Re: Web Animation and Sound Advice Sought

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. "Lily"
<lily@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> led the charge, yelling:


"Dr Zen" <longhornster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:a01lv19urk6phk84ui17g2s4pt8c7lc8om@xxxxxxxxxx
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. "Lily"
<lily@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> led the charge, yelling:

Dr Zen wrote:
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. "Lily"
<lily@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> led the charge, yelling:

$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.


How exactly would you use an embed tag to make a slideshow of images?

You wouldn't. I was just talking about the sound. Completely spaced it on
the animation part. But you'd place it in the code just as you would an
image.

I assure you I wouldn't.

You wouldn't place animation in the code like you would an image? I don't
mean using an image tag, though if it's an animated gif you would, just that
the principle is the same. With a Flash movie you use an object tag with all
the attributes and values that Flash gives it. But it's placed in the code
in the same way that an image is placed in the code.






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.

For many people, understanding the concepts first would actually be
less bad.

Bless them.




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.

Kof.


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>

Zero's just being a know-it-all ***. Even when he knows nothing, he
has to try to know more than the next guy.




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

what's the usual learning curve with Java Script?

Steep.

Steep.

By which I meant long and drawnout!



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.

The level of skills needed to do what Zero wants is easier to attain
in JS in my view, and the end result will be a better solution. If he
wanted to do multimedia websites, yes, he could and should learn
Flash, but he doesn't need it for this.

Yes, you're right, for this project. But I have a feeling that Flash and
Zero could be a match made in heaven. <g>

Oh yes. Imagine the fun he could have!

LOL!







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.


If he's fast, he's better off not bothering and going with handcoding.


<Shudder>

Again, it's a question of what works for you personally.

Coffeecup's editor does drag and drop coding if I recall correctly.

I'm not sure what that would be. C&Ping a bit of code is included in
"handcoding".




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.

Not always. You still need to check it.

I think we've already agreed on that. Dreamweaver writes nice, clean code.
Except those occasional times when things go wrong.

Most of the time, I think.

You think wrong.






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.


The bottom line is that if you don't know both the code AND JS, you're
going to be fucked at some point, and getting unfucked will probably
take you longer than just learning them in the first place would.

Yes, but for people like me, it's the mistakes and the unfucking that
actually teach me anything. Although I lose a lot of hair that way, too.

I suppose I just prefer to have some kind of handle on why I fucked up
so that I can avoid doing it again, rather than puzzling it out like a
sudoku.



Well, you'd have to have *some kind* of handle on it, else you wouldn't know
where to start to get fucked.






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.

You could write the pages and then load them into Frontpage to get the
same outcome, if you really wanted.





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.

Fucksake. This is what's irritating about Zero.

He's told it's IE only. He's told it's text only. But he insists that
it should work with images.

The logical reason it won't work with images is that images are not
text. HTH.

I think I said that somewhere. About text and images working differently.
Are you snipping? I can't believe it. You never snip. Or maybe that was an
edited comment that I'm remembering.


I don't usually snip unless I haven't read what I'm snipping. It's
probably an artefact of how I answer posts: I don't read them all and
then answer some. I read one and then answer it if I want to. Then
another, ditto, and so on.

Lord, who could read them all? I don't even have time to read all of yours
anymore.





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.

Arleen, it's way simple. Blink made text flash. It did it by
instructing the browser to make the text hidden and visible with a
(very) short delay. It didn't work with images because images are
separate from text in HTML. They are loaded separately and stored by
the browser separately.

You can make images blink if you really want to but you can't do it
with that tag. The script to do it would be easy to write, of course.

(I don't know much about animation, but I should think that you would
use another means than writing a script. An animated gif?)


Yes. My point was that I don't understand why text and images require
different ways of going about working with them, I just know that they do.
That that's the way it's set up.


Well, here's where understanding the principles would help you.

The principles I do know are working fine for what I need. And I know where
to look should that change.




[...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?

"Useful for what it does"? I'll say.

LOL! I'll take even CSS over messing with Access to make it do what I
want.

CSS is child's play.

Compared to Access as a whole, yes. But not with what I have to make Access
do.



I nearly had a nervous breakdown over that program when I first learned
it.
I'm proud of what I came up with in the end, but I have a love/hate
relationship with Access, especially when updates come out and they
require
I change something in my database interface.

Given the complexity of what a relational database can do, it's not
surprising they are a bit difficult to learn to a good level.

Yes, and that's just not my thing. How I ended up in a job that required I
know it is a mystery.


Let's face it. How you ended up in the life that has that job in it is
a mystery.
--

Dr Zen

I am kind enough to forget
injured pride, harsh words,
stupid things and remember
that we only have each other
between here and the void.
http://gollyg.blogspot.com
.

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