February 19 2010 • 11:24 AM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 119
Listen in your browser: InDesignSecrets-119.mp3 (13.8 MB, 28:47 minutes)
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The transcript of this podcast will be posted soon.
- Interview with Mordy Golding, Illustrator guru and New York City fanboy
- How he got involved with Flash Catalyst
- Why designers will love using it
- Details on his all-day Illustrator/Flash Catalyst tutorial at the PeP Conference
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Tiling
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Links mentioned in this podcast:
> Register for Mordy’s Illustrator/Flash Catalyst tutorial in Seattle on May 12 — follow the Registration link in the 2010 Print & ePublishing Conference information page
> Mordy’s web site, Mordy.com, and his Flash Catalyst Beta video tutorials
> Download Flash Catalyst from the Adobe Labs web site
> New PeP Conference sponsor, WinSoft (check out their Arabic typography contest)
> InDesignSecretsLive.com for seminar and conference info & registration links
> Another post that’s related to tiling in InDesign, sort of
So, I’ve just had my first experience of being asked to provide a swf with the actionscript for the click-thru embedded into my swf. BUT, I exported my FLA out of InDesign CS4 and opened in Flash Pro then exported my swf. (needed to adjust animation). With Catalyst allow me to setup this type of thing. I have watched your Lynda series on the beta.
@Jeff: I think Mordy is flying home today, so I’m not sure when he’ll see this. Can you explain what you mean by having the click-thru embedded in the SWF? What are you needing that the built-in InDesign SWF is not offering?
I’m also playing with a new product that I just heard about called eDocker that might be of some interest — like putting a bunch of InDesign SWFs into a “frame” that contains things like zoom in/scroll around, etc.
cont’d from above. I don’t know how to use flash by the way – but I’m hoping catalyst will be able to that stuff and be able to export final files rather than requiring a developer to complete it. There’s a huge market for swf banner ads that get produced, it would be nice if print designers could do take of that without having to rely on developers.
David, my swf had 3 panels and I had to set timing and have an object move thru the space – no animation control in CS4. The ad service wanted a “click-thru” embedded in the swf. After googling it, I discovered it’s an actionscript that is used for ad tracking.
Oh, I get it now. Yes, Catalyst should be great for that! Come hear Mordy talk at the conference about it in more detail.
that’s the plan David. March 23 by the way for the Vancouver InDesign User Group meeting.
http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/vancouver/events/1376/
Hi Jeff!
So actually, you WON’T be able to do that with Flash Catalyst (sigh). Flash Catalyst produces SWF files based on the Flex framework, not ActionScript — so you can’t embed ActionScript code into a Flash Catalyst. In fact, Flash Catalyst lets you VIEW the code it writes for you, but it’s read-only — you can’t embed your own code.
In the case of AS code that can track click-thrus (as used in ad banners), the only way to do that would be to open your Flash Catalyst project in Adobe Flash Builder, where you could add it there.
In general, using Flash Catalyst for ad banners isn’t a good idea, because the Flex-based framework it uses requires support files and additional libraries, and generally produces large SWF files — and most sites that use SWF for advertising have strict rules for file size limits — something you’d have a really hard time dealing with if you use Flash Catalyst. For ad banners (or advertising in general), your best bet is still Flash Professional.
Flash Catalyst is great for microsites, widgets, rich internet applications and site portfolios. I also think we’re in the early stages of distribution for these kind of SWF files – Adobe has put some pretty cool stuff in the FlashPlayer 10 version and as things begin to develop over the next 1-2 years, I think we’ll see more infrastructure in place not only in the browser, but as the adoption of AIR takes off as well. For example, Adobe just last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona announced that AIR will run on the mobile Android platform.
Mordy, thanks for the update. Well, I sure hope someone else comes up with something that would let me have that animation control and swf export options, outside of Flash Pro. There’s a plug-in opportunity there.
Mordy, I was rather excited by your one hour presentation of Flash Catalyst at Lynda.com.
I downloaded your FC example files from there, but none of the project files are opening. FC is showing an error message:
“Flash Catalyst cannot open this project because it was created by an incompatible version of Flash Catalyst.”
I installed Flash Catalyst Beta 2 – 253292
When I look at the time stamps of your fxp files they say May 19th 2009. Are they beta 1 files? And if so the question arrises what to do with fxp files of my beta 2 in the future? Will I be able to open them in FC beta 3 or in a final version?
Then I tried to import the ai and psd files. That, at least, was working. With a “minor” glitch: a message popped up saying “Incompatible fonts: Myriad Roman” when I was trying to import “forecast_widget.ai”. It should have said “Myriad Roman” missing, because there is no “Roman” styled Myriad installed on my system.
I’m running FC on a German Mac OS X 10.5.8
@Uwe: We’ll see if Mordy can drop in and reply, but your issue is probably better handled by lynda.com technical support. Have you asked them about it?
@David: not yet, but I will do…
Hi Uwe!
Yes, Adobe made some changes to the file format when they went from Beta 1 to Beta 2. That’s what is causing the incompatibility. I recorded the Lynda.com video before Beta 1 was released.
In addition, there are also some user interface changes that Adobe made which could make the training hard to follow at some points. Alas, these are the challenges with trying to record training on products so early in development that version 1.0 of the product isn’t even out yet
I believe that Beta 2 files will be able to be opened in the final version of Flash Catalyst though.
I’m not sure about the font issues you’re seeing, but of course, you can just open the file in Illustrator, update the fonts and resave if you’d like.
I’m glad that you enjoyed the Flash Catalyst training — there’s more on the way
Re. Text Exporter – It’s also incredibly useful if you need to send text from already layed up multi-story documents to agencies for translation.