the pros do it that way." Well, not necessarily.

Years ago in college, I took a class in drawing. The mutual conclusion that my teacher and I came to was "stick to photography". i.e. I have the eye and the creativity, but not the hand for art.

Guess what, tablets take that same hand skill. I kept frustrating myself. For example, I would hit a spot using the Healing Brush or Rubber Stamp and get a different result every time. That had to do with the pressure sensitive feature of tablets. My hand couldn’t get just exactly the right amount of pressure consistently.

With a mouse I automatically got the same hit every time. I just keep my left hand on the [ & ] keys to quickly adjust the size of the brush.
Since I only edit photographs and never "draw" or "paint" in Photoshop, I don’t need the pressure sensitive feature of a tablet. As this is the big reason to use a tablet, I have found that a mouse works better for me. So, I sold my tablet and lived happily ever after.
I’m sure that most professional Photoshop users have artistic hands and would find that tablets work better for them, not all of us. Once again, broad, sweeping statements that declare universitality are proven wrong.

Clyde

Okay. Well the ones *I* know – but that’s not representative of the entire industry for sure. You dont need artistic skills to use a tablet – all you are doing is tracing (mostly) when you are editing photos. Once you have spent a day with a tablet you never look back – it’s so much faster and more accurate. How can you do things like pressure without one? Well you cant, so right away you’re massively reducing the tools available in PhotoShop to help you do your job.

On the other hand I know lots of webby people who dont use a tablet, but they tend not to use PhotoShop quite so much.

We dont do artworking here beyond graphics for web sites, or to be incorporated into multimedia – essentially most of what we do is retouching of promotional shots, gig photos etc – and for that I cannot imagine not using a tablet. I’m no artist!

Funny. It looks like you didn’t read my message. One thing I said was that I don’t do anything that requires pressure sensitivity. That’s why I don’t need a tablet. So you are right, you can’t do pressure without a tablet, but it’s irrelivant for me.

It does reduce one tool (not massively) in Photoshop. Then again, I’m not using all the tools in Photoshop anyway. There are lots of drawing and painting tools that aren’t important to my photo editing.

Tracing "when you are editing photos"?!? What are you doing tracing? I don’t trace anything when I’m editing photos. It would seem that "retouching of promotional shots, gig photos etc" wouldn’t require tracing. The only reason I can think to do tracing is in manually creating masks. However, that is the slowest and most painful way to make masks. There are many better ways to make masks.

If you are doing a lot of tracing, a tablet would be a useful tool. I don’t do tracing or need pressure sensitivity. Therefore, I have no use for a tablet.

Clyde

"Clyde" wrote in message news:ApidnRxDl5pHzijeRVn-

Funny. It looks like you didn’t read my message. One thing I said was that I don’t do anything that requires pressure sensitivity. That’s why I don’t need a tablet. So you are right, you can’t do pressure without a tablet, but it’s irrelivant for me.

It does reduce one tool (not massively) in Photoshop. Then again, I’m not using all the tools in Photoshop anyway. There are lots of drawing and painting tools that aren’t important to my photo editing.
Tracing "when you are editing photos"?!? What are you doing tracing? I don’t trace anything when I’m editing photos. It would seem that "retouching of promotional shots, gig photos etc" wouldn’t require tracing. The only reason I can think to do tracing is in manually creating masks. However, that is the slowest and most painful way to make masks. There are many better ways to make masks.

If you are doing a lot of tracing, a tablet would be a useful tool. I don’t do tracing or need pressure sensitivity. Therefore, I have no use for a tablet.

Clyde

I mostly avoided this thread, but the change in subject line made me read it 🙂

I’d like to interject here though: I do freelance illustration, which often includes comic books. I also covhort (sp?) with a lot of comic book artists. I know a couple of guys who *ink* in Photoshop with only a mouse. That even blows the "tracing" comment out of the water :] (these people are quite good, I might add. And I’m not saying "inkers are tracers", but there is a lot of tracing involved in inking).

In article , Clyde
wrote:

Tracing "when you are editing photos"?!? What are you doing tracing? I don’t trace anything when I’m editing photos. It would seem that "retouching of promotional shots, gig photos etc" wouldn’t require tracing. The only reason I can think to do tracing is in manually creating masks. However, that is the slowest and most painful way to make masks. There are many better ways to make masks.

If you are doing a lot of tracing, a tablet would be a useful tool. I don’t do tracing or need pressure sensitivity. Therefore, I have no use for a tablet.

Clyde

I do a lot of photo editing for a couple of magazines that I design. Since they typically require silhouetting, I trace the contours of the image with the pen tool as a path (then right-clicking the path and making it a selection) – it’s easier, IMHO, to create a selection that way as opposed to using the "automatic" feature in PS. Definitely more than using the lasso tool or the magic wand (which if you ask me, is not magic).

I’ve always hated using a mouse (haven’t used one in about 10 years) because I’ve found, from talking to colleagues) that it contributes to carpal tunnel syndrome. Using a stylus is so much more intuitive – after all, everyone knows how to use a pen or pencil. The hardest thing to get used to, I think, is the "mapping" on your monitor. After that, it’s simple.

As for pressure levels messing with your work, you can (more often than not) disable the pressure levels within the stylus utility/preferences.

Not to sound like I’m trying to convince you, but I just hate thinking anyone’s walking around with potential carpal tunnel problems. Too, I have, as a result of a motorcyle accident, arthritis in my right wrist (the one I use for drawing, editing, writing, etc) and using a mouse was always agony – it’s gotten a lot better and I can do more using a stylus.

Just my two pennies . . .

Happy New Year!! ( :

—
Constance Pierce
principal/designer

"you can’t polish a turd."

Hey Spacegirl – sorry to bother you again, but do you have any good (fairly basic) books on Flash that you’d recommend? I really love the sites you gave us links to . . . and I’d love to be able to create sites HALF as good (no use being TOO ambitious!).

It’s amazingly impressive that you’re able to create such awesome sites being self-taught in Flash . . . I had totally pictured you sitting in HOURS of classes for MONTHS, if not longer. Damn, Girl! What I’d give to have your brain!! It seems that Flash requires such linear thinking, I just haven’t been able to wrap my brain around it. LOL

Do you have any other links you’d care to share? Which one(s) are your fave? Which were the most fun to do? Inquiring minds GOTTA know! ( :

Happy New Year!! ( :

—
Constance Pierce
principal/designer

"you can’t polish a turd."

Clyde wrote:

Funny. It looks like you didn’t read my message. One thing I said was that I don’t do anything that requires pressure sensitivity. That’s why I don’t need a tablet. So you are right, you can’t do pressure without a tablet, but it’s irrelivant for me.

I did read it! :p

It does reduce one tool (not massively) in Photoshop. Then again, I’m not using all the tools in Photoshop anyway. There are lots of drawing and painting tools that aren’t important to my photo editing.
Tracing "when you are editing photos"?!? What are you doing tracing? I don’t trace anything when I’m editing photos. It would seem that "retouching of promotional shots, gig photos etc" wouldn’t require tracing. The only reason I can think to do tracing is in manually creating masks. However, that is the slowest and most painful way to make masks. There are many better ways to make masks.

If you are doing a lot of tracing, a tablet would be a useful tool. I don’t do tracing or need pressure sensitivity. Therefore, I have no use for a tablet.

Clyde

I’m not a professional photographer (I wish!) and I use PhotoShop mostly for layout and dicing & slicing of artwork for multimedia projects. When it comes to photo-editing – well we get a lot of photos shot at gigs which require editing. Often we use elements of these photos for other promotional work. A lot of painting-on of quickmasks, or background removal, is done. With a mouse this would be inaccurate and time consuming. I used to exclusively use a mouse for editing until someone persuaded me to try a tablet for a day – I’d ordered my own by the end of that week and I’ve never looked back. Also, with my day-time job, almost all of our 1000 artists use graphics tablets (I work for a big directory publisher). The two professional photographers I know personally also use them (it was one of these who introduced me in the first place). I’ve also a few books, the newest one of which is "Adobe PhotoShop CS2 for Photographers", in which the author recommends the use of tablets for retouching.

I supposed ultimately it’s the tools you find easiest to use are the best for the job – so long as you have tried other tools. I’m no artist – I’m generally someone who sticks things together produced by other artists, but I totally swear by wacom tablets and really recommend anyone who hasn’t seriously used one for a couple of days to try one out.

Ultimately it’s personal choice! 🙂

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2006
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

fungusamungus wrote:

"Clyde" wrote in message news:ApidnRxDl5pHzijeRVn-

Funny. It looks like you didn’t read my message. One thing I said was that I don’t do anything that requires pressure sensitivity. That’s why I don’t need a tablet. So you are right, you can’t do pressure without a tablet, but it’s irrelivant for me.

It does reduce one tool (not massively) in Photoshop. Then again, I’m not using all the tools in Photoshop anyway. There are lots of drawing and painting tools that aren’t important to my photo editing.
Tracing "when you are editing photos"?!? What are you doing tracing? I don’t trace anything when I’m editing photos. It would seem that "retouching of promotional shots, gig photos etc" wouldn’t require tracing. The only reason I can think to do tracing is in manually creating masks. However, that is the slowest and most painful way to make masks. There are many better ways to make masks.

If you are doing a lot of tracing, a tablet would be a useful tool. I don’t do tracing or need pressure sensitivity. Therefore, I have no use for a tablet.

Clyde

I mostly avoided this thread, but the change in subject line made me read it 🙂

I’d like to interject here though: I do freelance illustration, which often includes comic books. I also covhort (sp?) with a lot of comic book artists. I know a couple of guys who *ink* in Photoshop with only a mouse. That even blows the "tracing" comment out of the water :] (these people are quite good, I might add. And I’m not saying "inkers are tracers", but there is a lot of tracing involved in inking).

On the other hand, I knew the crew at a couple of major UK comics who pretty much use tablets all the time for inking and editing! Yes I agree that inking requires a lot of tracing – he asked me to trying inking one of his panels once and I shamefully gave up. That’s a totally different skill 🙂

—

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2006
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 09:13:40 -0500, oldami
wrote:

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

Or was it hiv and std…oh wait, no we’re not talkin about your mom are we?

oh, that hurt…not.
this lame response is the best you can do?
You’re getting lazy.

Do be sure and let me know when it requires any more than that to keep you frothing at the mouth and replying to my posts, Stank.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 16:16:42 -0500, JDS
wrote:

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 14:52:23 -0600, Constance Pierce wrote:

And BTW, wasn’t H lauding you as the most talented person in the group just a month or two ago? What happened? * :

What happened is that Hatter is a fucking retard. No offense intended to retarded people.

Jeffy, throwing a tantrum and calling me names isn’t making any of your sites look any less like the spastic dribbling shit smears of a 3 year old…you might wanna keep that in mind.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 14:02:54 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:

You never did explain. However on my own I found you can right click on objects in Macromedia and convert them to symbols…quite deficient compared to SwishMax’s interface.

Still haven’t touched on that one…are you avoiding it on purpose or what?

Because I’ve not used Swish yet, so I cant really comment on it to be honest.

I was actually wondering about Macromedia Flash. I mean, is there something I’m missing? Do they just add extra steps in order to get objects on the outline/timeline? Is there some menu I’m missing? I’m trying to determine if it’s just a piss poor UI or if it’s just deficient as far as object layout/control.

…what would you need any real code for? No offense but if you’re writing a butt load of code to create interactive video you’re REALLY doing something wrong. Check out the downloads section on the main Backwater site…that didn’t require any sort of serious code at all.

Because you are living in client-side land. If you want to do anything with services, or use XML, process user input etc, you cannot do ANY of this without coding. But really, your statement demonstrates a real lack of knowledge about how Flash works beyond animation and perhaps stop(); ?? All the really creative sides are as much about good use of AS as design-smarts.

I thought we were talking about interactive video, now suddenly you’re talking about XML…what the fuck time zone are you in exactly?

Because it’s all part of it. at least, we tend to build sites that aren’t static, and rather than building every single video into Flash by hand we spit out XML from a database that contains info (such as location) for the video. This is then parsed by Flash and it loads the correct FLV. It’s pretty much the best way I think as if we choose a different way of distributing video in the future (perhaps Metro?) XML is universal.

1. Nothing is universal, if you think otherwise you’re just deluding yourself.

2. Last I checked you can access PHP files and pass variables back and forth from within Flash…which is a LOT more "universal" than relying on "XML"…by the by, just what do you mean EXACTLY by "XML"…just curious.

Actually no and it’s less intuitive. Less keyboard shortcuts is generally a better thing in most cases and why do you need to click on the image preview portion of the layers box in order to do it? What does that have to do with SELECTION…you see, less intuitive. In Paint Shop the function is tied into the SELECTION TOOL, which, you know MAKES SENSE.

You can ALSO do it from the select tool honey.

Yeah…with a keyboard command. You’re like…slow…or something.

There’s no reason to start name calling really is there?

….um, yeah actually there is. The insults make it all much more interesting to read (clever word art and all like that)…plus it weeds out deficients since those who don’t have thick skin will quite quickly become frothy mouthed little snits with nothing meaningful to contribute.

Here, let me try explaining to you the S..L..O..W way:

Photoshop – select a box area, hold down CTRL, then move your mouse slightly and hope to I love you don’t accidentally move the selection out of place in the process.

Pretty much sums it up. What professional uses Photoshop with a mouse!?

….you’re joking, right?

Really ends the discussion right there 😉 Buy yourself a graphics tablet for gods sake 😛

Um, I have one, actually…and coincidentally it came with a mouse too.

Paint Shop – select a box area, click once inside of it.

You can do all of that from the select menu – or how about vector masks? Or perhaps use the alpha channels, or then again a quickmask. The reason sometimes the functionality is not quite so obvious is because there is SO much of it.

Paint Shop – select a box area, click once inside of it.

Is reading just like REALLY hard for you or something? I mean, you’re sittin there back spinning for excuses and you just look like an idiot. This isn’t a debate over the imaginary functionality that you think exists in Photoshop, Kiddo, this is about a very SIMPLE and OFTEN USED tool that Adobe has implemented in a most horrid and backwards fashion.

Right there I’ve listed 4 masking tools, each of which
can be used in combination and each of which have their own specific functionality, and there’s reason for it – each do different tasks that could not be combined into a single tool Either that or you’d have 8 different masking buttons on the toolbar – which I think would be VERY confusing.

Not that, that has fuck all to do with…well, ANYTHING that this debate is about, but um, actually you could, quite easily…in fact they kind of already do. Click and hold over the pretty lil icons in the tool bar, Kiddo.

o_O

Where the fuck is your head, Kiddo?

On top of my pretty neck?

Which apparently is firmly entrenched between your butt cheeks.

It’s a choice.

Giving options where you don’t need any only causes confusion and makes the interface less user friendly and less intuitive. You don’t need 8 different ways of doing something, you only need ONE WAY, the best way. If you’re so deficient that you can’t figure out what the best way is…yeah, you probably shouldn’t be designing an interface.

No, you need the best way for that PROJECT. When it comes to ma<SLAP>

Okay look, Fallacy Girl, get it through that stupid head of yours, WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT MASKING. Jesus fuck all, quit molesting straw men to try and protect your Adobe demigod.

you run full screen with NO TOOLS visible at all. That’s how everyone in our studio works. It’s so much faster.

Kiddiekins, I bet I’m faster than every person in your studio COMBINED and, huh, I have the tools visible.

If you say so.

I produced a working example of alpha transparent video in less than a day while you’re…well, even with the backing of your ENTIRE studio you haven’t even been able to produce a single working prototype.

Wanna name a few clients?

….what do clients have to do with it, Kiddo? Just because you slurp yerself up a corporate asshole doesn’t mean you have fuck all for skills…well maybe in marketing.

Scrollwheel zooms the image in PhotoShop. Duh 🙂

Uh, no it doesn’t. Maybe on the Mac is does, but it sure as fuck doesn’t on the PC…but then what would you be using a Mac for…*snicker*…

Fix your mouse driver. Photoshop 6, 7, 8 & 9 all support scrollwheel on the PC, and 8 & 9 do on the Mac.

There’s nothing wrong with my mouse driver, Kiddo. The mouse wheel does not zoom in or out in Photoshop on the PC, it only scrolls up and down.

I’m not done yet. Paint Shop Pro also comes bundled with Animation Shop…Photoshop, not even CS2 has anything like that.

Photoshop comes shipped with ImageReady (since version 6, and we’re now on version 9). It’s a fully fledged animation/web tool.

Oh, Photoshop FINALLY got an anima-er…wait…wait…no, no it really doesn’t. I mean, if you want to make an uber simple 3rd rate animated GIF okay…but I don’t see any frame transitions…no frame effects…no text transitions…no text effects…you can only export video in Quicktime…um…I think maybe you missed the point, Powerluser.

I didn’t say it was any good. You just said there wasn’t one and that was somewhat inaccurate as there has been one for about 6 years. It does some very basic animation things, and it’s really designed for chopping up images for web pages – which it’s not actually very good at either. We tend to stick to PhotoShop. Cant remember the last time I used ImageReady for anything serious.

Now ya see, that wasn’t so hard, now was it? Maybe next we can cover Paint Shop Pro’s point to point line creation tool (which is like a perfected form of Illustrator built right into your graphics app)…only downside is that you can’t reedit node points after you’ve closed the line like you can in Illustrator…wait, no, I take that back, you can in Paint Shop Pro 9+.

That’s because unlike many other editing programs PhotoShop has non-linear undo.

*whispers* no it doesn’t *whispers*

o_O

…not by default anyway…and boy there’s a REAL good reason why.

I think it would confuse the hell out of new Photoshop users if it was turned on by default.

It would do a lot more than confuse them.

It’s incredibly useful though.

….yeah incredibly useful if you want to fuck everything all up. Seriously, it’s people like you that make me pray to God that we never invent time travel technology, because you’d be fucking retarded enough to actually think it’d be a good idea to go screwing around with it.

I dont actually know if PaintShop does that, maybe it does.

I don’t know either actually, I wouldn’t look for it if it did though.

There are far easier ways of achieving such results with far less effort and far less…mess. You’re relying far too much on the program to think for you and not enough on your own ability to organize what you’re doing directly. To me, most of what you’re doing and most of what you proposed says one thing…uncreative. *shrugs*

That IS the danger, but then clients are hard to predict. Especially the sorts we have – often we can get RIGHT to the end of a project and they decide to use a different colour on an album cover. So how do you fix all the art quickly?

With money and time, their money, your time. Bottom line…you’re getting screwed by your clients.

You know what REALLY kills Photoshop though?

This:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/PNG_Opt ions.png
Paint Shop has the most powerful PNG optimization controls I’ve ever seen…Photoshop has nothing even remotely like it…I wouldn’t expect Powerlusers to know anything about image encoding methodology though.

Yeah I wish it had better PNG support. But…

PNG isn’t really viable just now on the Internet – end of 2006-2007 when enough people have either IE7 or Fx.

….well, that’s the going delusion. Coincidentally I ripped it apart a long time ago:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/transmov e/

Not to mention that Flash fully supports PNG files outright, so uh…yeah, I dunno what yer talkin about.

Oh hey, Spacey, for fun why don’t you post the link to one of your studios sites, for fun I’ll reap the fucker and then rebuild it at half the size…LOL…

Hmm www.garbage.com

Apparently it’s not just a clever name. I especially like how the nav bar gets partially covered by the ink splotches making navigation just that much more annoying! ^_^

www.redhotchilipeppers.com

What a horrid interface…and an extremely poor use of fonts. Might wanna try breaking out of that monochromatic color scheme while you’re at it.

www.yell.com

….why did you even list that one? It looks like a generic Dreamweaver template littered up with some generic pictures you ripped off some stock photo CD you bought off eBay.

www.bowie.net etc…

Gawd, they just get worse as you go down the line. Apparently you were listing by quality of design. Free cl00, that last one…has no design.

PhotoShop has smart objects that can be embedded
PhotoShop or Illustrator files.

…those aren’t selections, Honey.

But they can contain selections.

Uh…no, they can’t actually. o_O

Yes they can. They’re just PSD files really. You can save as many alpha channels was you want inside them.

You’re confused again, child. We’re not talking about alpha channels, we’re talking about SELECTIONS. *rolls eyes* This whole READING thing sure is a bitch for you, innt?

What part of the definition of "selection" are you not grasping exactly?

Selection is just an alpha channel.

Uh, no it’s not. You can make a selection out of an alpha channel, but a selection most certainly IS NOT an alpha channel.

The closest you can come to saving selections in Photoshop is to save the selection as a new image and then to save that image as a PSD file…which coincidentally is HUGE in size and much harder to manage.

Because it’s a photo-editing program it has to save channels against something, so yes, alpha channels do have to be saved inside a PSD and cannot be saved externally. But that’s not really a problem. If you are working with production media size is hardly an issue is it? Some of our PhotoShop production files can be 200mb+ (raw images inside them).

If your production files are that large…yeah, you don’t know fuck all about image encoding methodology. And the size matters, Kiddo, even during the development phase. You remind me of the last client I had and I had to work with their graphic designer who sent me 300 MB PSD files. Transmitting 300 MB files back and forth is a Jesus killing waste of time and bandwidth even on a high speed connection. Multiply that by a factor of a 100 for a large
studio…OH…MY…GAWD…seriously, you could be saving quite literarily HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars in equipment and networking costs. You remind me of the kind of deficients who go out and buy a bunch of new shit for their fuckin Dell, complaining that it’s "running slow", when really, it’s not that it’s slow, it’s just it’s littered up with so much adware and spyware shit that it can no longer operate with any degree of practical efficiency.

Its useful. Imagine this; you are working on designs for a company web site. You integrate their pretty logo into letter heads, web sites, brochures etc. The company then changes their mind about their logo. Do you really want to have to edit ALL those documents by hand?

Yes…and if the client changes their mind about the logo…guess whose gonna pay for it…not only the logo change but updating all the letter heads, web sites, brochures, etc…yeah, THE CLIENT.

Of course – but if you have lots of clients you have be be efficient and it’s a huge pain in the arse if you have to go change all those files. Talk about mind-bendingly dull.

Like I said before, your clients are taking advantage of you. You can stop getting fucked up the ass any time you like, it’s your choice to get used like that. *shrugs*

Like I said, post the link to one of your sites…I’ll reap the fucker and rebuild it at half the size…LOL…yer Powerluser program doesn’t even have proper image encoding options for PNG files fer fuck sake.

With all the xml, php, asp, database, restricted access, logging,

As much of it as I can get, for the rest I can create simulation pieces.

search engine optomisation etc…?

….search engine optimization, eh? LOL *rolls eyes*

Well, that’s one way to look at it, but you’re aiming pretty low. My freelance clients range from record labels and popular bands for Universal to interactive sites for Yell. Home-bru sites have their market, but not if you’re after the kind of clients that are willing to let you play with more cutting edge stuff (and pay for the time it takes to do it).

…it’s sad that you need clients to "play with more cutting edge stuff"…tsch, tsch, tsch…sounds to me like you have no love of the art…just another "professional" with mediocre skills.

I do love the art – I only do this because I love it, but I have one I on what the Internet COULD be. Music clients tend to want something that stands out. This often means playing with things that no many people have done. That’s why we’re pushing all the time. Sadly we’re not always as cutting edge as we’d like to be :/

Especially if you’re only just now discovering the cleverness of alpha transparencies/chroma keying. Free cl00, you should have been working with alpha transparent images LONG before they ever started including support for alpha transparent video.

No, no, I think you misunderstood…again. My point was that you were trying to make it sound like chroma keying didn’t even exist before Flash…my point is that it’s been around for a LOOOONG time…WAAAAAY before Flash was even conceived of. The fact that you’re only finding a use for it NOW and just with Flash kinda says a lot about yer skillz, Kiddo.

It didn’t exist in Flash. I know keying has been around forever – but this is the first time it can be done real-time in something so small to distribute.

….not really:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/transmov e/

Woah, alpha transparencies sure are hard!
*rolls eyes*

Sounds fun 🙂 I’ll try post when we’re done filming. Not that we’ve even started yet! 😮

You’re too slow:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain2/
I’ve run into a couple problems, but I should have em sorted out within the next 24/7:

I dont see any video on there?

Try upgrading to Flash 8…or suddenly feel humbled by the fact that you can’t even recognize video when you see it.

None of the links do anything.

….why would the links do anything? It’s an interface prototype, why the fuck do you think it’s in a directory called "test platform"…woah, yeah, not just a clever name.

If you want access to the content you need to use the old version of the site:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/carebears/

Film something with a video camera and then show me.

….what difference would that make? I mean whether you’ve video taped a subject on a green screen or created it from scratch graphically it’s the same thing. Actually though, what I did was about a million times harder since I created my video from scratch…literarily, I created it FRAME BY FRAME from scratch. Any idiot to can hit record on a video camera, Bumbles. That requires no experience what-so-ever…just a good $4,000 or so for a Canon XL2…well unless you REALLY wanna do it up cheap.

As good as I am though…I don’t even need the subject to be on a green screen, I can manually edit out the background and create my own alpha transparency straight from scratch if it was absolutely necessary.

We just encoded about 40 MPEGs for a band site as Flash8 FLV, but none of them contain alpha grrrr. Gimme time 🙂 This is supposed to be a holiday!

Put up one of yer source videos, I’ll do it up proper for ya.

Doing it with SwishMax requires a bit more creativity than using Macromedia Flash, but I would never give up the SwishMax UI for it.

Yeah, point and click 🙂

No, Kiddo, point and click has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the relationships between content. It’s like comparing Agent to XNews. Agent’s UI is superior to XNews because it treats Usenet messages like individual files and let’s you manipulate them as if they were such. Where as with XNews it treats messages as if they’re apart of a list and gives you very little control over individual message manipulation and control. SwishMax is superior to Macromedia Flash because its interface treats every object like a piece of video on a timeline and allows you to essentially create sub clips or sprites within the timeline. SwishMax basically operates like Adobe Premiere where as Macromedia Flash operates too much like Photoshop, which doesn’t lend itself well for creating moving content.

—

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog

Hatter Quotes
————-
"I’m not a professional, I’m an artist."

"The more I learn the more I’m killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it’s merely a social construct that doesn’t really exist outside of your ability to convince others of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won’t jump the gun and start creamin yer panties before it’s time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that they’re just born with a soul. *snicker*…yeah, like they’re just givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling…everywhere. So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest, to their merry little mess."

"There’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘so earth shatteringly horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible images burned into their tiny little minds’."

"How sad that you’re such a poor judge of style that you can’t even properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You’re sure? Awww, gee…that’s too bad…for YOU!" `, )

Thus spake Onideus Mad Hatter :

[…]

There’s nothing wrong with my mouse driver, Kiddo. The mouse wheel does not zoom in or out in Photoshop on the PC, it only scrolls up and down.

<ahem>

Ctrl + or –

[…]

fizzgigg wrote:

Thus spake Onideus Mad Hatter :

There’s nothing wrong with my mouse driver, Kiddo. The mouse wheel does not zoom in or out in Photoshop on the PC, it only scrolls up and down.

<ahem>

Ctrl + or –

I’ve noticed the mouse-wheel acts as a zoom in and out when I first use it right after loading PS, but soon changes to scrolling the image after a few operations. Don’t really know why…

—
dvus

www.garbage.com
www.redhotchilipeppers.com
www.yell.com

Nice designs. For full flash music artist sites, I very fond of http://www.natalie-imbruglia.co.uk

—
Mimic

First day it opened I went down there, was doing a few laps and pulled over and the manager comes over to me and says "Oi, mate! No professionals." I said I’m not a professional. He said "Well, you should be with moves like that you could be the best in Britain". I said, "No thanks I’m making shit loads from computers".

[email: ZGF0YWZsZXhAY2FubmFiaXNtYWlsLmNvbQ==]
Help Stop Spam – www.hidemyemail.net

"I have come to realise that, only in death, will I find true perfection."

fizzgigg wrote:

Thus spake Onideus Mad Hatter :

[…]

There’s nothing wrong with my mouse driver, Kiddo. The mouse wheel does not zoom in or out in Photoshop on the PC, it only scrolls up and down.

<ahem>

Ctrl + or –

[…]

Or the scroll wheel, as, by default, it will zoom in and out as whoever the other person was said.

—
Mimic

First day it opened I went down there, was doing a few laps and pulled over and the manager comes over to me and says "Oi, mate! No professionals." I said I’m not a professional. He said "Well, you should be with moves like that you could be the best in Britain". I said, "No thanks I’m making shit loads from computers".

[email: ZGF0YWZsZXhAY2FubmFiaXNtYWlsLmNvbQ==]
Help Stop Spam – www.hidemyemail.net

"I have come to realise that, only in death, will I find true perfection."

R
"Mimic" ha scritto nel messaggio

www.garbage.com www.redhotchilipeppers.com www.yell.com

Nice designs. For full flash music artist sites, I very fond of http://www.natalie-imbruglia.co.uk

—
Mimic

Really nice Flash site. I like the champagne 😉 monochromatic colour scheme. The zoom text is very useful and well implemented for a Flash site. Very nice photo shots…Natalie is so cute…;-)

cheers
—
Davide

Thus spake "dvus" :

fizzgigg wrote:

Thus spake Onideus Mad Hatter :

There’s nothing wrong with my mouse driver, Kiddo. The mouse wheel does not zoom in or out in Photoshop on the PC, it only scrolls up and down.

<ahem>

Ctrl + or –

I’ve noticed the mouse-wheel acts as a zoom in and out when I first use it right after loading PS, but soon changes to scrolling the image after a few operations. Don’t really know why…

Dunno about that, but you can zoom by holding down Alt while scrolling.