Flashalisious

I found this article like most of the articles that I find…. using digg.com. Anyway I am part of a local community of designers and developers known as the615 and over the last few months there has been talk of CMS systems and most importantly how to use them for content management out side of the regularly installed system. I have used wordpress for a lot of my blogging solutions but just started using it as a CMS for my Flash projects. Most recently I used the RSS built into wordpress to feed some dynamic text boxes on the Eddie P. Briley web site that we just developed. The client needed a way to present news headlines and also tour dates and bio information, so each text box on the site that needed dynamic text is feed in from pages that I created in wordpress.

The following article that I found just gives you some good tips on how to use different PHP commands with in wordpress to pull different types of content. The article does not really explain how to pull this content into flash. I would reamed you do some searching on pulling PHP variables into flash to use it as CMS for your Flash or Flex projects.

Nick L.A. wrote some pretty cool hacks on how to modify wordpress themes and wordpress code to use it as a general CMS platform and not only as blogging platform. Tricks are easy to use for non developers. Follow the link to Digg to get to this article. Pretty cool stuff.

read more | digg story

SWFAddress 1.1is it’s name and deep linking is it’s game. This looks like a great feature to add to any flash based web site. I will help direct the users to a location of your web site that may not be right on the homepage. I think that it is really important that as Flash developers that we do our best to make our content accessible and easy to get to. Below is a link to the article that I found on this. Check it out.

SWFAddress - Deep Linking for Flash
— SWFAddress is a new open source project that provides deep linking and search engine indexing for Flash Websites and applications. In other words, it enables the Back, Forward, and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs that can be sent over e-mail or IM. Recently it reached version 1.0 and quickly gained the attention of top design agencies and interactive developers. SWFAddress started as a small experiment that aimed to enhance a typical Flash Website by presenting the portfolio of a fellow photographer. It adopted all the best practices available on the Internet and became one of the best solutions among the growing number of similar libraries.

Here is a cool project that I finished up a few weeks ago. Country Artist John Adam Murph called me to do a site for him around the end of last year. He had some idea as to the look that he wanted for the site. Flash projects are cool but Flash isn’t always the best program for getting some animation effects that you want. Wile I was designing this smokey themed site I had the idea that I wanted some smoke to fill the page whenever a user clicked on a button that I set up. It is kind of hidden in the lower right hand section of the site. See if you can find it and click it to load some smoke to the stage. Click it again to make it go away.

What I did is create the effect in Adobe After Effects and exported the loop as a swf file. I am loading the swf as an external swf. The smoke swf is around 1MB in size so is it really just for fun and to add a little coolness to the project.

Let me know what you guys think.

When you go to the site look for the “Load Smoke” Button in the lower right corner. http://johnadammurph.com

So I have not posted here in a long time so I thought I would make a New Years resolution to post more to my blog. I would love to hear from any of you that my come across my posts. Feedback on my design work is always welcome.

This site that I just finished up was for a Youth girls ministry that just started up this year. The client wanted something geared toward Youth girls. It needed to be something Feminine but cool at the same time. I hope we achieved that. Have a look for yourself.

The project consisted of three different areas to create a site that helped the Ministry get the word out. You have the main Radiant Site located here. http://radiantwalk.com

Next we created a Flash eCard. This is a way for the sites users spread the word. It tells about the ministry and also allows users to tell a friend by filling out a form and emailing a link to the friend about the ecard. The ecard for Radiant Ministries is located here. http://radiantwalk.com/ecard

Finally we took the clients current myspace page and created a color scheme and theme that would match the look of the new web site. You can check out Radiant Ministries myspace page here.

This was a fun project that I got to work on last week. All you guys should check it out. You could win a new Chevy Silverado!

On this project I did 99% of it animating with actionscript only. You guys should really check out the Fuse Kit for actionscript animation if you have not already.

This was a project that I got to work on with Echo Music. Basically the animation on the intro to the site and the animation on the main home page was done by me. As always check out more of my stuff via my web site. http://mswallace.com

The link to the actual web site is dead now. I guess the Holiday is over so the site is over till another Thanksgiving comes around.

This was a great project that I got to work on for the Gospel Music
Channel in conjunction with DIRECTV. I was able to do three different
Flash animated cards showing the different styles of music that are
available. Really a fun project. Best part is I got to use some of the
new Flash 8 filters. Here are links to the three different cards. Even got to build in some flash video too.
buzzplant.com/gmc/ecard1
buzzplant.com/gmc/ecard2
buzzplant.com/gmc/ecard3

technorati tags:Flash, Gospel, Music, Channel, Animaion, Video

So I just finished up a project this week. It was for a new country singer / songwriter out of Nashville, TN.

Now, personally I am not a big country fan. Over all I think the site turned out great. In addition to designing the site I also designed the artist an eCard. This is a great flash based tool that the artist can use for spreading the word and also give the fans a way to pass around the music and buy merchandise from the artist as well, and if you look hard enough on this one you may find some free music.

Check out the site and the eCard at http://gregpopemusic.com

technorati tags:Country, Music, Singer, Songwriter, Greg, Pope, Flash, Animaion, Design, Matthew, Wallace

So I have not posted here is a long time it seams. I have been working really hard to start doing all my animation in flash or at least 90% of it using actionscript. The files are just so much smaller and more optimized animating this way. I am using a great resource for this called the Fuse Kit. you can learn all about it at http://www.mosessupposes.com/Fuse/

The flash animated ecard that I just finished using the Fuse kit is a production for the band SonicFoold. More about them at http://sonicflood.com.

Here is a link to the ecard so you can check it out. http://buzzplant.com/sonicflood/ecard2 and wile you are at it check out my web site for more great Flash stuff that I have done at http://mswallace.com

So here is my latest eCard that I designed in flash. Nothing really special but I think it turned out well. This was for a Christian Artiste - Scott Riggan.

I used Flash 8 as always. I guess the most complex part of this was the mp3 player, and it is not that big of a deal if you have been working in flash for a wile. It has your basic external XML file that loads the song information and also tells flash where to look for all the song files on the server. Enjoy!

As a guitar player myself I just had to pick Steve Vai as a subject matter. Everything you see was drawn using Flash 8 only. No graphics where imported from photoshop or any other program. This is the power you can harness when you learn how to illustrate in flash. When you click on the picture that takes you to the actual Flash file you should right click on it and zoom in and check out some of the detail.

I used a lot of the new filters and blend modes that come with Flash 8 on this one. Man it really lets you do a lot of really cool stuff. Wile you are at it compare my drawing with the home page of Vai.com. Let me know how I did.