BP12_Learning_Flash

            It was finally time for me to check what Adobe Flash was all about. Over the last couple months, I have been in the process of switching career tracks to the learning or to be more specific eLearning industry.  I kept running into Flash at various occasions. I serve as the Director of Products at Keelworks, a non profit that creates eLearning programs for potential school dropouts and the founder of this organization is an expert on Flash. While researching the eLearning industry, I've across the terms "Flash designer", "Flash animator", "Flash Developer" and "Action Script" more times than I can remember. Recently Full Sail's online student portal displayed a link to Steve Jobs's thoughts-on-flash.  He did not extoll its virtues, but laid out as plainly as he could why Apple iPhones and iPads did not support Flash. His piece was excellent because it was easy to read due to good structure, logical and used very simple language to convey the point. All the above, including the fact that next month I will be studying Flash in my Digital Assets in Education(DAE) course, were signs that I needed to get started with Flash.
           
 Lynda.com was my chosen means to learn Flash. This was my first experience with a video based course. It was recommended that I start with "Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Essential Training". However, given my complete lack of experience with Flash and my innate curiosity, I chose to start with "Getting Started with Flash CS4", which is a pre-requisite to "Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Essential Training . If you just watch the videos, the entire training runs for 49 minutes. The training is broken up into 18 small videos, from 1 minute to 7 minutes long, which makes it easier on the mind, eyes and ears. I decided on a strategy to go over all the videos first as a passive learner and go over them again as an active learner, performing the same actions on my Adobe Flash CS5 software, as was shown on the video. Though this took more time, I was more satisfied with this approach and the fact that Lynda.com allows you to re-visit the videos as many times as you like.


           The "Getting Started with Flash CS4" training covers Flash File types, Art (drawing, symbols), Multimedia(graphics, music and video), Animations (shape tweens, motion tweens, bones and motion presets), a bit of Action Scripting and publishing on the web. I must mention, the lesson on Animation was the one that needed the most attention. There were new terms such as layers, keyframes and motion presets that took time to understand.  The training's overall purpose was to expose the student to how Flash can be used to create animations, morphing and multimedia. 


           As I go ahead with my Flash study plan, two thoughts come to my mind. One of Steve Job's comments on thoughts-on-flash was that Flash was a number one reason for Mac crashes. Being a new convert to Mac, hearing this does not make me very happy. The other is that the  most popular hand held devices such as the iphone and other smart phone, do not use Flash. It makes me wonder about the longevity of Flash.