Thanks to everybody who showed up for Thursday’s meeting! As promised, here are the files that were used in the demonstration:
Meeting #2 demo files.
These files were created to demonstrate how to implement SWFObject and sIFR in an HTML site.
I’ve included only the files that were necessary for the purposes of the demonstration. I highly recommend that you download the zip files for each script and take a look at them, since they have a wealth of extra information about how to make the most of the scripts.
I’ve also added fairly detailed comments to ‘home.html’ and to ‘navbar.fla’, to help explain what’s going on in each.
If you have any questions about anything in this package, email me.
Just a quick reminder that our next meeting is this Thursday, June 7, from 7:00 to 9:00 at Red River College, Princess Street campus, room W411. We’ll look at a couple of ways of integrating Flash into web sites in a standards- and search engine-friendly manner (more info here).
Room W411 is the same room as our last meeting; here’s a map showing how to get to the room:
Hope to see you out on Thursday!
Adobe has released a public beta of ColdFusion 8. You can get it at Adobe Labs.
Hi everybody, hope you’ve all had a great spring! My apologies for not being quicker in planning our second meeting, and for the rather short notice - we were on vacation for a while, and the time sort of slipped away.
Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, June 7, from 7:00 to 9:00 at Red River College, Princess Street campus (room TBA). We’ll take a look at a couple of really cool Javascript-based methods of integrating Flash content into web sites. These methods are standards-compliant, accessible, and search engine-friendly. And they’re very easy to use, so even if you don’t know any Javascript, you can use these methods to really enrich your sites with very little effort.
And, thanks to the good folks at FITC, we’ll be raffling off a free admission to this year’s FITC Winnipeg roadshow event to one lucky attendee!
The first bit of Javascript we’ll look at is Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject. One advantage of SWFObject over the standard method of embedding Flash content is that it lets you specify alternate content that is viewable to those who don’t have the Flash player installed. This content can also be crawled by search engines. By way of example, we’ll look at using SWFObject to add a Flash navigation bar to an HTML site.
The second method we’ll look at is sIFR. You know that you can use CSS to specify what fonts should be used to display HTML content, but ultimately you’re at the mercy of a relatively short list of common fonts. sIFR combines the power of Flash and Javascript to display small snippets of text (like headers and small quotes) in whatever font your design requires. We’ll look at how easy it is to get sIFR up and running.
If you can make it out, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know by email at darren@flashinthepeg.org. I hope to see you on June 7th!
This is slightly old news, but I’m catching up on a few things, so I thought I’d post this in case you missed the news: Freehand is officially kaput.
Thanks to everybody who showed up for our first meeting last night; I think it went pretty well! Stay tuned for info on our next meeting, which should be sometime in late May/early June.
The specific location of our first meeting has been confirmed: on April 18, we’ll be meeting in room W411 of Red River College, Princess Street campus. It’s marked on this map:
Entrance to the campus after 6:00 p.m. is via the North or South Atrium entrances. I’ll be sending out a reminder closer to the meeting date.
The date and time of the first meeting of Flash in the Peg has been set for Wednesday, April 18, at 7:00 p.m. The meeting will be held at the Princess Avenue campus of Red River College; I’m still waiting for confirmation of the specific room number, and will pass that along as soon as I find out.
I think the first meeting will just cover some basic stuff about what we’d like the User Group to cover/accomplish for everybody, so we’ll talk about stuff like:
- Yourself!
- Which Adobe tools we’d like to focus on, or if we’d like it to be a generalist sort of group;
- Meeting location/frequency;
- Specific topics you’d like to cover;
- Any presentation topics you’d like to see;
- Anything else you’d like to talk about!
Please RSVP to me (darren at flashinthepeg dot org), so that I have a rough idea of the number of people attending. If you simply reply to this message, your reply should come to me, rather than the list as a whole, but I’d suggest checking just to make sure before you hit ’send’.
If you know anybody who might be interested in attending, please direct them to the Flash in the Peg web site, http://www.flashinthepeg.org.
Abode now has some info up on their site detailing the various Creative Suite 3 packages available.
If people are interested, I can bring some info to our first meeting (which will hopefully be scheduled soon!).
I’m in the midst of nailing down a meeting space for our inaugural meeting; I hope to have something confirmed by the end of this week. The first meeting will probably take place around the middle to end of April. As soon as I have more information, I’ll post to this site and send out a reminder via the mailing list!
