Design>Web Design>Multimedia

Silverlight versus Flash

Recently I looked at how Adobe is reworking Flash in preparation for the coming battle with Microsoft over the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space and, with it, the likely future of computer-based design. In this article we finally get to see just what forces Microsoft has assembled – and its three staged launches at the MIX 07 conference in Las Vegas effectively amounted to a declaration of all-out war.

Ten Common Mistakes When Building AIR Applications

Adobe AIR has grown immensely popular over the past months. With its popularity, many new applications have been released. During this period, the following 10 issues have been the mistakes I have seen most often among developers. Hopefully, this list can help you avoid the same mistakes when building your next AIR application.

Best Practices: Six AIR Features that May Annoy Your Users

I get to see and play with a lot of really cool AIR applications (even when they’re still being developed). Every now and then I come across an app that totally ignores any best practices or usability rules. AIR provides developers with a lot of features that could potentially annoy users if not used wisely. I thought it was a good idea to write this article. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use these features, I just want you to think about them before you add them to your application.

New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture

This article will demonstrate how the notion of ‘phatic communion’ has become an increasingly signiﬁcant part of digital media culture alongside the rise of online networking practices. Through a consideration of the new media objects of blogs, social networking proﬁles and microblogs, along with their associated practices, I will argue, that the social contexts of ‘individualization’ and ‘network sociality’, alongside the technological developments associated with pervasive communication and ‘connected presence’ has led to an online media culture increasingly dominated by phatic communications. That is, communications which have purely social (networking) and not informational or dialogic intents. I conclude with a discussion of the potential nihilistic consequences of such a culture.

Twitter for the Social Media Fledgling

New media should be accessible to everyone, not just marketing, public relations and web professionals. Here, I aim to help all people navigate the new media landscape.

The 'Video' Element

The 'video' element is brand new in HTML 5 and allows you to, get this, play a movie in your website! The data of this element is supposed to be video but it might also have audio or images associated with it. Of course, this will only work in a few browsers: Safari 3.1+, Firefox 3.5+, and latest builds of Opera (oh, and potentially the next release of Chrome).

Why Text Remains King of the Web

I am starting to believe that despite all the hype around online video, text remains King of the Web. Why text? There are at least five reasons.

Pushing the Boundaries of Traditional Heritage Policy: Maintaining Long-Term Access to Multimedia Content

This paper will address the direction chosen by the Audiovisual Department of the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) in order to maintain access to a comprehensive collection of multimedia and electronic documents. It will describe several experimental technical solutions for preservation, emphasizing the consequences of a requirement for future users to be able to use these documents for research purposes. These result in the use of emulation solutions as well as new practices of collection development policy with regard to the specific structure of information within a multimedia context.

Ajax for Media: Use Ajax Techniques to Show Movies and Slide Shows

With the advent of widely available broadband, media, movies, images, and sound drive the Web 2.0 revolution. Learn to combine media with technologies such as PHP and Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) to create a compelling experience for your customers.

Documenting the Design of Rich Internet Applications: A Visual Language for State

Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have revolutionized the way users interact with Web sites. However, documenting the design of any page that uses Ajax is a challenge, because the page--and, more importantly, components on the page--can have different states, depending on how users interact with the page's components.

Flash Player 9: Bringing HD Flash Video to the Web

Moving from High Definition (HD) to FLV means a loss of quality. It is similar to moving a Photoshop high-resolution TIFF image to the JPG format--the loss in quality can't be avoided.

Flash Embedding Cage Match

'How can you best embed Flash content?' It should be a simple question, but is likely to evoke a lot of different opinions and arguments, as each of the many available embedding techniques have their own pros and cons. In this article, I will look into the complexities and subtleties of embedding Flash content and examine the most popular embedding methods to see how good they really are.

Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet

There's a belief within the web standards community that Flash is part of a different world. While all approaches have limitations and drawbacks, Flash has been scorned to the point that many refuse to acknowledge its benefits. Ultimately, this has led to the creation of a virtual separation among web designers; those who use Flash use it exclusively (leading to a saturation of full-screen, 'Skip Intro'-rich Flash sites on the web) and those who don't ever give it a second thought. Although the brilliant option of the hybrid (part Flash, part HTML) site had always existed, it's never really made it far past the typical Flash intro on a corporate homepage. Throughout the history of Flash on the web, the technology has always been intended to be embedded within HTML. Yet it has often seemed a foreign concept to use the two technologies to complement one another.

Generate Flash Movies on the Fly with PHP

Rich Internet Applications is the new buzz-phrase for Web 2.0, and a key component of the substance behind Web 2.0 is Adobe Flash. Learn how to integrate Flash movies into your application and generate Flash movies dynamically using the Ming library.

Graphics, Images, and Multimedia

Graphics are used on many, if not most, Web pages. When used appropriately, graphics can facilitate learning. An important image to show on most pages of a site is the organization's logo. When used appropriately, images, animation, video, and audio can add tremendous value to a Web site. When animation is used appropriately, it is a good idea to introduce the animation before it begins.

Bye, Bye EMBED

Break the chains of EMBED and live free. Elizabeth Casto explains how to embed movies without using invalid markup.

Studio for New Media

The Studio for New Media is an interdisciplinary research institute organized to support, further, and coordinate work with digital media.

Experiment in Sound

When you think about sound in regard to the internet, what comes to mind? Dutch design firm LUST explores the sound of the internet with this original project.

Blogs, Podcasts and All That Stuff

I think podcasting is powerful because it gives us the opportunity to reach people in ways we cannot with blogs and websites. Don't get me wrong, blogs and sites have their place. But let's face it, people have information overload! It's often a choice between reading your blog and the 15 other things they need to read. But with podcasts, people tell me that they listen via their iPods while in the gym. They burn them to CD and listen in their car during their commute. They listen on their computer with a headset or speakers.

On-Demand Access to Rich Media Assets

The maturation of digital asset management technology and products has enabled on-demand DAM services to emerge as an attractive alternative to on-premises installation. Organizations facing a variety of problems and constraints, such as speed to market and scalability, are finding software services models to be the most cost effective approach to digital asset management. This paper identifies the four key factors in making the decision between a services model and on-premises installation. It also argues that the decision should be analyzed in terms of discounted cash flows and presents examples of such calculations.

Does Your Website Need Those Bells and Whistles?

Some web designers will try to convince you that your website has to have the latest multimedia technology to be successful. Is it true?

Sympathy for the Plug-in

If Flash is indeed a cancer on the Web, how come so many artists (and viewers) adore it? The much-maligned multimedia plug-in bites back, with help from Flash artist Peter Balogh.

Fast-Track Your Flash Site

Many Websites that use Flash could be optimized to load much more quickly than they currently do. By breaking up one large .swf into multiple smaller .swf files, you can decrease the time it takes your site to load, while at the same time making the site easier to manage. This article will look at how to break your Website into multiple .swf files, and discuss why it's a good idea.

Why Flash Will Never Die

In this article we will look at the strengths and weaknesses of one of the most controversial products in the web development world, Macromedia Flash. We will take a close look at what Flash can do and what Flash can't or shouldn't do. And while in the process we will be comparing Flash to its counterparts HTML and CSS.

Flash - To Use Or No To Use?

Out there in the WWW there are thousands sites using flash for their needs. But the majority sites are not in this list. Let's summarize some facts about flash usage on YOUR web site. After that it's you will have to decide: to use or not to use.

Tips For Optimizing Flash Movies

When you're ready to deliver your Flash movie to your audience, use the Publish Settings or Export Movie option to export the Flash FLA file to a format for the Web.

Flash MX: The Sound Object

Use the Sound Object to control sounds that are stored in the Flash Library as well as load sounds that reside outside the Flash movie. Controlling sounds includes starting and stopping the sound, adjusting the volume or the right and left balance while a sound is playing.

Flash Transitions

Transitions are a very popular technique used in Flash, and they're typically used to let your audience know that a change in content or scenery is coming. They're usually displayed using fading effects and dissolves, and there are two ways to implement this type of effect: an alpha tween and a brightness tween. Let's take a look at both of these techniques.

Flash: Create a Preloader

Flash movies stream, so when the Flash movie contains several frames or scenes, the movie should be preloaded so that it will play back smoothly. Let's set up the animation that will play while the main movie (the presentation from a previous lesson) is loading behind the scenes. We'll create a movie clip for the preloader animation.

Flash: The LoadMovie Action

Want to load one movie at a time into a main movie? With Flash MX, you can load a SWF or JPEG file into the Flash Player while the original movie is playing. The loadMovie action lets you display several movies at once and switch between movies without loading another HTML document or a separate Flash movie.

Use Gradients to Give Objects a 3- Dimensional Appearance

Flash is a two-dimensional program. Using a gradient in Flash can give a two-dimensional object a third dimension. In this example, let's create a series of circular outlines, then add one of Flash's preset gradients to give the outlines a three-dimensional appearance.

Penser "Dynamique"

Il est devenu de bon ton de parler de contenus 'dynamiques'. Que veut-on dire par là au juste? En fait, la notion de 'contenus dynamiques' peut couvrir plusieurs acceptions.

Penser "Multimédia"

Basé quasiment exclusivement sur le texte à ses débuts, Internet est devenu aujourd'hui un moyen d'expression multimédia, permettant d'intégrer tout autant des textes que des images, des vidéos, des sons , des animations, des programmes interactifs, etc. Ecrire pour Internet, c'est donc exploiter plusieurs supports d'expression.

Macromedia Flash: A New Hope for Web Applications

Some new, cutting-edge applications have demonstrated Flash's potential to surpass the power of traditional software applications. These web applications leverage the strengths of Flash to help users make better sense of large amounts of data, presenting information in an easily accessible, graphical visual representation. In this white paper, we will explore how Flash can help developers easily build the next generation of web applications. We will also look at several new applications that have recently appeared on the scene and talk about how they leverage the benefits of Flash.

Five Reasons to Stream

Many organizations are hesitant to deploy streaming media on their sites due to the fact they don’t want to deal with the performance or support issues that may crop up. But those downsides need to be weighed against the true business benefits that accrue from streaming media deployments. In a recent primer, Adobe offered these top five business benefits of streaming media.

HTML+TIME Transitions in Internet Explorer 6

The inline transitions that Internet Explorer 6 supports are based on the latest SMIL 2.0 specification. In the HTML+TIME world, they are implemented with the use of a t:transitionfilter element. The implementation is a bit early and the browser is in beta so things can always change. But this introductory set of transitions will add a bit more punch to the HTML+TIME framework.

Internet Explorer SMILes

Some day, Internet historians will ponder the developments of the year 2000. They will look back and argue who won and who lost the battles of the multimedia browser war.

Learn SMIL with a SMIL

On this website are some examples of SMIL, a language like HTML, where with a simple text editor, anybody in the world can communicate their ideas as effectively as a Television commercial. SMIL 1.0 allows you to create the areas for media objects and then determine when to play them. SMIL 2.0 adds interactivity, transitions. XHTML + SMIL give SMIL 2.0 abilities to XHTML elements.

A Slideshow in HTML+TIME

What if you wanted your Web page to give a visual presentation of rotating graphics and text? You could create a massive animated GIF and let it do its work. Or you could create a RealPix and RealText presentation using RealPlayer. Or, with the SMIL power of HTML+TIME, you could do the same in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Un SMIL Tutorial

This tutorial will help you learning the language and creating your first SMIL presentations, through a step-by-step training.

XHTML+SMIL Profile

This page was made to help others and myself, become more familiarized with the features under consideration, for the next version of XHTML+SMIL.

Compromise and Compress

What to keep and what to cut when making Web movies in Premiere.

Guidelines for Multimedia on the Web

Multimedia is gaining popularity on the Web with several technologies to support use of animation, video, and audio to supplement the traditional media of text and images. These new media provide more design options but also require design discipline. Unconstrained use of multimedia results in user interfaces that confuse users and make it harder for them to understand the information. Not every webpage needs to bombard the user with the equivalent of Times Square in impressions and movement.

Multimedia

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of computing technology is the ability to combine text, graphics, sounds, and moving images in meaningful ways. The promise of multimedia has been slow to reach the Web because of bandwidth limitations, but each day brings new solutions. Although there are numerous methods for creating Web multimedia, we recommend using stable technology that works for the great majority of client machines. Plug-ins that extend the capabilities of your Web pages are a mixed blessing. You risk losing your audience if you require them to jump through hoops to view your content.

Basic Flash Concepts and Terms

Macromedia Flash uses a movie-making metaphor in how they define their concepts and areas of their interface. The basic terms used to describe the animation are the movie, stage and motion.

Comparison of Flash and Director

Only six years ago the web did not support graphics and CD-ROM based games asked users if they had 4Mb of memory on their computer with possible hard drive space of 20Mb to play any games. Today, oh heck, that seems archaic.

Effective Use of Flash in Professional Web Sites

Macromedia Flash is a popular animation application that can produce some striking special effects. In professional web sites, Flash must be used effectively instead of simply for novelty. Business applications of Flash can advertise a product or showcase a skill-set. Educational applications can use Flash to provide multimedia instruction. Entertainment applications of Flash include games and cartoons.

Flash Applications

The reason to use Macromedia Flash is usually to provide a solution or to satisfy the need of the Web site owner. Typically, Flash is used to create a company image through animations and special effects in the splash page or even throughout the site, establish better user understanding through demonstrations and simulated processes, and/or entertain or educate through animated cartoons and games.

Major Features of Flash

Macromedia Flash is primarily an animation development application. Its feature-set includes such things as vector-based drawing, Web animations and interactive effects. Drawing is required for animation, which in turn is part of interactive effects.

The Flash Aesthetic

Scaling, 2-D style, cycle-free motion, and heavy strokes. They’re not just web design trends any more. Join Olson on a cultural scavenger hunt as he tracks the ways Flash design techniques have crept into other media.

Are You Attractive?

An interactive tutorial about usable website design.

Is The Web On TV An Oxymoron?

The convergence of the web and television throws up numerous challenges for usability engineers. As more and more of the population choose to access the Internet through their television (usually via set-top boxes and with the assistance of television remote controls), optimizing web pages for use on these devices becomes a priority. These issues tend to be exacerbated by inherent differences between the two technologies. For instance, television is usually thought of as 'lean-back' technology, whereas the computer is seen as 'lean-forward' technology. Television viewers on average sit more than 9 feet away from their sets, whereas computer users are usually within 13 inches of their monitors. Television viewers are accustomed to being passive and having information presented to them. Computer use requires more active interaction and maximizes user initiative. It is possible that the fundamental conflict between these modes of operation will mean that web-on-television is doomed to failure. But, in the meantime, what can be done to ensure high quality user-experience when viewing the web on TV?

Low-End Media for User Empowerment

Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment.

The Best of CHI-WEB and SIGIA-L

The chi-web and sig-ia mailing lists are two email based discussion groups on the topics of web usability, design and human computer interaction (the later with a heavier emphasis on information architecture). To subscribe to chi-web, read the info page or to get a better flavor for what happens there, use its full searchable archive. Alternatively, you can join sigia-l from here or view the sigia-l archive . Using the archives for each mailing list, I've compiled a list of the summary postings from useful threads, and a few personally selected favorite postings. Please note: my list below is not an exhaustive list of summary postings. I just picked the ones I found most salient and valuable for reference. Also, these summaries are collections of contributing posts: they are a mixture of opinions and commentary, with some references to reports, usability data, websites or books.

Strategies of Influence for Interaction Designers

Unless you have the power to make business and development decisions for your project, some of your energy will be spent influencing those who do. Experienced usability engineers or interaction designers may have limited skill in influence, despite how significantly it can effect their ability to contribute to projects. It’s the smartest and most effective designers that work to understand the human to human interaction within their project teams, as part of their work towards better human to computer interaction.

Flash MX: Clarifying the Concept

The new Flash MX authoring environment and the equally new Flash Player 6 solve a few accessibility problems. Screen reader compatibility is the first Macromedia access milestone. Screen readers—which, by the way, are not called “voice browsers” or “text readers”—are software that reads web pages, and anything else on your computer, out loud. (I’d show you a picture, but apart from a few uninteresting configuration screens, these programs have no overt visible form.)

Director MX Versus Flash

Director, which hit the scene way back in 1988, was always considered the ultimate multimedia authoring tool. Then the Web came along and Shockwave, a format that translated Director projects for the Web, was born. It was pretty wowie in its day (circa 1995), but the size of Shockwave files, along with the browser plugin users needed to see them, really slowed Shockwave down. Enter Flash's SWF format, which was designed solely for the Web so it was faster and easier to use than Shockwave. And the rest is history: Flash is everywhere, and whipper-snapper Web developers are all, 'Shockwave who?' But Shockwave has its uses. Flash may be better than ever these days, but you can still outgrow it. Say you need better video performance, or you want to create a game or educational tool that uses a joy stick. Or maybe you're looking for the depth of 3D animation. When it comes to interactive projects in the non-Web world (yes, it's true, there is life outside the Web) — such as CD-ROM games, educational materials, reference books, and presentations — sometimes Flash just isn't enough. If you're tackling a big-league, off-Web project, or a particularly intricate website, then perhaps it's time to take another look at Macromedia's Director MX.

The Design and Evaluation of Interactivities in a Digital Library

The US National Science Foundation has established a program to create a National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). One of the subsidiary NSDL libraries under development is the National Civil Engineering Educational Resources Library (NCERL). The first phase of NCERL is the creation and collection of digital resources in three areas of civil engineering—geotechnical (soil), rock, and water engineering (GROW). The concept of interactivities guides the design, development, and evaluation efforts of the GROW digital collection. This article describes the salient features of GROW, defines and discusses interactivities as an emerging, integral part of teaching and learning in civil engineering education. Interactivities take place at three distinct levels: the information resource, the collection, and the context. Very simply, the concept of interactivities can be defined as the emphasis on structured representations of interactive multimedia resources. Additionally, resources are designed with rich learning tasks and organized in pedagogical collections supplemented with contextual information. Preliminary evaluation of GROW-NCERL using interactivities is briefly described.

Flash Usability

Those succeeding with Flash usually apply it as an element and mix it with other technologies or images such as streaming audio and video, GIF, JPG, DHTML, and CGI to name a few. Determine what elements you need on your site and study the strengths and weaknesses of each technology to determine which option would work best for each element. You're in good shape if you can use Flash without sacrificing accessibility, readability, navigability, usability, searchability, and ability to update.

All the Access Money Can Buy

Just when you think online multimedia will never be truly accessible, someone proves you wrong. In BMW Films, Clark sees a tantalizing glimpse of a better web.

Flash: 99% Bad

Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value.

The Interactive Development Process

This is a very simple introduction to a development process that has been developed over years of work at vivid studios. It started out as a book, developed for Apple Computer's Multimedia Developer's Program, entitled, Multimedia Demystified. This book covers the general development process in some detail. As both the process itself and our application of it to online media have evolved, we have refined this process to what you see above. This, of course, is a fairly shallow explanation of it.

Streaming Media

Streaming media is a method for delivering multimedia content, where video, audio, graphics, and animation can all play simultaneous roles in the presentation.

The advantage of streaming media is that you can start viewing the presentation almost immediately while the file itself is still being sent from the server; there is no waiting period while all the component files are first downloaded to your hard drive. When the presentation is over, none of the component files remain on your computer.

Webmonkey: The Web Developer's Resource

Webmonkey offers a How-to Library on authoring, design, multimedia, e-business and programming.