Wondershare Photo Gallery

It may take a couple of minutes for all 27 photos to load into the cylinder.
To view a photo, click on it to zoom in. Then click on the photo again to zoom back out again. Hold down the mouse and drag to rotate the cylinder around. We can also use the top right hand corner player buttons to advance through the pictures.

The above super cool 3D photo gallery was made using a $50 US application called "Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Deluxe".

A full overview of this product can be found at:
http://www.flash-gallery-software.com/flash-gallery.html#10113

The cylindical slideshow maker can be found at this web page:

http://www.ourpix.com/tutorial/3d-flash-photo-gallery.html#10113

It does a slideshow of our photos, and we can add background music as well.

Note that on our PWofICT Blog page we are limited to a 550 pixels wide display of the cylinder. However because it runs as a Flash.SWF file, it is fully scalable, and looks even better as a larger sized cylinder on a single web page.

Eg. Click on the following link to view a larger version of the cylinder gallery:

http://www.passyworld.com/passyHTMLs/WondershareGalleryCyl.html

Everyone should try this Wondershare software to see how easy it is to use.
The first step is to download and install the trial software from the above web page. When we start the application, we click "order later" and this will give us access to use the software for 30 days free of charge.

(However, as shown in the example at the end of this blog post, your photos will have the "Evaluation Copy" message placed on top of them).

There is a full set of instructions on how to use the software, at the following web page. The software is very quick and easy to use.

http://www.ourpix.com/tutorial/3d-flash-photo-gallery.html#10113

Basically it is a simple three step process:

• Browse to find your photos on your hard drive, and double click on each one to add it to the gallery maker.

• Choose a template (such as the 27 pics cylinder one)

• Publish an output SWF or HTML or EXE etc file.

Note that our published .SWF file of 27 photos ended up around 3 MB in size.

When we installed the software, we obtained some sample pictures in a folder at: C:\Program Files\Wondershare\Flash Gallery Factory\res\Samples

In this folder, the photos are all .jpgs that are 800x600 in size.

We therefore took our own selection of photos, and made them all 800x600 .JPG files using Adobe CS3 Photoshop. While we were in Photoshop, we also played around with filters and effects on a number of our pictures. This created some very nice "arty" results.

Wondershare Gallery has several types of different gallery layouts such as spheres, cubes, circles, and many others. This one below is called a "Wall" layout. (Because we did not have a set of 36 photos for the wall, some of our 27 photos are repeated on the wall.

There are two versions of Flash Gallery Factory: Standard and Deluxe.
Here at Passy World we are using the Deluxe version.
To see the differences go to this page:
http://www.flash-gallery-software.com/comparison.html

If you like what you have seen here, then you will definitely want to purchase your own copy of "Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Deluxe" by clicking the following link:
http://www.flash-gallery-software.com/purchase-flash-gallery.html


Here at Passy World we plan to use the WS Gallery software to create interesting visual displays of items for you throughout our blog posts in 2010.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Songsterr Online Guitar Tabs

Songsterr ( http://www.songsterr.com/ ) is a website offering the extraordinary online experience of hearing, playing, practicing, and learning guitar, bass, and singing. Songsterr provides a realistic guitar sound and gives you a full control over the playback - you can play at half speed, as well as repeatedly looping through sections until you can play them correctly.

When I first used it, it was allowing me to use the full set of functions including half-speed, looping, and printing. However after a week or so this free trial has cut out, and I can only use the player. I am not sure how this has happened, as I never signed up for a free trail. Maybe they enabled a free trial automatically by referencing my IP address each time I logged on. All I know is that it was significantly better being able to access this full functionality.

Here is a list of the functions, (which I no longer have), as they are only active for payed accounts (current charge is $9.90 U.S. per month):



The other strange thing about Songsterr is that it has an amazingly large library of Tabs, yet there does not seem to be very much information about it on the Internet. Maybe it is relatively new, or perhaps because we have to pay for most of its useful functions, it is not all that popular ?

The Songsterr Player provides drums, bass, all guitar parts (Note that lyrics and Vocals are not displayed, unless you go into the Mixer function and click them on).

Songsterr is actually many Tabs rolled into one. To isolate the Tab we want, we use "the mixer", where we can choose which Tab we wish to view.

Eg. Here is what the mixer setup for the Oasis song "Wonderwall" :



In the mixer we can choose to mute various instruments, we can also select which tab we want to display. In the pay version we can also adjust instrument volumes.

Here are example mixer selections from Songsterr's tab of Oasis "Wonderwall":












So we could in fact use Songsterr for learning Guitar or Bass or just for practicing Singing, and learning the vocals for lots of songs.

The only thing in the player I would like, is to have the options for the lyrics to display with any tab, because I usually keep track of where I am in a song by singing or listening to the words.


Here is a YouTube 4minutes 30 seconds video on how to use Songsterr:



Here is a 30 second YouTube video that demonstrates the Songsterr Half Speed function:



And finally a 2 minute YouTUbe video that shows Sonsterr playing Stairway to Heaven, and a few other songs:



I am still deciding whether or not to get pay Songsterr for a month, overlapping with some holidays, and do some intensive song learning. The alternative is to have a printed free tab from somewhere like 911 Tabs, and just use the Songsterr player to help learn the song off the 911 printed tab.

Nonetheless, Songsterr is certainly a very impressive use of Adobe Flash to make an extremely flexible and fully functional online tab player.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Matching Objects Game in Flash

The above matching game was made in Flash Actionscript 3.0 .
(Make sure you have your speakers turned on to hear the sound effects).

It was developed as a follow-on from an excellent tutorial found on the "Flash Classroom" website, and can be viewed at this link:
http://www.flashclassroom.com/docs/documents/444_dragdroptargetsflashcs3.pdf

The original game in the tutorial shows how to set up a game where we can match geometrical shapes to their sillouettes. This basic game comes out something like this:

The following is the Actionscript 3.0 Code that was used in these two games:

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.


Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “Matching Game AS3.0 Code”

If you would like to download a rar zip file of all of the resources for these two games, (Including the .FLA source files), then click the following link:

Click here for Zip file of Resources

If you struggled with the Flag Matching Game, then perhaps this very short YouTube video will help you learn your World War II history a bit better.



A classic piece of Animated story telling right there for sure.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

A Very Flash Matching Game

(Make sure sound is turned on while doing the above puzzle).

The above was made by following an excellent tutorial on how to make a matching / puzzle game located at:

http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Flash_drag_and_drop_tutorial

It goes through step by step how to make a matching game in Flash, using Actionscript 3.0.

Also supplied are examples of the finished item each time, as well as the facility to download the source files for the tutorial.

At the heart of this game is the Flash "Dictionary Class" which is a means of making an array (or matrix) of as many related pairs of items as we need.

If you want to find out more about the "Dictionary Class" then click the following link: Information about the Dictionary Class

The nice thing about the Dictionary Class is it makes it very easy to make another game, simply by changing the dictionary entries and source pictures.
For example, here is a similar game about Australian football team mascots:

I thought that Adobe Fireworks was supposed to be Flash's "best friend", but this is not always the case. Eg. when I obtained an image from the internet, resized it in Fireworks to be 80 pixels tall, and saved it as a .png file type; there were problems. It could be imported, made to move around, but refused to match up with the text box I had set for it in the "Dictionary" part of the Actionscript code. The only way I could find to overcome this was to save the file as a .GIF type after resizing it. GIF files import to Flash, convert to Movie Clips, and function 100% ok in the matching game. (Note that .JPG files work fine as well).

So to bring images into Flash when building the Matching Game, the steps are:

1) Find an image on the internet and save it to our PC.

2) Load the image into Photoshop or Fireworks or GIMP, and resize it proportionally to be between 80 and 100 bytes tall. Save the image as a .GIF file type.

3) In Flash (with the matching game loaded in), do File > Import > Import to Stage then browse navigate to open and bring in the GIF file.

4) In Flash right click the selected image, and do Modify > Convert to Symbol
and make it a Movie Clip type, with the registration point as usual top left hand corner, and give it a meaningful name.

5) Very important to now type in an instance name, in the bottom left hand corner of the Properties panel, straight under where it says "Movie Clip". This instance name has to exactly match the name that is used in step 6.

6) With frame 1 selected on the timeline, press F9 to access the "Actions" (or do Window > Actions) and edit the top section of code to map the instance name from step 5, to the appropriate dynamic text box name. This is basically adding the required entry to the "Dictionary" we are using to drive this game.


These types of matching games would be great for Language teachers to use for vocabulary practice.

Maths teachers could make Geometry puzzle games about Triangle or Quadrilateral types, or Angle types, or Perpendicular versus Parallel and so on.

Science teachers could make puzzles about matching Animals to their family type, or rocks to igneous, sedimentary, etc types, and so on.

If you would like to download the source .FLA files for the two games used in this Blog Post, then click the link below:

Click here to download a .RAR file of resources.

Stay tuned for an upcoming "Part 2" post about Flash matching.
This will involve matching pairs of pictures to each other, rather than a picture to a text box.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Flash Bunnies Movies Parody

Click the above picture to watch a 30 second parody of the James Bond genre of movies.

The "Flash Bunnies" star in a set of movie parodies, and have even won prestigious "Webby Awards".

There are many well known movies to choose from, and all are delightfully re-enacted by "bunny" like characters in a tight 30 second timeframe.



plus many others, with new movies constantly being added.

The full set of Bunnies Movies can be found and viewed at the "Angry Alien" home page located at: http://www.angryalien.com .

May I suggest that you visit this page and watch a few of these amazing feats of flash, and who knows, you may even get a good laugh or two.

Enjoy,
Big Bunny Passy Wasabi

MJW's Flash AS 3.0 Avoider Game

The Michael James Williams Avoider Game was built from a multi-part set of Tutorials that start on this webpage:

http://avoidergame.com/category/base-tutorials/page/2/

and continue to a conclusion at the top of this page:

http://avoidergame.com/category/base-tutorials/

The tutorials run down the page from final part to beginner part, and so we have to go to the very bottom of page 2 to get to the very first tutorial.

We have to be careful when going through the listed Tutorials, because some are written in the old Actionscript 2.0, and the others are the latest Actionscript 3.0 (AS3) tutorials.

There is a page that has a master index of all the AS 3.0 steps at:

http://gamedev.michaeljameswilliams.com/2008/09/17/avoider-game-tutorial-1/

and I suggest that people use this page to access the tutorials and build the game.


The game being reviewed here was developed in Adobe Flash Actionscript 3.0 and Michael does a great job of building the game up step by step with brilliantly detailed instructions and explanations.

In total there are 12 tutorials that sequentially build up the full game in AS 3.0 :

AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 1: Basic Set Up
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 2: Multiple Smiling Enemies
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 3: Game Over
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 4: Menus and Buttons
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 5: A Score and a Clock
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 6: Several Small Improvements
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 7: Keyboard Control
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 8: Adding a Preloader
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 9: Music and Sound Effects
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 10: Multiple Levels
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 11: Saving and Loading
AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial, Part 12: Garbage Collection

Doing these tutorials is a great fun way to learn ActionScript 3.0.

In the "Alien Game" at the start of this Blog post, we have only completed parts 1 to 6 of the above Tutorials, due to time constraints.

(Eg. Have to eat sleep work play guitar, and do other stuff as well).

Sometime later on it would be fun to add the other parts to the game, especially bonus objects (like coins or jewels) that the green alien could bump into and collect to earn extra game points. Levels and Lives would also be great.

The instructions on the MJW website are fully detailed, and he has a nice copy to clipboard feature on all of the code snippets which saves a lot of typing time.

He also has downloadable zip files for each part, so that when things are not working, we can download his AS 3.0 Class files, and compare them line by line with our own code.

If you would like to download the .FLA Source file, as well as all of the AS 3.0 class files for the Passy World version of the game, then click the link below:

Click Here to Download .RAR file of Source Code from Passy World

There is another page, where we can play amazing variations of his Avoider Game that people have developed, such as a great game called "Robot Saga: Escape". These games can be found and played online at the Avoider Game homepage at: http://avoidergame.com/ .

Michael James Williams is definitely one of the flashest game programming teachers to be found on the Net.

Passy World rates his tutorials as 12/10 !

So stop avoiding Actionscript 3.0, and get right into it !

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Flash Frame by Frame Animation

Wouldn't it be great to see the next few frames for the above action event.
Who actually ends up in the water ?

The following Frame by Frame Animations were done in Flash CS3 using images from the web. I made a couple of them, but mostly they were made by my students.

This blog post may take a few minutes to complete loading in.

Some of the animations have small glitches where the background jumps out of position during the movie. I should have told the students to check the x and y coordinate values of the background image on every frame of their animation. As long as these x and y coordinates remain constant, the background should not move.

A bit of a strange cricketing sequence of events in this one:





Is this Alien lost, or just getting dizzy ?





One of those classic Plane vs Bird Movies:





Beauty and the Beast busy practicing for the latest dance competition:





A classic "Dukes of Hazard" car jump that one of my students made.







Here is Bart Simpson Skating it up, just as he always does.



Here are some Instructions on how to do Frame by Frame animations in Flash, including using Onion-skinning. These instructions will enable you to make a basic Bart Simpson skateboarding flash movie.

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “Bart Skateboarding” PDF

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Flashing Your Message Out There

The above flashing message was made by using some basic frame by frame animation in Flash.

A good message to make is to simply make your own name flashing.
Or perhaps you might get a picture of your favourite sports team, exotic car, music group, or celebrity, and add a flashing message over the top of the image.

If we change the colour of the text in each frame, then we can get rapid bursts of colour as the message unrolls across the screen. This creates a bright rapid flashing light effect: like those bogus "You're today's Winner" advertisements, that are often found on commercial internet web sites.

Students love writing their name in flashing letters like this, although I must admit that I find all of it a bit too bright and demanding on the eyes.
(Must be a GenX versus GenY thing I guess).

If a student doesn't want to make the flashing colours part of the animation, then do not force them to do it. They can make uni-colour rolling text, and that would be fine for practicing frame by frame animation.

The PDF document below gives detailed step by step instructions on how to make a flashing message using Adobe Flash CS3.

If you would like to open or download a full size copy of these instructions,then click the link below.

Click here to open or save the “How to Make a Flash Message” PDF

So why not make your own very flashy message to the world.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Graffiti Creator - Online Text Art

Don't worry folks, Passy hasn't gone ferral and started tagging public property with damaging graffiti. It was all done in Adobe Photoshop, with a little bit of help from a neat online tool called "Graffitti Creator" to make the spray on text.

Graffitti Creator is a great free program, built in Flash, that enables users to make fabulous artistic text images like these:


Simply type in a word and out comes a designed font of your text.
This can then be modified using all kinds of artistic effects, and RBG (red blue green) color mixing. We can thereby enhance our logotype and make it really special and unique.



The site is located at: http://www.graffiticreator.net and the PDF document below gives a full set of instructions on how to use the application.

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.


Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “How to Graffiti Creator” PDF

Note that the text length of a Graffiti item is limited to a maximum of 14 characters.

Unfortunately, there is no way to save our finished image, or its settings, on the Graffiti Creator website.

What we have to do is “PrintScreen” the image into Paint or Adobe Fireworks or Photoshop, and then save it there.

We can also get very "Flashy" with our text image, as shown below.

Eg. Import the image into a new blank ActionSript 3.0 file. Make the image very small using the scale tool. Then use F6 key to copy this first keyframe 9 more times. In each frame make the image get gradually larger, (using the "Free Transform" tool), and have it full size in the last 3 frames.



Here are the terms and Conditions of Use from the website.
(As we would expect, it is for private non-profit personal use only).



Now kids, this is one that you should try at home! (But no going out and painting the town for real, because that's low-mentality, illegal, and mindless vandalism).

You wouldn't want someone painting all over your stuff, so don't go doing it to other people's property.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

P.S. Looks like I have a problem spelling Graffiti with an extra "T" now and then, must be because I am thinking about the cup of tea I am off to have right now :)

Actionscript 3.0 Soccer Game

Use the Mouse to move the lad, and make him kick or head-hit the ball.
Kicks deflect to the left, Headers deflect to the right.
If the ball hits the bottom of the screen, a life is lost. There are three lives.
There are 3 levels of soccer goal scoring to get through to win the game and "beat the computer".

There are a few issues with this online version of the Flash game:

1) We need to do refresh or reload inbetween restarts of the game, or the levels stop working.

2) The ball can get stuck going vertically up and down in the left or right boundaries of the screen. The only way to end this is to move the player away, and sacrifice lives until the game ends itself as a loss.

(Although this is not all bad. After all, it does add a suprise element to the game, via the random occurrence of this unlucky event.)

3) If we do not refresh the blog page between new games, all sorts of strange things happen with the levels, and sometimes the ball starts going faster and faster (to disaster !) as the game progresses.

These issues do not seem to occur on the SWF file when it is played locally on the PC here at home. If someone knows how to fix the online issues, I would be delighted to be enlightened.

This game is actually a "Paddle Ball" game, called "Break the Bricks" that I have changed into a soccer game.

The original Paddle Ball game was built by following the excellent multipart AS 3.0 tutorial at the "Mr Sun" Flash website:
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/mr-sun-studios

The following PDF document gives a detailed review of the build with quite a few extra hints and ideas. It also explains how Mr Sun's Paddle Ball game was converted into this Soccer Game. Also included is a step by step guide on how to put the finished Flash Game onto a website or Blog.

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “Build the Soccer Game” PDF


The following additional PDF provides a full listing of all of the Actionscript code that was used to make the Soccer Game:

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save “Soccer Game AS 3.0 Code” PDF

CREDITS:

Nearly all of the AS 3.0 code contained in this game came from Mr Sun’s excellent tutorial on making the “Brick Breaker” game, which can be found at this website:
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/mr-sun-studios

I have merely put his code together and added a few changes and extra comments and explanations along the way.

Kenny Sun is the one who deserves the credit for the overall game structure and coding. His Blog is great for learning how to make Actionscript Games.
Do yourself a favor and check it out sometime soon !

Hopefully one day, if we keep doing enough tutorials, we will be able to design games, and write the complete Actionscript code ourselves :)

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

"Robo Chess" Online Chess Game

Play more free flash games at Multigames.com

This is a fun little free Flash game of Chess made by Start Games.

Click the "Play" button to start the game. (Takes a while to load in).

Make sure your speakers are switched on to hear the very informative comments from the Robot.

Note : To "castle": Click the king once first and then click on the rook !

What I like best about the game animation is moving the mouse around the Robot's head, and seeing his eyes follow it in a very human-like manner.

What I like second best is how the Robot just says a simple "Oh No !", when you get him into check mate.

Drawbacks to the game are that the Robot makes his moves very fast, and we cannot see all of our lost pieces stacked up at the side of the board as we play.

There are several other embeddable chess games at: http://www.multigames.com .

But you do not need to CHECK out these MATE, because currently Robo Chess is the highest ranked favorite. :)

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Note: "Robo Chess" is fairly easy to win against, and does not have favorable reviews everywhere on the web. If you are after a more serious challenge then you should probably check out this site:
http://www.expert-chess-strategies.com/
and play some of the Java Chess games there.

Another site with a very good multi-level Chess game that I recommend for players of all abilities is at: http://www.mathsisfun.com/games/chess.html.

Flash SWFs Slide Show in AS 3.0

Playing above is a set of “Car Driving” Animations that my students made.

Unfortunately there is sometimes a glitch when the slide show plays through the first time. As you may see above, it sometimes plays "one and a bit" of the movie, then does a wobbly jump to the next movie. This glitch does not occur when the Flash slide show is ran locally on a stand alone computer, and it stops occurring when the slides go through for their second and third times etc.

The first time through, this Blog page has to download the movies from the internet, and this probably causes the delay glitch. However, second time through, the browser is probably getting the images from the temp files on the user's hard drive, and so faster load speed, and no delay glitches.
(If I ever find out how to remove the glitch, I will go back and modify this blog page. Maybe I don't have my Browser buffering set up properly ?).

The main reason I needed to make a slide show was to be able to present some student work at an open day and/or school assembly. And running stand alone on my laptop, it works just fine with never a jumpy glitch. :)

In fact, I had been wondering for quite a while how to make a set of individual Flash SWF files into an automated slideshow.

The answer to these ponderings was found at the “Flash and Math” website, in their “External Clips in Flash CS3” tutorial. This tutorial goes through step-by-step, how to create a FLA project that uses Action Script 3.0 code that runs several SWF files one after each other.

The resulting SWF provides a looping slide show of our SWF files.

The component SWF files that are in the Slide Show, need to be ActionScript 3.0 SWF files that play in a continuous loop, and do not themselves contain any Actionscript.

The tutorial for making the Slide Show is in two parts, at these Web addresses:

http://www.flashandmath.com/intermediate/externalclips/ext_clip1.html

http://www.flashandmath.com/intermediate/externalclips/ext_clip2.html

(There are also some further Parts 3 and 4 tutorials, but these are on how to control FLV video files using Actionscript, and not about SWF files.)

The Parts 1 and 2 web pages also have downloadable finished “FLA” files.

So if you just need to animate some SWF files, (and don’t have time to learn the ActionScript code), then download their finished FLA file, and rename your SWF files to clip0.swf, clip1.swf, and clip2.swf. Then make sure these files are located in the same directory as the downloaded FLA file.

The “Car Driving” animations that the students made, were developed by following an excellent set of instructions by Denise Etheridge, located at: http://www.baycongroup.com/flash/01_flash_5_tutorial.htm

The PDF document below, gives full instructions and details about setting up a Flash Slide Show of SWF files. It also includes how to put the end product onto the web in a blog page.

If you would like to have your own copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the PDF by clicking the link below:
(Click the Browser's Back Button to return to this Blog).

Click here to open or save the PDF

Enjoy, Big Passy Wasabi

Making a Jigsaw Puzzle in Flash

To do the above Jigsaw Puzzle use the mouse to click on a piece, and keep the mouse button held down. Move the piece to a new location, and then release the mouse button to drop it into position.

If all goes well, then the final puzzle should finish up like this:

Making a Jigsaw Puzzle is an excellent introduction to Actionscript 2.0 for people that have never used this feature of Flash.

I use this activity with beginners to Flash, to show them how we can bring what the mouse is doing, into our actual Flash project, and we do this by writing script.

The other great thing about the activity, is that the people doing it choose their own picture to use for making the puzzle, and this gives them greater enthusiasm and ownership of the learning task.

The following is a viewable embedded PDF of detailed instructions on how to make a puzzle like this. Unfortunately, the PDF is over 1 meg in size, and so takes a while to load in.

The other limitation is that due to blogger column width limitations, we can only have the PDF viewing window a maximum width of 550 pixels.
(I have widened my blog from 400 to 550, there is a separate post on this).

If you would like to have your own copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the PDF

If you are wondering how we make a viewable and scrollable PDF within a blog, (or any web page), then click on the image below.



I found out how to do this by "Googling", and it involves using an "iframe". It works much better on normal web pages, where the width of the iframe can be set to 800 pixels, so that the PDF is near normal size.

Enjoy,

Big Passy Wasabi

Inserting a Flash SWF into a Blogger Post

Maybe you are wondering exactly how the above Flash SWF animation file was embedded into this blog post.

Well it was done by editing the HTML of the post, to have an embedded flash object contained in it. This was done by typing in the following html:


(Click the above image to see it full size and read the text. )

The big potential drawback is that you need to have your swf file on a website somewhere that you can make a link to from within your blog html. My "beauty_beast" swf file is on an old unused website I have at: http://www.passyworld.com/.

If you do not have a website to use, you might be able to make a free one at somewhere like: http://sites.google.com/, http://geocities.yahoo.com/http://www.spaces.live.com/, or http://www.justfree.com/
Possibly you can then upload an swf file to the freesite, and then link to it from within a blog.

If anyone tries out a free site and loads up an swf for linkage, let me know if it works out ok. I will also place it on my list of things to do sometime in 2009.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

The Wonders of OpenOffice.org

Open Office is great if you have Powerpoint Presentations, and you want to convert them into Flash SWF's that can be added to a web page.

Open Office is free and can be downloaded from here:
Click Here for Open Office Download Page

To convert a Powerpoint presentation, click on "Presentation" on the Open Office welcome screen. It is then a matter of browsing to your powerpoint and opening it up in Open Office :



This should bring the PPT into the presentation editor. To make the Flash SWF, all we have to do is do File > Export > (name of our file) and then change the "file format" output type from the default .xpm to Flash .swf, simply by clicking the drop down list of format types.

We will then have a SWF file produced like this one here:
(Click on the current slide below to advance to next slide).



The only drawback is that in the Flash version, we do not have all the slide transition effects of the original PowerPoint.

If you would like to download a copy of the above PowerPoint presentation, (in MS PPT 2003 format) then click the link below:
View the above "Fireworks" Presentation in PPT

If you would like to download a copy of the above Powerpoint presentation, (in Adobe PDF format) then click the link below:
View the PowerPoint Presentation as a PDF

If you are wondering how we inserted the SWF flash file into a blog; well that sounds like a good idea for my next post.


Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi