Flash

Once you've learned some Flash basics via either Flash's online help or a tutorial book, you can revisit the hacks that piqued your curiosity. I considered beginning the book with tips on optimization, security, and similar topics. But I deci...

This hack can be used with other video-friendly hacks [Hack #8] to make your static bitmaps more interesting [Hack #3]. Flash uses a vector-based rendering engine, which doesn't allow direct access to the individual screen pixels. This...

You have two ways to keep this number small: keep to small images (as we did in the per-pixel transition effect hack [Hack #1]), or use the effect on an image with lots of background pixels (which you can ignore to reduce the number of fake pi...

Adding an old film grain effect is one of the easiest ways to add instant atmosphere or a grungy hard edge to an otherwise crisp and clean clip. It can be combined with video colorization [Hack #8] or sepia tone colorization [Hack #13] for ...

So I went to the O'Reilly home page (http://www.oreilly.com) where I was greeted by the little critter—I'm told it's a tarsier—shown in Figure 1-17. The filename is oreilly_header1.gif, which is typical of slices created for an HTML-based t...

We'll go through the details because they are instructive (and free!), but a third-party Photoshop plugin, called PSD2FLA (http://www.medialab.com/psd2fla) from Media Lab, simplifies the process considerably. Director developers will recogniz...

In the next hack, we'll create movement using an embedded hierarchy of movie clips. For those of us who prefer speaking English, we're going to grow a tree and make it sway in a breeze [Hack #7]. We will do this by re-creating natural phe...

In this hack, we'll animate it. When trees move, they seem to follow the same tree-branch-twig hierarchy we used when generating the tree. It took me a while to work it out, although it's completely obvious once you grasp it: When the tr...