Need Help in Determining the correct approach

[ratan203]

Hi,
I am thinking of building a standalone flash application for kids.
It will have questions and also have videos.
I need it to be versatile so that i can include more questions sets and videos in the future.
Could somebody guide me on the following:-
1> Can this application be build using flash?
2> Can this application have links through which the kids can see the videos and also take the question or tests.
3> is there any way to send the correct questions answered by the kids after completion through net.

Thanking a lot for the help.
Thanks
Major

[Northcode]

The answers to all of your questions are yes. The details will depend on how you want to implement them. If you are okay with using shared objects to hold questions and you keep all the videos online then it's all easily doable in Flash. If you want to store any content locally then you'll probably end up using a third party swf2exe tool to provide access to the hardware.

Here's a list of third party tools that you might want to check out...

SWF Studio http://www.northcode.com (my baby)
mProjector http://www.screentime.com
SWFKit http://www.swfkit.com
SWiSH Studio http://www.swishzone.com
Jugglor http://www.jugglor.com
Zinc http://www.multidmedia.com

All of the third party tools have trial versions. If you want to get a feel for each of the products the best thing to do is to download them and try them for yourself. When you download the trial, don't just fire up the UI, do something real with it. Build the examples and look at the example code. Pound on the product a bit, see what breaks (or doesn't).

Pick a simple but realistic project for yourself (like building a CD front end or something) and see how it goes with each product. Pick something that in a perfect world you could bang out in a day and plan to spend a week on it to get yourself over the initial learning curve. Most of these tools cover too much ground to just be absorbed by intuition. RTFM.

Most, if not all, of these tools also have online forums where you can interact with other users, ask for help, look at past problems and solutions and get a feel for the community. Definitely check out the forums, you'll probably be spending a lot of time in them. The forums are a big open window into the product and the company. See what kinds of problems people have or have had. Are the problems caused by the product (quality, doc, stability), by learning curves or other factors?

Finally, ask each company questions by forum, email or phone before you buy and see what kind of response you get. If you actually decide to try a little test project you'll probably have to ask for support at some point anyway, so you might as well give that a test drive too.

[ratan203]

Thanks alot for the detailed answer.
Please guide me what all possible problems can be faced if I keep the application as .swf only and do not convert to .exe?
I would like my app to work through a browser but without internet connection as my target audience might not have access to reliable internet all the time.
Also i would like the videos to be downloaded again due to unreliable internet connection.
I feel that the .exe can be copied to multiple computers, is there any way to avoid piracy with any of the tools?

Thanks
Ratan

[Northcode]

You're likely not going to be able to store the questions or videos as part of the EXE (or the SWF) so to avoid cheating and piracy you'll need some way to protect your content as well as your EXE file from copying. There are many ways to do this ranging from very simple to very complex. Which approach you take will depend on how critical it is to protect your application from your users (i.e. how tech savvy they are) and from pirates (i.e. how much of a target you are). Anything more you can tell me about your application will help me figure out what an appropriate level of protection might be.

Let's start with...

1. How much data are you going to be downloading?
2. How large are the videos?