Product Description

Creating web designs and site content in Macromedia Flash MX can be a lot of fun, but there are always tasks that you'll want to do again and again. It's always a bit of a hassle to have to keep recreating and tweaking the same old content or functionality in different projects, so why can't you just reuse what you've created? With components, you can do just that! Flash MX Components enable the creation of self-contained design building blocks that can be simply dragged and dropped into any Flash movie. They are flexible enough to be easily customized to take care of many different tasks. No fuss, no bother - you can repurpose the standard elements of your design, application, or game, and use them over and over again. But wait, it gets better! Components can be used by anyone, not just the person who created them. So in this book, weve done all the hard work for you and collected together the Most Wanted components that will make your life easier. In this book (and on the CD) youll find a perfect combination of creative and functional components from some of todays leading Flash designers and developers. Just look at the fantastic components you get: - Event Calendar - Text Editor - News Feed - Tool Tip - Sketch Pad - Video Player - Image Scroller - Pattern Generators - Tab Control - Sliding Panel - Color Picker - Game Player Selector - Particle Emitter - Layout Manager - Data Grid - Movie Loader - Image Modulators - XML-to-ActionScript Converter - Virtual 3D Trackball - Text Animation - Dynamic Text Manager Each of these components is included on the accompanying CD, ready to incorporate within your designs, along with plenty of example files giving practical demonstrations of their use. On top of that, each chapter in this book presents a comprehensive designer-oriented guide that will help you to get the most out of using all of the featured components. If youre a Flash designer, of any ability from novice to professional, this book will increase the power of your Flash designs and enhance your project workflow &emdash; instantly!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1130335 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From the Publisher
This book is for experienced Flash users and novices alike. That is the beauty of Flash components, they are so easy to use that those who are fairly new to Flash can use them to create movies that would ordinarily be out of their reach, whereas the more experienced designer can use them as great time-saving tools, cutting the time needed to create their applications and improving their productivity.

About the Author
Todd Marks is an avid developer, designer, instructor, and author of information display technologies. In 2000, Todd moved from teaching Mathematics and Computer Science in the public sector to becoming a Vice President of Research and Development at digitalorganism. In 2002, Todd founded Mindgrub Technologies and established a web technologies portal. In 2003, Todd joined Pope de Flash as the Head of Technology to form The Unity Project. Todd currently works as a Product Engineer for the mediaEdge division of Exceptional Software Strategies Inc. Todd is a Macromedia Certified Developer, Designer, and Subject Matter Expert. His efforts have earned him three Flash Film Festival nominations, a Macromedia Site of the Day award, two Addy Awards, and several educational partnerships. Todd has written and contributed to several books including Macromedia Flash MX Video, Foundation Dreamweaver MX, Beginning Dreamweaver MX 2004, Advanced PHP for Flash, Macromedia Flash MX Components Most Wanted, and Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Magic.

Peter is a certified Flash MX 2004 developer, Team Macromedia volunteer for Flash and runs his own business named MindStudio, which mainly does multimedia development and consultancy. Introduced to Macromedia Flash in late 1996, he started of doing interactive advertisement campaigns for one of Europe's largest online advertisement agencies. When Macromedia released its Generator software his interest moved more towards the backend side of things, fascinated by Flash and database integration &emdash; what many considered some very innovative technology at that time. After attending the FlashForward 2001 conference in Amsterdam, Peter was so inspired that he decided to make the switch from HTML to full-fledged multimedia development, a decision he hasn't regretted since.

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Jared Tarbell was born in 1973 to William and Suzon Davis Tarbell in the high-altitude desert city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. First introduced to personal computers in 1987, Jared's interest in computation has grown in direct proportion to the processing power of these machines. Jared holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from New Mexico State University. He sits on the Board of the Austin Museum of Digital Art where he helps promote and encourage appreciation of the arts within the global community. Jared is most interested in the visualization of large data sets, and the emergent, life-like properties of complex computational systems. Jared has recently returned to Albuquerque to work closer to friends and family while enjoying the unique aspects of desert living. Additional work from Jared Tarbell can be found at levitated.net and complexification.net.

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Aral Balkan is a Flash Platform veteran and overall Internet junkie. Oh, and in 2008 he\'s producing the world\'s first large-scale online web conference, Singularity. Aral cofounded and coordinates OSFlash.org, authored the pattern- based ActionScript framework Arp, and created the SWX data format, SWX RPC, and SWX PHP. His latest open source project is the GAE SWF Project, providing Flash and Flex developers with knowledge and tools to build Rich Internet Applications on Google App Engine. Aral is a published author and has contributed to several books and magazine articles. Specifically, he is the author of the Adobe Flex 2 QuickStart Guide and Flex 3 QuickStart Guide and has authored six courses on Flash, Flex, ActionScript, and open source development. Aral is a regular speaker at international conferences including Macworld, FlashForward, d.construct, FITC, Wizards of OS, and Adobe MAX.

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James graduated in 1998 from the Texas A&M Computer Engineering program. In 2000 he completed his M.S. degree in Computer Visualization. Deeply technical and profoundly visual, James has been working professionally both in print and the web since 1994. James founded Caramba Designs in 2001 to develop web-based applications and end-to-end solutions for unique problems.

‘Who is this guy?' I hear you ask. Well, allow me to introduce myself. I'm a 28 year old designer and Flash developer living in the sunny town of Coatbridge, near Glasgow, Scotland. I originally started out as a Product Designer, having studied at Glasgow School of Art, but somehow found myself in the New Media industry, like most of my peers I just seem to have ‘fallen into' New Media. Up until recently I've spent the last 2 years of my life working (if you can call it that) at Flammable Jam with Hoss Gifford and some of the other top designer/developers in Scotland. Check out my site at www.gimpster.net.

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Jen deHaan is a freelance web designer/developer based in Calgary. She has been involved in writing, contributing to or editing many computer books on Flash, ActionScript, digital video and ColdFusion in 2002. She has co-authored three books on ActionScript: Flash MX Designer\'s ActionScript Reference, ActionScript Zero to Hero, and Flash MX Components Most Wanted. Jen graduated with top honors from a top New Media program, and also with a BFA in Developmental Art from the University of Calgary. She is an experienced teacher and writer, focusing on integrating technologies for the Web using Flash MX. Jen\'s personal websites are ejepo.com and flash-mx.com.

[Bio updated October 2008]

Paul Prudence\'s current work can be found at transphormetic.com

Paul is an artist and real-time visual performer working with computational and visual feedback systems and video. Uses VVVV, Flash & processed Digital Video. He\'s also a lecturer on visual music and syneasthetic art.

Paul is a researcher and writer at Dataisnature.

After studying theatre in London, then working for several years as an actor in the US, Todd was introduced to Flash in 2000 and was quickly taken by how it allowed for both stunning creativity and programmatic logic application&emdash;a truly left-brain, right brain approach to production&emdash;and has not looked back. He now freelances as a Flash developer in New York City, creating both silly animations and utilitarian applications. His personal work and experimentation can be found at his website, www.27Bobs.com.

I\'m an ActionScripter from Chile. There aren\'t many of us AS coders here, and there aren\'t many ActionScript jobs either, so I started searching for clients on the Internet instead, developing some applications, and participating on Flash forums. I have a lot of hobbies &emdash;sometimes I work as an electronics engineer on satellite communications and networking, sometimes I work as a pa

Brian is more than simply a Flash artist. He is a technologist with a love for great design, motion graphics, and music. Currently, he is a Senior Interactive Designer at nFusion Group in Austin, Texas. His role with nFusion includes creating dynamic Flash demos, videos, and sound design. His future plans include filmmaking. Becoming a filmmaker has been a lifelong passion for Brian, and until that day comes he'll continue to create unique multimedia. Visit his website: www.monnone.com.

Brandon is a senior at Spring Woods High School in Houston, Texas, with many years of mathematics and computer science study in his c.v. His mathematics focus has been single and multivariable calculus, real analysis, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, elementary combinatorics, and number theory. His computer science experience is based on programming design, object-oriented programming, and problem solving. His goal is to pursue a Ph.D. in Mathematics. In his spare time, he helps run the math forum at Were-Here under the name of ahab, and works for Eyeland Studios as a games programmer.

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Josh Dura started his career as most web developers do, designing simple HTML pages with a little graphics here and there. About 3 years ago, Josh started coding ColdFusion, learning basic OOP skills through that language, which brought him to learning ActionScript. Josh currently works for ReadyHosting.com out of Richardson, TX, doing most of the web, graphic/print design work for them. His personal website, www.joshdura.com , is a basic weblog/photography/open source Flash project. Josh also currently owns and runs Dura Media, LLC ( www.duramedia.com) with his brother Daniel.

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Customer Reviews

Nifty Components, Lacking in Real Technical Depth
"Flash MX Components Most Wanteed" is targeted towards designers and those that shy away from ActionScript. The book focuses on explanations of how to use each of the components -- not how they were created or the design choices made while building these sometimes extraordinarily complex components. Many of the components contained on the CD are quite useful, but I personally could have done without the "nifty graphics" and image manipulation components. It's nice to have detailed explanations of each of the available component parameters (kind of like a product manual), but the book left me wanting more about the hows and whys of creating solid, useful Flash MX components.

a darn good bargain
I still can't believe i only paid so little for this book, it's just awesome! I've been using Flash for a couple of years now, but only recently started getting into MX components - any designer (or even developer?) looking for efficient solutions should really look into using them. I'm at the point now where i'm having to reuse as much code/design elements as i can now because
work is just soooo busy, and with this book you get a cd containing 21 components (actually, there's even more than that if you count some of the neat experimental ones!). I'm not even gonna try and work out how much development time this cd will save me, but I can't advise it enough - i really hope these guys bring more of them out. To be honest i've only looked through about half of these components so far, but i'm still blown away -
check out tool tip, the dynamic text 'stringthing', and the XML/actionscript converter especially - i didn't even realize i needed these things until now! The chapter on the movie loader is just a killer too. And there are also more 'crazy-stoopid' ones, like pattern generators and image modulators. What can i say, buy it and hope these authors bring out a sequel! Tons of fully-documented components, tons of examples, i'm a happy
designer!

Great Book
Im coming from a unix/c background with over 10 years experience and I found this book to be really good introduction to Flash MX. Its written very clearly and concsicely and full of useful examples and great ideas. I got my project up and running very quickly with some very pleasing results. Keep up the good work boys!