Re: Web Animation and Sound Advice Sought

$Zero wrote:
On Thurs, Feb 16 2006 2:38 am, Lily wrote:

$Zero wrote:
Dr Zen wrote:
"$Zero" <zero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> led the charge, yelling:
Dr Zen wrote:
"$Zero" <zero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> led the charge, yelling:
Dr Zen wrote:
"$Zero" <zero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> led the charge, yelling:

Web Animation and Sound Advice Sought

anyone here got any tips on adding animation and
sound to your website?

<BGSOUND SRC="sound/lespapillons.mid" LOOP="infinite">or put a
number after loop for how many times you want the file to play.
only works in IE, though.

you can hear it at http://ajartworks.com/home.html

Is that the "Imagine" song thinger I recall you once having somewhere?

Same principle, different song.


there's a way to do it so that it works in netscape and mozilla
browsers, but i can't remember. i think it's an embed tag.
this site looks like it has possibilities:
http://www.porjes.com/idocs/embeddedobjects/_EMBED.html

Cool. I'll check it out. That may just settle the sound part.

Zen says it's old stuff.


also, try searching at http://webmonkey.com/ they have some great
tutorials and scripts that you can just grab. i used to depend on
the site back in the days when i was first learning all this stuff.

Thanks again, that's one of the links Sal gave me, IIRC.

You're welcome.


i'm looking for the simplest way possible.

using raw HTML coding (windows notepad-generated).

Do you know any DHTML?

not yet. just basic HTML.

No JS at all?

JS = Java Script?

Yeah.

Jah.

javascript's only bad if you're determined to learn it and do
it all yourself from the ground up.

Why is it only bad under those circumstances?

I'm personalizing it. You probably won't find it bad at all. I hate code.
HATE. But I have to know it to do the things I like doing.


go search for a script that's already written.

Well, yeah, that's what I was thinking.

after looking through a few of them, you'll get the idea
and be able to tweak them for your needs if necessary.

I just want to run thru maybe twenty - thirty jpegs in 5-7 seconds (in
an infinite loop) while playing a 30 second or so sound file behind it
(also on an infinite loop).

at least for what it is you're looking for.
it doesn't sound too complex.

My point exactly. Very basic stuff.

nope. not yet.

Sal gave me some links awhile back, but i haven't had a
chance to look into them yet.

Do it. You can't make what you want without it.

I challenge you on that assertion, but... nevertheless...

it really helps to read through a few tutorials.

Yes, Zen really ought to.

Particularly the How-to-be-Creative tutorial.

Although, it seems to me that he was going thru a severely-annoyed
menstrual cycle when he responded to moi responding to him on this
topic.

He sounded normal to me. <g>



You need some JS to do what you're after, I think.

what's the usual learning curve with Java Script?

Steep.

Steep.


a couple days? i'm a quick study, mind you.

The basics, maybe.

Well, that applies to almost anything. Do you think that someone
of my vast Unicornian intelligence could learn what I need to know
in order to create an animation with a sound file in a couple of
days? My guess is yes, since I checked out some sites last night
demonstrating how to make swf files, of course they were using
some prepackaged software, but...still.

swf files are flash files. you cannot learn flash in 2 days.

Why not?

trust me on this. there are programs, like swish, that create
readymade flash effects, though.

Well, that's one way to learn it fast, assuming you can peek at the
underlying code.

As far as I know, the actionscripting is the only code you can see, which is
not the Flash movie itself just the commands for making the movie do what
you want it to do. There's more to it than that, but I'm not a geek and
can't explain it properly. Learning the tools and the timeline takes time.
It seems pretty straightforward, but it takes lots of practice. Check out
http://cartoonsmart.com This guy's great. He has some free tutorials to
download that you can watch. It will give you an idea of what Flash is all
about. He has some reasonably priced tutorials that I've found much more
useful than the books I bought simply because I learn better watching
someone else than I do reading about this stuff.

If you ever really get into it, http://flashkit.com is THE resource website.
You can get all your questions answered and they have tutorials and free
readymades.




especially with software/programming stuff.

Do you know any scripting languages? Visual Basic?

Yes. I know something very similar to Visual Basic.

i handcode in microsoft notepad text files.

Yes, so do I.

i'm sure there's some cool advantages to using suff like
adobe pro-live and whatnot, but i like keeping things simple.

You would only have to check it if you used a program.

True. But I don't feel like committing to a program just yet.
I've been down that route. You get locked in and then you find
that you're locked into a fricken' nightmare. All that time spent
probing the depths of the program's capacity (years and yeqars)
only to discover a few years down the road that the company who
makes it are losers and> nitwits.

dreamweaver is good. and you can still handcode using it if you
prefer.

I'm probably eventually gonna get that. Or Adobe-Pro Live. Or both.

Which would you recommend? I'm leaning towards Adobe because of its
probable inherently better compatibility with Adobe Photoshop, which
is a huge image-creating standard. I've played around with an old
version of APL and thought it good. It easily plopped in various
kinds of sound files and readers. Nice property boxes. A nicely
object-oriented visual interface, and it was an old one at that.

Don't worry about the compatibility. It's highly unlikely that anyone would
shoot themselves in the foot by developing a program that isn't Photoshop
compatible. I've never used Adobe Go-Live, so don't know how it differs from
Dreamweaver. You know, now that Macromedia is part of Adobe, they'll
probably eventually take the best of both products (one would hope) so it
won't even be a decision one needs to make anymore. You're probably better
off going with Adobe Go-Live anyway, just because of that business move.



i'm too visual. i prefer the drag and drop method,

Well, yeah. As long as it creates decent code behind it all.

Dreamweaver does. It's nice, clean code. And it uses colors to help you
differentiate between tags and values. It's lovely for a visual learner.
Coffeecup.com offers a nice editor that does the same thing with the code.
You should check them out, too. http://coffeecup.com


though i've learned that it's still necessary to know the code.

Not for everyone necessarily, but for serious tweakers like moi?
Definitely.

Of course, knowing something about the code is definitely advantageous
for the inevitable glitches that will likely happen during drag and
drop technology that has not been thoroughly perfected yet.

I used to think that. About not needing to know the code. I was wrong.



OTOH, I've had just the opposite experience as well. I'm just
not in the mood to flip that coin right now, unless I have to.
Of course, it'd be easier to make that choice if all the techies
around here were a bit more generous with their recommendations,
but, then this wouldn't be mw, would it?

i have a brandnew copy of Frontpage still shrinkwrapped in the
box, but i'd rather build things from the ground up. it helps
my creativity develop.

do not EVER use frontpage. EVER. the code is a nightmare.

I know, I used it back in 2000. What an ungodly mess.

what you can do with one page of html takes frontpage 3 pages.

That's a various generous assessment.

The only thing I liked about it was how it created a huge clickable
map of how all your pages were linked to eachother, but I'd imagine
that that kinda thing is pretty standard stuff in the pro
applications, no?

Yes.




It's up to you how you do it but without JS, you're not going
to do it.

i seem to remember some sort of "flash" option in the early HTML
stuff, years ago.

Learning flash would be harder than learning JS.

I'm thinking the old HTML feature that I was thinking about was
called "blink", not "flash". Are you talking about flash macromedia
or some such?

i think the blink tag only worked with text, though, didn't it?

So? My thinking was that if it worked for text that there's no
logical reason it couldn't somehow work for images. It was
performing a swap of some sort. Changing the color of the text?
That's a sort of Animation. EOFS. There may be some other "reason"
that swapping images has never been implemented as a basic HTML
option, but it's not a _logical_ reason.

I wouldn't know. It's like electricity. I know there's a power plant
somewhere generating it. I know it travels through wires. And I know that if
I turn the switch on and the light bulbs are working the light goes on. I
have no idea why or how. I can change the light bulbs. I can even change out
the wiring in the light or change the fuse in the fuse box, but other than
that, it's a mystery.



[...absurd "Java" fiasco...]

Gawd. I'll answer that one next post. It has way more to do with
writing than animation and sound files.

BTW: As you can see, I'm now using something other than notepad to
write my posts. Something I created myself using MS Access. But the
darn thing auto-capitalizes, so I've lost my ZeroStyle. For awhile, I
was correcting its corrections, but then I asked myself "what the ***
am I doing that for?"

I hate Access. I believe I've mentioned that before. But it's useful for
what it does. I assume you use it in order to archive what you've written to
a database?



I may take the time to figure out how to turn that obnoxious feature
off, but my first exploration into that quest turned up null. At
least where it would have made logical sense to find such an option.
I decided not to spend much time looking for the answer because, well,
maybe I should consider using caps where others seem to freak-out over
their absence.

Besides, if the program is gonna do it automatically -- without
requiring moi to press the shift key -- why should I try to over-ride
it?

LOL!


Lily


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