Web Design Tips and Tricks

The Flash Tutorial

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Finding the perfect learning tool for Flash is a daunting task to any novice web developer. One can find help in a number of ways through books, friends and private tutors. These methods are great but not often readily available, nor cheap! The best and cheapest way to learn anything from the basics of flash to the secrets of the trade is a Flash Tutorial. Think of the Flash Tutorial as a mini lesson that teaches a specific part of the flash.

Flash Tutorials come in many levels of difficulty and quality. Developers don’t publish their tutorials according to an established curriculum, they simple publish whatever they please or think will be useful. That makes finding the correct Flash Tutorial difficult. Many times the tutorial is too vague and the information is difficult to understand. Conversely, the concepts could be easy to understand but entirely useless in the real world. If a person will examine the quality of the tutorial before they work through it, they will be able to avoid a lot of unnecessary frustration. When selecting a Flash Tutorial, look for these three criteria: examples, clarity, and usefulness.

Examples

When looking for a Flash Tutorial, be sure that it has examples to go with it. Examples are actual snippets of code that actually demonstrate the principles taught in the tutorial. If the source code is downloadable as an example file for you to look at and run, that is even better. Look for examples that are easy to follow and demonstrate clearly the principle being taught. There is nothing more frustrating than finding the perfect tutorial and not having the perfect example to work from.

Clarity

Find Flash Tutorials that are clear and easy to understand. If a flash dictionary is needed, then the tutorial is not worth your time. Tutorials should be written clearly and concisely. It is best when the author has put links to the definition of, or clarifies a difficult word. Generally, it is also helpful when the tutorial has visuals. That being said, not all visuals are effective. The visuals should clarify and not confuse.

Usefulness

Above all tutorials should be useful. They should teach things that can actually be used. It is great when the tutorial teaches how to effectively use the feature in a real-life situation. A good Flash Tutorial will be adaptable. The user should be able to take the examples and adapt them to their application without having to entirely redo the process. Finally, the tutorial should teach the entire concept. This can be in one lesson or in many lessons, but it should teach everything the user needs to know to implement that concept.

When looking for tutorials remember that it must have example, it must be clear and it must be useful. If you’re a basic user start searching for “Basic Flash Tutorials”. As you get more advanced, search for specific topics such as character creation or Flash shape tweening. Remember, the first tutorial that comes up on the search isn’t always the best. They have to be sifted through until the really good ones are found.

Okay, one of the reasons why posting has been light on this blog is because we have been busy. My wife and I have also had our first child (well, two years ago) and to be honest, our work has become less innovative in terms of doing cool new things and more iterative, as in we have been applying a lot of the cool things we learned and developed over the last few years.

This happened because we changed our business model from agency style to "plug us into your operations and we will be your dev crew" style.

Anyways, every once in a while we like to take stock and see where we may be able to gain some time so as to try and work in our next direction or new model, whatever that may be. The applications that we use are often places where we can find cool new stuff and gain time.

What things have you done to find extra time? Please, share below!

Here are three things that, in the last year point five have helped us find some extra time.

1. Navicat: we moved all of the bits of PHPmyAdmin accesses over to navicat at about the end of 2007 and this was an excellent move. Tonnes of time gained.
2. TeamViewer: for quick support and desktop sharing with remote staff.
3. Buying a netbook and using Maxivista and Ultramon: adds two new monitors to my existing setup. I now have a 4 monitor two computer setup which allows me to not only have two more monitors but I can also have open two versions of many of the apps that I use (useful for multitasking with teams etc.)
4. Moving simpler client sites to WordPress: now that it has one step upgrades and almost doesn't require the use of an FTP client to get up and running on some hosts.
5. Dictation Software: I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for writing some course and blog materiel lately (pre-writing for my new blog). I find this is saving me a load of time and I am getting more written then ever before.

So what solution have you implemented lately to buy you some extra time?

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