So we all know that you can embed a font directly into the Flash Library by clicking on the Library options menu and choosing New Font... Then you can specify which typeface and style and faux attributes, if you want. My understanding of this feature was that Flash actually somehow held onto that font, so that - for example - if you had to share your FLA file with someone who didn't have that font, they would be able to use the one in the library. Turns out that ain't true.

If you embed the font into the library, but then use a font utility to disable the font for the system, then Flash can't actually render the font. So I'm wondering what's the point then? Sure, you can programmatically call on that font and use it with ActionScript to create a TextFormt, for example. But again, only if the font is available system wide.

Labels: Flash

Adobe offers a few different certifications for its users. There's the ACE (Adobe Certified Expert), ACA (Adobe Certified Associate), and ACI (Adobe Certified Instructor). Each certification has its own testing criteria and benefits, which for the most part are obvious. The newest of the three, ACA is the entry-level certification. Kind of like the Microsoft MOUSE exam.

Recently, I've been researching the whole ACA program, its curriculum, the exam, and resource materials, in preparation for taking the exam with the hopes of becoming an ACA instructor - someone who's qualified to teach Adobe programs to students with the idea in mind that they will be prepared enough to become certified. This all sounds well and good until you dig a little deeper.

On the surface, it sounds like the ACA exam is open up to anyone who's interested in being certified at a user level in Adobe products. The ACA certification is handled by a company called Certiport. The Certiport website has information about a bunch of Microsoft tests and test facilities. When it comes to the ACA test, the site becomes mysterious and even unusable. Sure, there's a little information about the test and what its benefits are, but when you actually start drilling down and trying to find information about how to actually take the test, it becomes absurd.

Come with me and let's see what we can find:

Start by going to www.certiport.com.
Click on the Adobe logo that says Adobe Certified Associate. On the left hand navigation you'll see links about each test, some resources, FAQs, success stories, some PDFs that show the path of each certification for individuals and institutions. All promising, but where's the link to actually take the test? Not there.
Click up at the top where it says 'Get Certified', maybe the link is in there. Nope. There's some more information about why I should get certified and the types of certifications, blah, blah, blah.
There's a tab up at the top that says 'Certifications'. I click that and I see the Adobe logo again. Click on that and it takes me back to the page I was on before.
There's a Registration tab up at the top, maybe I have to register to take an exam. Seems odd, but I'll give it a try. Here, there's a big button that says 'Register for a Certification Exam'. Perfect, that's what I'm looking for.
Fill out the form on the next page and click Next. Continue filling out the form.
After getting a login, I'm taken to a page that has an additional tab, My Certiport. I see at the bottom that I have to purchase a voucher for an exam. I'll click on that.
This takes me to a page that has 6 Microsoft vouchers and 0 Adobe vouchers. Hmm? Something isn't right here. I try all of the other links here and it looks like I'm at the end of the line. There's absolutely NO information about the ACA exam. What do I do now?
I figure, 'I must've missed something at the Certiport site.' I go back there and under the Take an Exam tab, there's a Testing Center Locator link. I try that. I enter the ACA exam and the zip code for the nearest testing center. The page returns 4 results, all of which are local high schools, some as far away as Rhode Island and Connecticut, some 40+ miles out of my way. Each link to each testing center takes you to the individual high school site with no visible information about certification. OK, another dead end.
So now I go back to the Certiport site again and this time, I'm looking for contact information. I can't see a Contact us link anywhere. I see a link called About Certiport with an overview of the company. There's a tab up there called Contacts, so I click that. Now, I'm offered three choices, Support and Customer Services, Headquarters, and Sales Consultants. There's no 1-800 number listed or a general email. I click on Sales Consultants, because I figure, they must be involved in selling the actual exam or the vouchers for the exam. They have a little map with the following links: U.S. Regional Sales - Certiport & Microsoft, U.S. Regional Sales - Adobe, and Courseware. Adobe, yeah, that's what I need. I click on that. I get a popup with a bigger map that's clickable. I click on my geographical location and I get information for a sales person in my area. I send him the following email:

Mr. Smith,

I am trying to find out where I can purchase a voucher for the Adobe ACA test. Can you please direct me?

Thanks.

He replies with the following:

Al, we only sell voucher through our testing centers. Here is the link to find one in your area. http://www.certiport.com/Portal/Pages/LocatorView.aspx

They should be able to help you.

So, going to the Certiport site to register for an Adobe ACA exam is useless. I have to contact the actual testing center. I find one of the ones that were listed before and call them. It's a high school about 20 miles away from where I am. I get the school office. When I ask them about certification, they transfer me to the Principals office. When I ask them again, they transfer me to their Data Center - their equivalent to technical vocational computer training. I get a young student on the phone who has no idea what I'm talking about and then hands the call off to a teacher. She informs me that the test is only available to students in her program and no one from the outside can take the test there.

WTF?

So, I send another email to that sales rep telling him of my experience, and I haven't heard anything back.

So for all of the hyperbole that Adobe is driving behind the benefits of taking the test, all of the energy that went into researching the curriculum, purchasing resource materials to prepare myself for the exam, the frustration of using an unuseable site and all of its dead ends, and now having no where to take the exam, I'm losing faith in the certification procedure.

So I'm thinking now that maybe the ACA exam was specifically set up as an equivalent to some of the basic Microsoft tests that are geared towards students, not professionals. That part is understood, but one of the requirements of becoming an Adobe ACA instructor is to actually take one of the ACA exams!!! Of which, I can't actually participate in.

Wake up Adobe!!!

Labels: Flash

At the recent FOTB (Flash on the Beach) conference, senior Adobe Flash product manager, Richard Galvan, revealed some of the new features of Flash CS5 - due to come out who knows when. Hopefully, not that soon. The information is sketchy at this point, but Adobe is continuing its efforts to tighten up the Flash platform and address the slow adopting of AS3.

In the sneak peak, Galvan showed integration (finally) of Flash and Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex - although most Flex developers will still refer to it as that). You can now export from Flash your projects as Flash Builder projects and you can go from Flash Builder back to Flash. I think this is a key strategy in pulling together the technologies, since this has kind of presented a split in the Flash camp between designer/developer.

For AS3, there's a new code samples panel, which acts similar to the behaviors panel - which was made useless in a Flash AS3 project. Well, now you can actually use these samples (snippets) in your projects using ActionScript 3. I think Adobe's really trying to get everyone to adopt AS3, so they can continue developing its features.

Finally, there have been improvements made to the text features in Flash to aid text layout. This is a long-time coming thing. Editing and placing text in Flash has been pretty painful in the past and the functionality is different from something like Adobe Illustrator, different enough to make you scratch your head. There's also changes that have been made to the Art Deco tool. I didn't even think that would be a primary focus for anyone in the Flash world, but apparently, Adobe thought they should make it better.

There are more mobile featurs in this version and they announced increased adoption of Flash Player 10 to a figure that's over 90%.

I'm really encouraged by these changes and I can't wait to get my hands on a beta copy and start deconstructing it. Hopefully, this new release will get developers to realize the power of AS3 so they can start utilizing its features.

Labels: Flash

Keith Peters (author of Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 and others) has a great post about 'why people hate flash.' What's great about this is Keith's responses to each objection. I particularly have experienced this kind of sentiment in the classroom and the workplace.

There are right and wrong uses of Flash out there and it really depends on who's developing the site/project to bring out the full potential of Flash without all of the catch all's and don'ts.

What I have noticed lately are two examples of sites that I have used for a while now that have transitioned from Flash to an HTML/JS/CSS solution. The most shocking of these is Adobe TV. The site was a Flex site for the longest time, but recently has switched. Keith mentions in his post how large Flex sites can become and I can imagine all of those video assets building up file size too.

Another site that was all Flash, My Coke Rewards, had a lot of the difficulties listed in Keith's post. It seemed like logging in took forever and the site components took a long time to load, to the point that it was painful. Now the site comes up a lot quicker and communication is better.

The other curious point that I have to bring up is that a majority of major corporations have all Flash sites. Listings of the top 100 sites and such point to Flash sites more so than HTML sites - for good reason, I believe. The potential for greatness is there, it's what the developer does with it. The Ford 2010 Mustang site for example, is absolutely amazing.

I don't think Flash is going away, but it is getting a lot of competition these days, which is good for Adobe.

Labels: Flash

You may know that JavaScript Cookies exist and they hold bits of information about a browser session for a site that you visit regularly. These cookies eventually expire and are pretty innocuous. On the other hand, Flash has its own kind of cookie, although it's not called that, but exists for similar purposes.

According to this article at MACNN, Flash cookies could pose some privacy issues because they are not as easy to delete via the browser. Flash cookies are larger than JavaScript cookies (100Kb as opposed to 4kb).

I can already see Microsoft saying I told you so. There's probably a similar mechanism in SilverLight, but I can't confirm.

A majority of the time, these Flash cookies aren't storing or retrieving sensitive information, but who knows. I'm sure Adobe is all over this. What do you think?

Labels: Flash

There's a great post over at FlashDen today about the problems with ActionScript and its future. As a Flash instructor, the hardest thing about teaching Flash is ActionScript. ActionScript 3 made that only the more difficult.

The hurdles I've had to face transitioning from AS2 to AS3 were pretty high and it took a while to get acclimated. For a student who's had little to no exposure to Flash and scripting languages of any kind, it's almost impossible for them to even grasp what's going on.

Sure AS3 is awesome and the benefits of a stricter language offer performance improvements and such, but how does that translate to the average user? What's the ideal learning path for someone just learning Flash? How do I become a Flash Developer and move to the next level? It's not something that comes quickly or easily. The language is more involved and there are still syntax issues.

The articles contributors sum it up pretty good. It's amazing to me how many people are still developing in AS2 and prefer to. It's indicative a shift in the direction of the language towards an extreme that may just be too difficult for some to wrap their brains around.

Labels: Flash

Learn how to respond to and listen for Keyboard Events in AS3.

Labels: AS3, Flash, Keyboard Events

CS4 Backward Compatibility

CS4 has been around about nine months now and so everyone should’ve upgraded, right? Well, not exactly. The adoption rate has been a little slow this time ‘round, given the economy and for some, a lack of compelling reasons to upgrade. Adobe has been on a spree lately, getting the CS4 word out there and working with their evangelists to create compelling reasons to upgrade.

So let’s say that you did upgrade and now you’re in a situation where you are working with a client that is still in CS3 land. Inevitably, you’ll run into compatibility issues. This article will help you navigate that particular topic.

InDesign

InDesign has had a built-in, cross-product file format since CS2. An INX file is basically an XML file that describes how an InDesign document has been created and all of its linked assets.

In InDesign, when you go to File > Save As, you won’t be able to save down to CS3, you can only save as a CS4 document or template. However, if you go to File > Export, you’ll find the InDesign CS3 Interchange (INX) file format. Export as this file format to send to anyone who’s on CS3.

A word of warning, linked assets and fonts are not bundled with the INX file, so you’ll have to send those along as well. In InDesign CS3, simply go to File > Open and open the InDesign file.

Illustrator

Illustrator has also always featured a cross-compatibility file format in the Illustrator Save Options dialog. You won’t find a Illustrator CS3 option under File > Save As, but you will find multiple formats in the Options dialog.

As you can see, you can go back as far as Illustrator 3.

A little warning here is that some of the transparency effects and the new gradient transparency feature will not be backward-compatible. Also, since Illustrator CS4 supports multiple artboards, opening a file like that in CS3 will be problematic. You may have to save each artboard as a separate file.

Photoshop

Photoshop backward-compatibility is also built-in to the current version of the program. When you save a Photoshop file, you might see this dialog:

You can enable file compatibility options in the File Handling preferences. All you need to do to save the file is choose the Photoshop format from the file format drop-down:

Again, certain features will not be supported in CS3, but a majority of the file will be useable.

Flash

Flash actually does allow you to save down to the CS3 format. Just choose File > Save As and you can use the CS3 file format.

What you’ll lose here is the Motion Tweens you create in CS4 will be translated into Classic Tweens in CS3. ActionScript hasn’t changed much (Flash is still using AS3), so there’s not much to worry about there. Your easing values might be different, since CS4’s Motion Editor is more robust than simple easing in CS3.

Summary

You may find people still on CS2 or on other versions of the Creative Suite. At that point, backward-compatibility becomes more difficult. There may be other approaches of working with older documents. For example, InDesign allows you to place InDesign files and PDF documents. So you may be able to import older files into CS4 as a starting point. Going backwards though, not so easy.

Labels: Creative Suite, Flash, Flash CS4, Illustrator CS4, InDesign, InDesign CS4, Photoshop CS4

Eltimer's Flash Optimizer can make SWF files 80% of their original size. Although Flash optimization is great, this utility offers precise control over what is being compressed. At $99 it might be worth looking into.

Labels: Flash, Flash Optimization, Flash Optimizer, OSX

If you've been holding off on moving to AS3 or have felt that AS3 is too difficult to learn, Adobe wants you to migrate. To help you do so, they've published a migration guide: "ActionScript 3.0 Migration Cookbook." Check it out and please, make the switch.

Labels: ActionScript, Flash

There's a new Flash course on Lynda.com about search engine optimization: http://usingflash.blogspot.com/2009/04/lyndacom-has-new-flash-seo-course.html

Labels: Flash, Flash CS4, Lynda.com, SEO

Application program Help is all over the place on the Mac platform. Sometimes, you'll see the standard OS interface, other times, it will be a proprietary interface, and in Adobe's case (for CS4 that is), it's all web-based.

Yes, that's right, CS4 help is web-based. Now at first glance, that may sound ideal and when you first try it, you might be impressed to find that any search will return results not only from the Adobe website, but anywhere on the web.

However, this can be a hindrance and not help. If you use a focused search on something like "Knife Tool", in Adobe Illustrator CS4, you may get some results that are directly about CS4 and some that aren't. In earlier versions of Adobe products, the Help file would be only about that particular product. It becomes more frustrating in Flash, when you're doing searches on ActionScript particulars. I thought the earlier help tools were much more helpful, though maybe not as broad, than the current version.

The most frustrating thing about the new help system is that, if you don't have an internet connection, you can't get help! That just doesn't seem right.

What are your thoughts?

On another note, it's been a while since I've posted here. I've been posting at my other blogs:
http://usingflash.blogspot.com
http://usingillustrator.blogspot.com
http://usingindesign.blogspot.com
http://usingphotoshop.blogspot.com

I'm also feature in another blog from the school where I'm currently teaching:
http://www.cdiabu.com/blog

Finally, I'm also blogging for my place of work at:
http://boggse-learningchronicle.typepad.com/the_online_conte/
in the Tricks and Tips for CSS, Flash, XHMTL Category.

Labels: Adobe, Flash, Help, Illustrator, InDesign

I went to the Adobe CS3 Creative License conference yesterday at the Hynes convention center in Boston and was splendidly surprised at all the whiz bang of it. Aside from the presentations, they gave us a whole month's worth of training from Lynda.com. Plus, the people at On1 software gave us $400 worth of plug-in software for Photoshop CS3! In our little Adobe bags they also included a DVD version of the video workshop which includes video tutorials for all of the products in the creative suite. Well worth the $79 price for attendance.

First up, Terry White gave us an overview of the entire suite. He got a lot of oohs and ahhs from the audience by showing the new Quick Select tool in Photoshop, Smart Filters, and the ability to load and play video files. There were some cool new features in Contribute that allow you to edit and update a blog. Terry took a couple of snapshots of the audience and then posted live to his own blog. I was impressed with the new version of Premiere and the ability to drag and drop After Effects comps directly into Premiere.

Terry and the next presenter Sebastian, spent a lot of time extolling the goods of Bridge. The new Bridge home has some video tutorials that you can view online. Sebastian then went into all of the cool new features of Camera Raw 4.1 like, parametric curves, clarity and vibrance, and split toning. The wildest thing that he showed though was the Auto Align and Auto Blend features in Photoshop. You can align images on multiple layers. The Auto Blend features works well when stitching together panoramas.

Sebastian then went into Kuler and talked about how you can use it with the Live Color feature in Illustrator. The ability to manipulate colors in a smarter way with color groups in the Swatches palette and the new color guide are going to improve the non-color savvy designers creations. InDesign has some great new transparency and effects. Now you can have transparency for fills, stroke, type, and object. InDesign CS2 only allows object transparency, so this is big.

The web portion of the presentation was particularly weak. The presenter (Kyle) had a lot of difficulty getting anything to work and within a few minutes he had blown his demo completely. It was hard for me to pay any more attention to him because he kept mucking things up so badly. People in the audience had to help him remember things and Terry white had to help him through his demo on FireWorks. He fumbled through the Spry Framework in Dreamweaver, which was a particular bummer. He was able to recoup though, during the Flash portion, showing us the new primitive objects and native Illustrator/Photoshop support. Copying and pasting motion tweens from one object to the next is really great and, of course, copying a tween as ActionScript is even cooler.

Towards the end of the day, it was all about video and Kevan showed us some awesome features in Photoshop. Yes, that's right, I said Photoshop. You can now export from Vanishing Point an image in a special 3D for After Effects VP Exchange format. Once in After Effects, you can treat the object as a 3-D element and do pans and motion. There's an awesome and hilarious new feature in AE called the puppet tool. Kevan took a live action shot of a person doing kung-fu and rearranged the kick of the person to reach out to different locations, kicking away a piece of text. Finally, he showed us some very cool features of SoundBooth, which has some really remarkable audio clean up tools.

All in all, it was a great day of learning and I am very excited about the possibilities. I'm really excited about Flash and After Effects especially.

Labels: Adobe, After Effects, CS3, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop