Re: FLASH: Re: flashskills.com feedback..thanks

[Laura Mollett]

Hi Zoubin,


Great site, very complete! and should be a wonderful resource for flashers.

I love seeing something like this.


Other than the spelling comments, a few things I noticed... On view details,

the comments text is being cut off at 2 lines (when you can type in, I

think, 4). I expect a back button to take me back one page (especially in

flash sites), but that one returns you to the main menu. You might consider

calling it main or home or something? Why not allow people searching to view

the entire list of skills checked, rather than just the number based on

those skills (add a "for more detail" or something?) or does the database

not hold that? Just seems like there are places where the specific skills

would be of much greater interest than a number generalizing them.


Along those lines, there's a couple of places where it seems like the score

might be misleading, especially in creative and actionscripting. Creative

has graphic design/illustration (without really distinguishing them), video,

sound, and animation all on one list. Those are pretty varied fields, and

some of them apply to flash more than others, and it's not always clear

where that would matter in the form. I'm an illustrator/designer, but I'm

certainly not a sound specialist and I doubt many people specialize in all

of those categories, although they might have some general knowledge in

several. And then like, lighting effects... I don't know how to set lights

for movies, but I can't see at all how that applies to flash, where you

can't come close to doing that anyway. I can use the lighting effects in

photoshop... but that's not usually a real good thing to do for flash design

anyway... There's also a few places where your terminology is different than

that I'd normally use. Unless I was pretty sure what something was, I didn't

check it, but it could be misleading. For example you said "painting with

bitmaps" and I suspect you mean using bitmap fills (which isn't on there),

but I'm not positive... or... knowing when to use AIFF, WAV, and MP3 - are

you just looking for understanding of which is imported from what OS and

what's output?


Anyways, I think it'd be worth dividing the creative category up and maybe

emphasizing use in flash (knowing how to turn movies into something useable

for flash like the whasherfacenitro one or the music group site (ok, I lose

names :) and how to use/create vectors and maybe taking some of the "core

skills" and reducing those categories to: can you open the program and know

what the tools are and how to use them? (should there be anyone in the

database that can't use the paint bucket or circle tool? :)


Also I ended up with too high a score in actionscripting, I'm pretty sure. I

know what a lot of things are, and have done them, but (unless the

checkboxes are weighted in a way I didn't realize) "understand and write

from scratch" gets the same weight as "know who george boole" was... I

dunno, I feel comfortable writing a sort function, but I think that's a more

intermediate thing than being a real programmer like Branden, and I wonder

if the database skills Cheri and Helen are displaying (and understanding of

how programming works) aren't being given quite the weight they should be...

if that makes any sense :)


All just my two cents and worth what's paid for it of course. I think it's a

wonderful database and intend all these comments constructively (and put my

name in there too even though my portfolio *still* isn't done :)


hth,

Laura


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