At its most basic level, this area is where I hope to offer my low-tech Frontier solutions. The offerings at the download area are slim pickings right now, but I hope to spruce that up a bit later on. I got a little inspired to make some Frontier-centric graphics, which I describe in my Graphic Inspirations page. Browse around, take a look, and tell me what you think.

3 January 1997 Frontier and Flash I am starting to see quite a few sites use Macromedia's Shockwave Flash files as embedded graphics. When FreeHand, my favored vector illustration tool, gained the ability to export graphics in this format, I decided to check it out. There are still problems with Flash, but for the most part, it is a potentially useful addition to a webmaster's arsenal. There are a lot of things to like about Flash. The vector format makes for very compact file sizes, even if they are quite large in the physical dimensions. Once the shapes and paths are defined, the issue of screen resolution is moot. Font faces are embedded, so one can for once start using all sorts of exotic font faces as part of the design, and not worry about them coming out jaggy. I like the fact that the players are crossplatform and compact; the downloads are painless, and they seem to install without much of a problem. But Flash seems to be first a designer's tool; the ability to assign URLs to specific shapes (but not to text boxes, I noticed) seems like an afterthought. At first, I thought that if one embeds URLs in Flash files, it will make it rather difficult to index, and that lessened their appeal to me. But now I realize that there are certain pieces of information that I would like to be able to share with people, and not necessarily to 'bots (which sometimes don't bother to check the robots.txt exclusion file). By embedding the URL in the Flash file, they become accessible to humans while leaving out the automated indexers. Hot damn. That's why I put my mailto links in the Flash file of the Feedback page, it foils address trawlers. Now, for the Frontier part. I wanted Frontier to be able to manage my Flash files much in the same way as it already does my GIFs and JPEGs when rendering web pages. So, I cobbled together a little macro (available for "Download") which does just that. When I write: mediaRef ("bottombar", width:"400", height:"90") I get: cool, huh? If you cmd-click (Mac) or right-click on the image, you can zoom in. There are a couple of difficulties I encountered writing this macro. One is that FreeHand exports Flash files with a Type code of TEXT (for Windows users, on the Mac, each file is assigned two invisible codes, the Type code, which gives the OS a clue as to the nature of the file, and the Creator code, which is linked to the program that created it. These codes are 4 letters long, and are kind of like the 3 letter extension system that Win32 uses, only a bit more robust). This is a problem when Frontier tries to load the file using the WEB>Load Image File... menu item; it tries to read it in as a text file! So, using the Finder scripting menu, I batch convert each file to a Type code of ShWF (I made it up). Then Frontier will load it in as binary file, correctly. It is also the basis of how mediaRef knows to assign the .swf extension. How does Frontier/Win figure out the Type of file? Exclusively through the 3 letter extension? I'd appreciate knowing that, because it looked like ImageRef, on which this code is based on, relies heavily on the Mac Type codes to assign type to a loaded binary file. Problem with Flash: they misbehave in layers! I am experimenting with layers as supported in the v4 browsers, using either CSSP or the <Layers> tag, and I find that Flash files seem to display on the top, even though they are on a layer at the bottom. This puts a real damper on my goal, which is to use Flash as a means of displaying large background graphics with minimal download time. All comments on this are greatly appreciated. Let's discuss!

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