Flash Search being Enabled by Google, Yahoo
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July 1st, 2008
Datis Design Weblog
Designing for Communicating
In a major step forward in search technology, Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files searchable in online search. The project will enable searches on Flash content to return text and links, which can then be indexed, and hence available in search results for the users. Content from a Flash application or even a game or advertisement will be available to search engines, reports InfoWorld. Pages containing a Flash .SWF file will be returned in a search. Google has already implemented this, while Yahoo, ever the laggard, will enable Flash search in a future version, whenever that comes out.
As for images and video, no luck yet. From Google’s own description: "If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements."
Source : Neowin
Adobe Systems Inc. today rolled out a beta version of its Adobe Flash Player 10 (formerly called Astro) browser plug-in, which adds features to help designers and developers create special effects and cinematic Web experiences.
The new offering adds support for custom filters and effects created using Adobe’s Pixel Bender tool kit, Adobe said. The Pixel Bender technology is used in the company’s After Effects CS3 tool, which creates motion graphics and visual effects for film and broadcast.
"We’re doing things that really change the game of what’s possible on the Internet," said Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager of Flash Player. "The community now has the ability to upgrade the capabilities of the player and create new types of effects and cinematic experiences that are not available with any other browser plug-in."
The beta version of the player also includes native 3-D transformation and animation capabilities, an extensible rich-text layout, and graphics processing unit hardware acceleration, he added.
The new support for 3-D is "really 3-D for the rest of us," Barclay noted. "It allows people to take what they know in the 2-D world and transform it into 3-D. It’s native so the performance is very fast, and it will not result in larger file sizes."
New bit-rate streaming for video links between the Flash Player and intended future releases of Adobe’s Flash Media Server will automatically adjust video quality as bandwidth changes without having to rebuffer, the company said. "This will provide a seamless playback experience with no starting or stopping of video waiting for the stream to catch up," Barclay said.
In addition, a new text engine in Flash Player 10 allows designers and developers to have more creative control over device font attributes such as rotation and style, Adobe said. The new version also adds more text layouts, like vertical and bidirectional, which support the creation of rich Internet applications like interactive e-books and online publications in additional languages, Barclay added.
The beta version of Adobe Flash Player 10 runs on the Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. The Adobe Pixel Bender Exchange is available for beta users to create custom effects for the Flash Player, according to the company.
The general release of Flash Player 10 is expected later this year.
Source : Computerworld.com
As I said before, Validating a web site is an important step in web designing. But when we want to put Flash contents in our web site, validation will be failed. There are some ways to prevent this error, the method I suggest is to use UFO object.
First download UFO from this link.
Next step is to create a new (X)HTML document. Create a placeholder and give it an unique ID. Look at this code :
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>UFO Test Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="ufo">
<p>Place Flash Content Here</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>In next step we should link the UFO script to our page, please note that the address of the UFO script is right :
<script src="ufo.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Then we should create an object for each of our Flash contents, look at this code :
<script type="text/javascript">
var FO = { movie:"swf/myMovie.swf", width:"300", height:"120",
majorversion:"6", build:"40" };
</script> In next step we should call UFO for each of Flash objects, we use the unique ID that we create in first step in our (X)HTML document :
UFO.create(FO, "ufo");We put this code at the end of our script code.
Final Code :
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>UFO Test Document</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ufo.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var FO = { movie:"swf/myMovie.swf", width:"300", height:"120",
majorversion:"6", build:"40" };
UFO.create(FO, "ufo");
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="ufo">
<p>Place Flash Content Here</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>Usually you need only these parameters that I used in this code. movie parameter get the address of your swf file, width and height parameters get the dimension of your document, majorversion and build parameters get the version of your swf file. There are other optional parameters which you can see in the UFO website. Please note that the programmers of this script wont continue this project, maybe you like to try other scripts, SWFObject is another method for placing Flash files in your document.
In this tutorial I am going to tell you how can you make some nice growing effects with Adobe Flash, like this flash header that I created for IranScandinavia.
Open Flash and make a new document, import some graphic into Flash, for example I am using some plant to show them growing.
