| User Details | message |
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| Timothy Hall Sat, 01 Sep 2007 |
This is a general appeal for help. I do wish you had a working example for each individual effect demonstrating and documenting that effect's particulars - because many of them are a total mystery to me; the default settings, when applied to the same text, sometimes do not produce an understandable or desireable example, and without specific direction regarding that effects purpose and how to use it properly, it may as well not even be there. It is undoubetedly obvious to you what each effect is supposed to do, otherwise you would have provided this detailed information - as you have made an admireable effort to otherwise document this component. Some effects seem to be missing essential controls (Fade In Fade Out needs the ability to control how long the text remains visible before fading out, as does Lightspeed, Magicfall, Magiclens, Roadtrip, Scalein, and others). Shouldn't these have In only, Out only, and In/Out with delay times options? Typewriter has an option for something called CursorMC - an example with some explanation would have been helpfull. I don't mean to sound entirely critical however either, in fact I am extreemly impressed with the component in general - particularly regarding its breadth and scope. This was a large and ambitous undertaking - but one would hope you have not now signed off on it either, for without addressing these issues, many of the effects are, though clever, not really useable. Thank you. |
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| Catalin Serban [eXtend] Mon, 03 Sep 2007 |
Hello Timothy, We know how important it is to have everything well documented and how it is to need an answer fast, because of this the documentation of all effect parameters is under your eyes all the time, in the form of the contextual help. (Example: for CursorMC - The linkage Id of the movie clip you would like to use as the cursor). The effects are producing a not understandable or an undesirable effect due to the combination to the text length and default effect duration. The default duration is set for “Insert Your Text Here� text, which has 21 characters (including white spaces). Here is an example to understand what is going wrong: If you have a text of 80 characters and duration of 60 frames it means that each character will be animated in less than a 1 frame, so yout won’t be able to see something desirable. In this case, in order to fix-it you should set the duration to 160 or more. If you want to see what the effects are supposed to do (calibrated by us) you should make a test with the default text, going through the entire list of effects at least once. The effects that you are referring to (Lightspeed, Magicfall, Magiclens, Roadtrip, Scalein,) are all from “PassingBy� category – every character just comes and goes. Most of the effects from this category are derived from the other categories, and what you want can be achieved choosing any other effect with Start or Reverse behavior. Giving these effects the options that you are mentioning will make them redundant and also because here are combined two effects (In and Out) had been caused synchronization problems. As I said the parameter “CursorMC� needs: “The linkage Id of the movie clip you would like to use as the cursor�. This is form the contextual help which is at the bottom of the component inspector. You just have to give it a try with any MC to see what you can achieve. I hope that this is helpful to you. Also, if you have suggestions of new features for our components, please send them at support@extendstudio.com. We are always taking in consideration features requests for the future updates or new versions. We have not “signed off� on our flash text effects component; we are actually planning to move it to AS3 next year. Regards, Catalin Serban |
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| Timothy Hall Mon, 03 Sep 2007 |
Thank you for getting back to me. Perhaps, you would consider updating your help area to specify the particular effects that are used in combinations in the PassingBy category. I suspected this is was case there, but not having your familiarity with the effects and the undelying internal libraries makes me like a chemist who must "taste" each chemical to know their specific properties - not a very effective, scientific, or safe, approach - instead of having an impirical understanding of them. I did set up a tester, and will continue to play with each effect, as you suggested. In time, I am sure, I will gain a better understanding - and will probably have additional questions. Thank you also for explaining the secret of text length and calibrated duration times - this is just the kind of contextual input I was hoping for through example. Many software developers these days are offering tutorial movies; the best of them even offer free podcasts - with regular pointers on how to use their products - to ever help deepen their customers understanding (and appreciation) and commitment to their products. You really should consider doing this yourselves given the depth and reach of your incredible tweening tools. If I may, I would also like to offer another suggestion.. Your website is flash based. I am on a Mac G5 (PPC), with dual 2Ghz processors, 6.5 GB of ram, under OSX 10.4.10 - and I have a high bandwidth connection - and yet find your site to be slow. Most of your effects used on your site are also slow and consume large chunks of my processor power - not a complementary vehicle for getting your message across. And this forum (also flash based) has a few flaws - the most noteable is that this "Forum Post" popup widow has obscured your kind reply, making it so I cannot reposition it to review your comments while I composed this reply. I therefore had to open a second tab into this forum, and switch back and forth. It would have been better if you had either made this window draggable - or (better), had used one of the staple free PHP-based forums we are all used to instead. I admire your dedication to Flash, but have also (I'm affraid) learned a few practical lessons about its limits through your site as well. Not something you would want to hear I imagine. Given that you are expanding your line to offer additional components and libraries, I wonder how much overlap some of them share with their bretheren? A frank discussion, through a regular podcast (as I had suggested) would empower us users, and will (I promise) firm up your place in the flash community. Thank you for giving me the oportunity to sound off on these concerns by the way. Not all companies would be so open. And for this I do commend you. Yours, -Timothy Hall |
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| Catalin Serban [eXtend] Tue, 04 Sep 2007 |
Hello Timothy, First of all allow me to thank you for your suggestions and I am happy that you find my answer useful. We have some movie tutorials in our live demo section and we are considering in making a few more. Probably we will make them available for downloading in the form of free podcasts. We are also considering in having a small blog on the website. In our website we had pushed the limits of FLAH websites creating a hybrid of AJAX and FLASH. We know that there are some problems and I assure you that most of them will be solved in the form of minor tweaks that will take place in the next few months (including the reply form). For any other questions feel free to contact us. Keep In Touch, Catalin Serban |
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| marc Sat, 12 Jan 2008 |
Is there a list of the paramaters applicable to each effect? I am creating a file driven message display. I want to specify the text and the effecft from an external file. It seems that I will need to create a function call for each effect and pass the proper peramaters, but I cannot find any documentation regarding the paramatres available for each effect. Is such documentation available, or do you have a better suggestion as to how to use dynamic text and effects? |
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| Catalin Serban [eXtend] Tue, 15 Jan 2008 |
Hello Marc, I think it would be easier if you would create your effect on the stage and configure it using the interface and set only the text property dynamically before starting the effect. This way you can configure the effect parameters from the interface which is much easier than configuring from actionscript. After setting the text property you just have to call the initEffect and startEffect methods in order to start the effect. Best regards |
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