RE: FLASH: Zoom & Pan Movie Clips?+Browsers & Javascript?

[Len Harrison]

Thanks John,

> Len Harrison wrote:

>

> > 1) Is it possible to zoom and then pan a movie clip


> FSCommand Zoom and Pan is limited to the whole movie.

> But you can pan, tilt and zoom a movie clip by simply moving it, tilting

> it and resizing it. This can be implemented by nesting the Movie Clips

> inside other Movie Clips (Nesting). Multiple functions can be applied by

> multiple layers of nesting.


I tried this and it gets very difficult to control if you zoom in 4-6x. You

need to move the edge of the clip off-screen to pan and you can't tell where

it will be in design mode, only runtime. I ended up just scaling a symbol

with a mask on it and putting the result of that in a clip. That worked

pretty well, because the panned objects are screen shots and the mask is a

symbol also so I can resize, move, and tween it. Not the original intent: I

was looking to keep the screenshots in half the window, zoom and pan them,

then annotate in the other half. But may be better: current mode is

certainly more dynamic than that. Vertical elements like our equivalent of

the Outlook bar are rendered vertically, horizontal elements like

traditional toolbars come in that way, everything tweens into position, and

the annotations arise relative to the image instead of in fixed places. We

like it better in-house, but the woman in Robert Warnke's post who freaked

behind animated gifs would probably have convulsions. ;=)


> I've answered this twice last week.

> Only the following browsers support 2 way communicationb with Flash

> (FSCommand):

>

> Netscape 3+ - Win 95/98/NT and Power Mac (Using Live Connect)

> MSIE 3+  -  Win 95/98/NT (Using ActiveX)


Sorry for the rerun, I was not sure of the exact specifics from your

previous posts. However, doesn't this cover essentially all of corporate

America and the major international corporations except for those in Unix

(who don't Flash anyway), 90+% of home users, and all educational

institutions except Unix labs? I'd think the percentage of users who had

Flash installed but whose browsers didn't support javascript would be pretty

small, mostly some subset of people  with old Macs and Win 3.1 who have a

interest in emerging technologies but are presumably cash-tight. Not a lot,

not a prime market, certainly not movers and shakers.


I'm not disputing your point, just looking for the global perspective. Other

issues to consider in that perspective might be programming structure,

efficiency, development time, maintenance, documentation and comprehension

by others or yourself down the road, reusability, ability to fine-tune and

modify, and scalability.


I did a lot of pseudo-Flash design (writing the equivalent of pseudo-code

for Flash) this weekend, basically examining where the edges of the envelope

were. No question that you can do all kinds of things that are not

immediately obvious within this paradigm by using clips that only control

other clips or objects on the main timeline. Then you get clips that control

control clips, etc. Pretty soon you're implementing all kinds of logic this

way and it gets quite interesting. You're doing virtual things with

hardcoded objects, sort of like programming everything in enumerated

classes.


If I remember my digital logic and microprocessor theory correctly, it

appears you can implement anything in Flash since you can emulate the basic

building blocks. But would you want to? Might be fun to simulate a simple

singleboard in Flash complete with Hex pad, Led Display, visible registers

and stack, etc., and a simple instruction set. Would be a great teaching

tool for that subject. But you could do the same thing in less than half the

time using a host script for the intelligence and Flash for display. And you

could expand it in any direction with relative ease, use the code itself as

a teaching tool, etc.


On the other hand, simple objects that are easily programmed, like the silly

little control I mentioned earlier, have the advantage of working wholly

within the Flash development environment and not needing a host for testing.

Plus the browser thing.


It's all trade-offs as usual. Just a question of evaluating each instance

and factor correctly.


len harrison

instructional designer

lenhabtcorp [dot] com

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