estimating flash time?
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- toddvio
can anyone recommend a good resource for estimating
a flash website? share some personal insight?my co-worker and i are officially forming the a "flash dept" at my (digital marketing) company and i've thought of coming up with a 3 tiered approach... almost a chinese menu for level of animation, navigation, dynamic capabililties, etc... after all a flash website can be as simple as an html page if one choose so.
any wisdon/advice would be greatly appreciated!
-thrillho
- berserka0
If your developing dynamic flash sites and you don't have a solid codebase estimate at least double the time as you would need to build a similar page in HTML. But the complexity of the project depends on how flexible the site should be: are all sections dynamic, can you hardcode the menu in flash or is it retrieved by an database...
building fully dynamic flash sites requires a lot of work to code tasks which the browser handles for you in HTML (like scrollbars, positioning, UI, etc.)
- nRIK0
building fully dynamic flash sites requires a lot of work to code tasks which the browser handles for you in HTML (like scrollbars, positioning, UI, etc.)
berserka
(Jan 10 06, 06:27)yes! as well as preloading (i hate that the most :(
- jpea0
if preloading's an huge issue then you have bigger fish to fry
;-)
- fugged0
if preloading's an huge issue then you have bigger fish to fry
;-)
jpea
(Jan 10 06, 07:00)I would have to agree. I'm building a flash application at the moment that is fully dynamic and it's a fucking pain. Once it's done I'll have a crap load of classes that I can use in the future for handling/rendering forms (all based on XML) that will help a lot. Building it though, has been tough.
I think flex and AS3 are going to help greatly in this area, but for now it's all a big pain.
- toddvio0
thanks...
i imagine dynamic capabilities are the biggest variables in the equation...
as far animation or how dynamic the site will be (animation wise)... do you draw upon any examples when trying to relate to ungodly AMs,PMs, and client service people...
ex a portfolio site can be:
http://www.markromanek.com/
or
http://www.matthewmahon.com/
- ********0
not to mention that most of the mx components are overweight, seemingly impenetrable piles of crap..
To make a simple custom skin for, eg a scrollbar comp. you have to find the comp. in the program folder, openit, change what seems to be a myriad of gfx, save, publish, reimport etc..
While I appreciate that flash was trying to go to the next level, I look back on the period from flash5 to 7 as being pretty terrible. Now it seems that flash can only be used to it potential if you already have a very solid grounding in something like C or Java, and although they've given a nod to the design community with bitmap caching and fricking drop shadows (like that didnt take all of 30 seconds in mx2004....), AS2.0 classes/components etc are still some of the most unusable and disproportionate principals Ive ever come across - far too much effort to get too simple a result.
Fuck it.
I want sparkle.
- spmitch0
you should check out amfphp
open source flash remoting
- fugged0
mikotondria2,
I think if anything, things have improved. As flash becomes more and more a fully OOP environment, code will get easier to maintain, update and write.
------
I want sparkle.mikotondria2
(Jan 10 06, 08:26)
-----fuck that. i'm going to avoid that shit like the plague.
it's just going to introduce more and more crap that users will be required to download and that developers will have to support.
just wait until clients start demanding sites that will work in Flash, HTML, and sparkle? fuck that...
- jpea0
it just means more money for the dev's. hell, bring on more complex projects for me. i don't want to compete with 2 billion other people who can tween a shape. i want my field of competition to be decreased.
- fugged0
if you like maintaining two entirely different code bases that do that same thing, more power to ya =)
- jpea0
fugged, guess i didn't understand what you're sayin, cause i think i agree with you
- ********0
good point, fugged..
Im still not entirely sure about the how sparkle/avalong will be delivered...anyone.
Oh, and I sorted out my component problem, so Im not as pissed at them now.
Im bloody fickle, I tell you.
- jpea0
i don't see sparkle creating that much of a demand. isn't it just supposed to only work with Vista and above? inherent to that, what about users on other platforms?
- ********0
chinese menu? what the hell does that mean? maybe you mean the type of menus that they have at the Chicken Ranch brothel in nevada. in which case I would avoid it because clients don't/can't know enough about flash design to be able to pick out what they want. also it's stupid because it shouldn't cost much more to animate a button. just divide it out through level of sophistication (database etc)