Flash 4

A simpler publishing process

Of course, creating your movie is only part of the story. For anyone to be able to actually see it on your site, you have to integrate it into your Web pages. Again, this used to be a nightmare involving hand coding the necessary object and embed tags and all their multiple parameters. With version 3 Macromedia included the separate Aftershock utility, which created the customised coding for you. With version 4 Macromedia has gone all the way and has integrated the necessary functionality into an entirely new Publish Settings dialog. By default this outputs both the Flash SWF file and its associated HTML, and offers dedicated tabs to control every aspect of each - from load order and audio compression, to movie size and alignment. To make things simpler, Flash 4 offers eight built-in templates that allow you to choose between the major viewing options, such as creating output for Java-based playback, or providing visitors with a choice between downloading the new player or viewing a static bitmap. For absolute control these templates can be fully customised.

As well as handling SWF and HTML, the Publish Settings dialog also offers a number of other file format choices, all of which can then be simultaneously output with a single Publish command. For each format that you select, another tab appears in the dialog so that selecting any of the bitmap formats (GIF, JPEG or PNG) enables full control over image optimisation and compression, but there's no preview or feedback on file size. In addition, you can output Flash 4 files as standalone projector EXEs in both PC and Mac format (though you'll have to run the latter through a file translator utility first).

It's the new support for the QuickTime 4 MOV format that's most impressive, however. This includes support for features such as alpha-channel transparency and QuickTime sound compression. More importantly, QuickTime 4 now supports the Flash format itself so that Flash movies can be incorporated as a layer within the video. This means that an existing video can be brought into Flash, and a semi-transparent layer of animation and control buttons can be added, and the combined result again published to MOV format. This ability to swap between bitmap video and vector animation and interactivity really does look to offer the best of both worlds in a single Web-friendly streaming format. Sadly, the QuickTime 4 application isn't bundled with Flash so you'll have to buy it separately.

There are some other disappointments when it comes to output. Flash 4's integration and simplification of the publishing process certainly makes life easy,æbut rather too easy. The default HTML template, Flash Only, simply creates a SWF version of your movie. If your visitors don't have the Flash player installed, they'll see nothing. It's crucial that you cater for this by outputting an alternative static GIF or JPEG or animated GIF and getting Flash to produce the necessary detection and handling routines. Flash 4 lets you do this but again it makes it more difficult than necessary. For instance, with Aftershock you could interactively preview the movie to choose alternative bitmaps, but with Flash 4 you have to set up frame labels in advance. Where Aftershock was honest about the complexities and helped you pick your way through them, Flash 4 pretends the process is easy and ends up making it more difficult as a result.

Of course, the publishing process is just as simple as Macromedia would have you believe, so long as your visitors already have the Flash player installed. That's why Macromedia makes so much of its installed user base. Thanks to over 150 million downloads from the Macromedia site and the bundling of the Flash player with the latest releases of both browsers and operating systems, an independent survey has recently claimed that 77 per cent of browsers can now view Flash content. As Macromedia points out, this means that Flash has greater market penetration than Java, Navigator or Explorer. With the decision to open up the source code of both the SWF format and now the Flash player, Macromedia clearly hopes to make Flash as universal a standard as GIF or JPEG.