My (not so) Flashy Flash

Well I didnt have time to be creative with these exercises but I did manage to do some basic stuff in Flash CS3 Professional. Hopefully I'll get more familiar with it before my 30 day trial is up.

You can see them following the links below:

• Animated Shapes
• Scrolling Text
• Button with Link to a Website
• Colour Changing Text
• Shape Morphing into Another Shape
• Shape in Motion
• A Very Basic Banner
• Text with Scroll Bar
• Animated Text

The banner is not doing exactly what I wanted so I'll keep playing with it.

When I used the Publish option in Flash, the html it produced presents me with the alert "This page requires AC_RunActiveContent.js" (where do I get it?) but the cookie cutter code as per Tizag Tutorial works fine so I modified and used that instead.

KruMPinIT

JavaScript Challenges


I love doing these exercises! Its taken me a while but I'm actually starting to feel comfortable with this stuff - and I like it!! I'll be going back to my Contact Form soon and pimping it out with all my newly acquired skills... Its gonna be da bomb lol.

Ok... enough excitement... I've completed four challenges so far and my stuff works so check it out below:

Challenge 1 - Peekaboo Elements - Hiding/Showing Elements
Challenge 2 - 'Same as Above' Postal Address Boxes - with Disable and Enable
Challenge 3 - Radio Buttons and Check Boxes - Making sure a selection has been made
Challenge 4 - Better Input Validation - In-line error messages instead of Pop-up alerts

Cheers

WooHoo!

JavaScript

Finally! my Contact Form is working with only one pop-up at the end. Now I want to get the email address checked for illegal characters and maybe have the error messages show beside the form elements rather than have a pop-up at all. I might even keep playing with it to get a valid length and illegal characters for the username and a password etc... help meeee :)

Sites I admire:

Hmm... well I had a look around the TAFE site and I have to say I really admire Rany's page! Well done Rany .. I love your gradients and i really like the 'cleanness' of your profile page in particular .. you've done so well in such a short time .. I now have no defense at all for my lame first attempts lol.

I also had a look what the Digital Media students have been up to. Gavin Woodhouse's site is great. Appears very artistic to me. The colors he used for his navigation buttons look really impressive on each of the different coloured backgrounds .. simple and clean design .. I like it a lot.

Ok.. so I didnt give up...

Having already completed the assignment for the Black Square Problem last year, I decided to present it as a JavaScript gallery as suggested anyway. The thing I learned from this exercise was how good it is to cut and paste scripts :) hmmm but seriously I searched and located a number of scripts for the slideshow and this was the one I was most comfortable with as far as my understanding of variables and functions. It was easy enough to edit the array and I can see how it all works. I obtained this script from CodeLifter.com.

You can see my flowchart that represents my design of the 'web application' exercise here. I hope this is right coz, as usual, it took me a while to get my head around it but I made it look pretty at least.

WooHoo... Check out my Login Form here! So simple when you know how. Thank you so much for the blow-by-blow analysis... some blondes really need you to talk slowly like this lol and I must say I finally feel motivated again and a little more confident to have another go at my Contact Form. Hopefully it will be working like a dream by next blog.

I didnt go to the web pages that suck site coz my own pages suck enough so I will tell you the thing I hate most about Hell Aint Cool is the large, comic font I used for starters. I also hate the background pattern and colour on the link buttons. Maybe plain red text would look better. I like my background and I kinda like my lil fiery devil guy coz he's a cool animation but I hate the animated heading now ... less is more as they say. Anyway, basically the whole design of this site sucks big time and I intend to fix it good when I can.

As for The Ploughman ... well I hate the ugly background and the uglierrr buttons on this site as well. I like the font but its hard to read with the colours. I can improve this site a lot too if only I had the tiiiime. Both these sites definitely show a lack of design intelligence but in defense of myself I'm thinking they were an ok attempt for self-taught basic html.

I'm out of time. Will have to comment on sites I admire in another blog - and they wont be mine lol.
Cheers.

GeTtiN' ovEr a DoUbLE edGed TaNtY

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning
---Rich Cook

Didnt do much at all this week but did manage to change my index links, create a link to the Creative Commons licence for my video sequence, and linked back to all the pics and music used giving attribution to the owners and creators of the original images etc.

Also, while in my bad mood, I've gone out and purchased a shit load of text books, the first of which I highly recommend - How to do Everything with Javascript by Scott Duffy - wow - I'm reading it from cover to cover (who the hell reads a text book from cover to cover??)

Anyway, I can hardly put it down. Its very well written and is really giving me a better
understanding of the terminology and the program flow. At a quick glance, it looks like it has some good stuff on the DOM too.

Image : Rachel Sian : "Reading"

The other two books that make up my Alphabet Soup Library are HTML, XHTML & CSS by Elizabeth Castro and PHP5/MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Andy Harris - they look like they're gonna be a great permanent reference too. You gotta love a hard copy resource - I know I do!

This is waffle... maybe next week will be better...

I giVe uP !! *%^#$!

Image : Sharlene : "iGiveUp" :P

A Better Week Than the Last One

I am pleased to inform I not only brushed up on some css and got my new index page made, I also kinda validated my Contact Form. I say kinda because I'm sure there's a better way, and I'm sure I'll hear about it :)

I havent uploaded the new index yet because I'm too tired to change all the links, but this is what it will look like.

Back to the javascript form.... I want to have the whole thing validate in one foul swoop and/or have the fields that are not valid change colour with the error message alongside. I'm very confused about all the different ways you can write javascript and have gotten myself quite overwhelmed.

I think I was supposed to start on 3755G - Apply a Web Authoring Tool as well this week, but that hasn't happened yet. I will be using Dreamweaver for this module - I hope I get to like it but at the moment it seems a lot easier to keep manually coding in an editor.

So... two blogs this week coz I was slack and had none last week. Cheers.