Well it has been a slice as they say. Flash 99% Good has been a labor of love for many years, but alas my love has grown cold for maintaining this blog.  Moving hosts, getting hacked a few times, and general lack of time have brought me to the conclusion that it is time to put the blog to rest as they say. I must thank everyone for their comments and encouragement over the years. Flash 99% Good taught me as much as I hope it has taught the internet community about usability and all things Flash. After I clean out the spam/crude from the comments I am going to switch the site to a flat file HTML site that is read only. I plan to leave it up for historical purposes and maybe the information here can bring use to someone in the future. Once again, thank you everyone for your help. You can still follow our work over at airgid.com

cheers, Kevin Airgid

In the spirit of the “Preloader Gallery” we recently featured, I thought it would be nice to share a list of resources for Flash developers to aid their search for high quality preloader source code and ideas. Most of the resources are “artist” friendly, so tweener-types will be fine with these resources …

If you haven’t gone out and got your self Flash CS4 then this is one big reason to do it. This is something that will make creating characters in Flash way easier. Adobe has posted a great tutorial on how to use this. See: Using Inverse Kinematics“

Lee Brimelow has some really great, and well documented tutorials over at gotoandlearn, but be warned many of them are for “actionscript” junkies, but a few are good for mere mortals (aka timeline folk)

Lee Brimelow a Platform Evangelist over at Adobe has posted a rather nice (and might I say) easy to follow tutorial on how to create a parallax photo effect. For those of you who don’t know what “parallax photo effect” is, think Biography channel when they don’t have video for say a American civil war documentary. So instead they cut out photos of objects in the foreground and make them move faster than the background. The cool thing about Flash CS4 is it brings things that could only be done in AfterEffects to Flash. Simply by moving around 3D space metrics users can simulate this effect. I can’t wait to try this in a project. I also think adding some more animation to the background while you do this effect could also introduce some very interesting results as well.

unFocus History Keeper is a great “frameless” way to enable the back button in Flash. It works in many more browsers than my current (and old) Robert Penner code on this site. Take a look and worth a try!.

Deep (Stateful) Linking and Back Button Integration with Flash Applications Is a good tutorial by Justin over at chakramedia.

Chris Hendershot found this really nice back button code that doesn’t use Javascript. I’ haven’t personally used it… but in theory it should work better. You can download the code here

Recently Amazon.com has been using Flash Video in a very interesting way. They are presenting a “short” film on the home page of their site. I’m sure their market demographics told them this would generate more traffic to the site. And you know what they are right. Check out the Flash Video on the site, very well done.

I hate when I view Flash content and I can’t use my wheel mouse anymore. I use my wheel mouse on like 80% of the content I read online. I found this great tutorial on how to make it work in Flash 7 content. (although I think it will work in Flash 6 as well) Here is the tutorial.