Jess Warden posted his opinion about the communication between designer to developer (thanks I learned from his blog a lot):”Designers have no idea the capability of the platform they are designing for“. Yes, especially for code-based Flash/Flex application, from Flash/Flex developer’s sight the design assets(bitmap, vector, shape) should be as light as possible, so we always use some tricks in Flash design to get best solution of it, while designers wouldn’t know it could be tiled with Graphics.beginBitmapFill(), using a very small bitmap comparing to draw a big bitmap which it couldn’t be used for Flash (or a big head for download time).

Well, I’m working on my new ‘Flash Labs’ in a few days, developing a whole ‘Vista’ windows based system in pure ActionScript 3.

A couple of months ago I started on AS 3 about an ‘unix terminal’ component in Flex 2, finally I gave up because I don’t want to be involved into UIComponent series too much. I need a more flexible, lightweight Flash. So now I use Flash 9 preview, it’s a legal version before a final of 2007 summer.

The new Flash AS3 Labs, first it’s interface of course pure Flash 9 IDE plus AS3, currently 9,355 bytes only (Nov 28, 2006 build). It wouldn’t be more than 15kbytes when it totally finished. Very light, quite neat? Yes, I love neat.

So, have a look and see you later there. Even the background image is loaded dynamically each time, so you could refresh your browser to see it again, I just want to make the air to be fresh . I will surely add more and more icons and more ‘applications’ inside it, and all free source downloads will be there.

Btw, I need to take some nice pictures to replace vista wallpapers, unfortunately it’s the time of long Canadian winter…

Nov 30, 06 updates:

A first version 0.1 finished, 12k (11,952) bytes totally, used 4 days including design. Use more icons/links for multiple windows testing. Works fine synchronization between link/windows/taskbars. Add MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN to CLICK events together, make background windows could be activated easily. Add more blur effects for farther windows, perspective like. 9 slice scaling not support for mask, will convert it to bitmap later. Loaded SWFs could call external functions easily.

Especially in early years, Flash had some bit bad name in web world. Instead of waiting a long download time for Flash movie to play, people would click the ‘skip intro’ button. That’s a nightmare of Flash design, because of the big size of movie. Though it’s not so easy to decrease bytes of a SWF file while keeps the quality, what ever in another side, we could always find some Flash in good design playing smoothly and even experience like watching a scene of film. SWF file while it download, will display each frame until downloaded all assets of that frame, so it’s very essential to know how to organize assets to be downloaded in each frame. Many Flash designers like to ignore this and put every thing to download in the first stage, to display a first page and their main scenes wouldn’t start until everything is ready.

Adobe has a good example of this, a neat advertisement movie for their own CS 2. In the first one or two seconds, it display a line of text with a button to begin. This give them some seconds to download their underneath assets. The whole SWF file actually has about 4M bytes, that wouldn’t be easy to display if they didn’t organized well with the bandwidth profiler.

After the button is clicked, a transition of bluring the background, scene changes into table and papers. It also give some seconds for underneath downloading surely, as well as position animation time it needed. From this case we could have some good methods to make a good Flash movie even in big size, using some effects/animations to capture some time to download assets to display smoothly.

Unlike film compositing and post-production, Flash design like this (herein I called ‘Neat film’) need to have to balance of speed, bandwidth, the size of assets to play. It’s much limited but it could.

This method could be work only for design-based Flash movie, for Flash developers it wouldn’t be useful as Flash codes are mostly not working on frames. I would try to figure out some other methods later.

Conclusion

To play a big size SWF quickly and smoothly (based on frame structure):

• Display small size assets first.
• Use some transition/animation methods to steal some seconds for underneath downloading of big size assets.
• Keep a continuous balance on design, motion speed, bandwidth, organization of assets.