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Subject: | RE: FLASH: Zoom & Pan Movie Clips?+Browsers & Javascript? |
From: | Len Harrison |
Date: | Tue, 27 Oct 1998 17:30:24 GMT |
Thanks John,
> Len Harrison wrote:
>
> > 1) Is it possible to zoom and then pan a movie clip
> FSCommand Zoom and Pan is limited to the whole movie.
> But you can pan, tilt and zoom a movie clip by simply moving it, tilting
> it and resizing it. This can be implemented by nesting the Movie Clips
> inside other Movie Clips (Nesting). Multiple functions can be applied by
> multiple layers of nesting.
I tried this and it gets very difficult to control if you zoom in 4-6x. You
need to move the edge of the clip off-screen to pan and you can't tell where
it will be in design mode, only runtime. I ended up just scaling a symbol
with a mask on it and putting the result of that in a clip. That worked
pretty well, because the panned objects are screen shots and the mask is a
symbol also so I can resize, move, and tween it. Not the original intent: I
was looking to keep the screenshots in half the window, zoom and pan them,
then annotate in the other half. But may be better: current mode is
certainly more dynamic than that. Vertical elements like our equivalent of
the Outlook bar are rendered vertically, horizontal elements like
traditional toolbars come in that way, everything tweens into position, and
the annotations arise relative to the image instead of in fixed places. We
like it better in-house, but the woman in Robert Warnke's post who freaked
behind animated gifs would probably have convulsions. ;=)
> I've answered this twice last week.
> Only the following browsers support 2 way communicationb with Flash
> (FSCommand):
>
> Netscape 3+ - Win 95/98/NT and Power Mac (Using Live Connect)
> MSIE 3+ - Win 95/98/NT (Using ActiveX)
Sorry for the rerun, I was not sure of the exact specifics from your
previous posts. However, doesn't this cover essentially all of corporate
America and the major international corporations except for those in Unix
(who don't Flash anyway), 90+% of home users, and all educational
institutions except Unix labs? I'd think the percentage of users who had
Flash installed but whose browsers didn't support javascript would be pretty
small, mostly some subset of people with old Macs and Win 3.1 who have a
interest in emerging technologies but are presumably cash-tight. Not a lot,
not a prime market, certainly not movers and shakers.
I'm not disputing your point, just looking for the global perspective. Other
issues to consider in that perspective might be programming structure,
efficiency, development time, maintenance, documentation and comprehension
by others or yourself down the road, reusability, ability to fine-tune and
modify, and scalability.
I did a lot of pseudo-Flash design (writing the equivalent of pseudo-code
for Flash) this weekend, basically examining where the edges of the envelope
were. No question that you can do all kinds of things that are not
immediately obvious within this paradigm by using clips that only control
other clips or objects on the main timeline. Then you get clips that control
control clips, etc. Pretty soon you're implementing all kinds of logic this
way and it gets quite interesting. You're doing virtual things with
hardcoded objects, sort of like programming everything in enumerated
classes.
If I remember my digital logic and microprocessor theory correctly, it
appears you can implement anything in Flash since you can emulate the basic
building blocks. But would you want to? Might be fun to simulate a simple
singleboard in Flash complete with Hex pad, Led Display, visible registers
and stack, etc., and a simple instruction set. Would be a great teaching
tool for that subject. But you could do the same thing in less than half the
time using a host script for the intelligence and Flash for display. And you
could expand it in any direction with relative ease, use the code itself as
a teaching tool, etc.
On the other hand, simple objects that are easily programmed, like the silly
little control I mentioned earlier, have the advantage of working wholly
within the Flash development environment and not needing a host for testing.
Plus the browser thing.
It's all trade-offs as usual. Just a question of evaluating each instance
and factor correctly.
len harrison
instructional designer
lenh
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Replies
Re: FLASH: Zoom & Pan Movie Clips?+VB sc, John Croteau
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