[Resolved] Goodbye Generator & Director..?

you want to split text into individual shapes and manipulate them to do some text effects, but you need this text to be dynamic, for example entered by an user or queried from DB etc. you need generator.


Do you mean, that you can have broken apart text (vector shape) added by generator?

If you mean text on a shape, like letters moving, thats just as easy dynamic, you just have to make it load the sentence then do the norm (dice it up, make a movieclip for each letter, animate them ect..)

What do you mean about the charts?

Hi,

may I add slightly to skavish's point of view: you can make good use of some generator for many tasks

My favourite is ming - it is all code, and it comes with a full programming language (like php or perl) that you can use to create the dynamic content. There is an example - ostscript / eps conversion to swf at http://www.neuralust.com/~mingdocs for those interested. (Please dont tell me that flash can import eps - it refused to handle _these_ files) You can even have the programming language generate actionscript on the fly.

To comment on some of the points: customizing a movie, like adding text to an e-card, can be done with plain php or perl script
newsticker: unless you want the news to show up in nice text, a lain script could just retrieve the data and send them to a text file - I dont think generator does a good news digest on its own anyway
other image formats: imagemagick costs exactly 0.00
text effects: have a look at the vinyl cutter at http://www.fontimages.org.uk
Admittedly, generator might be best in the hands of designers

Musicman

Quote:

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Originally posted by grayczyk
...with a little brainpower & creativity, be done using Flash 5...

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Sorry for the confusion, I meant to write ...Just about everything can be done using Flash 5...

Quote:

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from http://www.flashpro.nl
Macromedia will be delivering a new set of solutions to make rich client application development with Macromedia Flash more flexible and powerful. As we move towards this vision, later this year we will transition from Macromedia Generator to this new product architecture and will provide a path for existing Macromedia Generator customers. In moving to this new generation of server products, we will be ceasing further feature development on Macromedia Generator, though we will continue to provide support and maintenance

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So, there is an end for Generator in sight...

yes but Flash MX doesn't use Actionscript as I understand. It uses true ECMAscript. I understand AS is based on it but they even say on the MM site that developers will have to throw out almost all they learned new in 5.

nope. it's actionscript . some things have changed, but only for certain objects/methods/etc.

"Macromedia Flash MX also supports industry standards such as ECMAScript"

DOH, I misread it, glad to hear it doesn't toss most of the new stuff

no, you can in fact write in F5 AS, it's backward compatible. you can save as F5 or FMX

Well no, I figured that, but I thought they changed the language. I love the new UI too. Now I gotta scrounge up another 199 for the upgrade. Do you know if it can interact directly with databases such as MySQL?

new UI? f5 is almost two years old!! I have a feeling MX is much better.
I've heard rumors about direct access to java objects, so you should be able to grab your DB straight up. better xml support. there just might be a way

MX has the new UI I was referring too. :D

I agree that Flash MX rocks, I was on the beta list and had a hard time keeping my mouth shut about features. However since it doesn't support real-time 3D it can't touch Director when it comes to 3D. For example look at this set of simple interactive 3D instructions we built.

http://www.forgefx.com/demos/swing-popup.htm

I never realised Director was so easy, I thought you HAD to know Lingo. Cool! Nice Work!!!