Multi Tasking

My computer is having a fit now as its probably running the most number of programs in its life.

It all goes down to me having to edit (with my friend Omar), an English play that will be submitted to the ministry's competition. Our role in this play is the animators.

And what a hard job it is. I've just finished doing this horribly long movie beginning, thankfully the rest will be the play that was recorded on camera.

I insisted that the animation be done on Flash, since he had wanted the terribly simple and basic movie maker. I got my way, and he was thankful that I did when he saw the result.

I think I was going for a word-scrolling like beginning, all words that point to global warming, somewhat like the Jawwal advertisement on MBC.

I still have to do lots more homework, and it's already nine-thirty. Its a rough night for me.

Wish me luck.

(click on picture to expand it)

Making A Music Player

After downloading the new Flash program, I decided to make a music player, driven by a playlist that was coded in XML.

The playlist its self is not hard to write or to edit, but due to Flash's lack of saving, XML was the only choice.

I had remembered a great website that was made by a person called Lee Brimelow, which offered free high quality video tutorials on Flash.

So, I went ahead and downloaded his whole series, which was a whopping 1.45 GB, but it downloaded within a day on a 512 connection.

Using his guide to remember the basics of Actionscript, I made the player. With 140 lines of code, it was quite a long job, but it worked.

If you want to be more technical, the player reads the XML playlist to store the path to the MP3 files, and then it reads the ID3 tags stored inside the music files, which contain the song title/artist name and other information. Using these, it plays the music files.

And here is a screenshot of the program at work. You must excuse the quickly done background, and the weird name, and the stupid volume slider which I must replace. Other than that, I'm quite proud of myself. :D

Macromedia Flash

The first time I saw Flash, I loved it. I never really knew anything about it, just that it had frames, objects, tweens - all the basics a normal flash beginner would know. A boy sat at school, clicking away, drawing something in Flash then tweening it. And their I sat, amazed and confused at the same time. It is strange how you could look at a program and not know what it does, but at the same time you begin to need it.

The next day, I went to a close by CD store with my dad. I had convinced my dad to say to the man that he wanted it, not me. I could just imagine the laugh that would come if I came and said I wanted a copy of Macromedia Flash. So it all worked to plan, my dad handed over 3.5JDs (you greedy shop, blank CDs cost a few piasters), and he handed over Macromedia Flash Pro 8. And feeling confident, I went home and installed it.

I felt stupid when I couldn't do anything on the program. I had thought I had memorised everything the boy done, but nothing worked. I began to feel frustrated, at how I had wasted lots of dinars to how I had not asked for help in the first place. I was in a tight position and I did what I always do - give up.

A few days later, or weeks maybe, I went with my uncle to a computer fair, and after going around the place I found the For Dummies books. I found it, Macromedia Flash MX For Dummies. I knew I had to get it, and after a long long series of nagging, I bought it. Although MX and Pro 8 are different versions, the book still taught virtually the same thing since there weren't that much big differences between the two versions.

I learnt quite quickly. The first thing I made was just a simple rotating tween, but as time came I began to learn frame by frame animation and start to use the tools. This wasn't really that good, I wasn't into drawing or animation. I began to learn about buttons, and began to touch onto my first programming language - Actionscript. Buttons weren't really that good in teaching me, and since the book didn't teach AS, I went and searched on the Internet.

I found a forum which had quite a lot of hand written tutorials, all about Actionscript - everything from the simple gotoAndPlay to the terrifying API (in which you draw through code). The forum also allowed me to ask the users there, mostly teens in their 16s, and I would usually get answers in minutes since it was a very big forum with over two million users.

And as time past, I began to learn and became much better in AS, learning much more advanced thing such as Arrays and Math functions. But one day, I had to format the computer, and Flash was lost. Thinking I could reinstall it from the CD I got, I tried it, and found it was virtually unreadable since it had a million scratches on it. I then gave up on Flash for the moment, and began to learn other things like PHP.

But all of that changed a week ago. My school's IT lab had Flash MX on it, and after I tried a few things on it, I began to remember most of what I had learnt in Action Script. The next lesson I brought out my USB drive, looked around, plugged it in, copy, paste, took it out - done. At home, I installed it and began to try out something new I had learnt which was rotation of objects by AS.

The program basically relies on two variables to rotate an object, one is speed and one is acceleration. The square rotates till it reaches a certain speed then starts slowing down until zero then repeats itself. Its quite interesting, I guess my Physics teacher would be impressed. But then again, he wouldn't really care. I won't bother.

[IMAGES NOT AVAILABLE, SORRY ^^]