Sunday, March 11, 2007
Lab 4 - Macromedia Flash - Part II
http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/NewElections.html
The link to the map is listed above. I had difficulties with a couple of things during this lab:
(1) I created a cool neatline and caret but when I went to publish, Flash told me that the viewer version didn't support the enhanced features even though it allows you to actually create the graphics on the screen; so, it published as just black. I ended up having to create less cool versions of the neatline and caret just to get the thing to publish what was actually on the screen. Kind of a cheesy bait and switch mentality on the part of the program...I'm sure my beloved Illustrator would not be so lacking in integrity.
(2) Because I used the boundary layer that required using the paint bucket rather than the fill tool, I ran into an odd problem. I was working with color schemes that had radial gradients. Apparently with the paint bucket, the center of the radial gradient is not placed at the center of the area to be filled but rather where the paint bucket touches the area. As a result, I got a flickering effect between years due to having touched the bucket to different parts of the states each time I colored them. It took some doing to minimize this through trial and error. I don't think the fill tool works that way...it just puts the center of the radial gradient in the center of the polygon being colored.
(3) Finally, I now know more about the Mason cluster/UNIX/etc. than I ever wanted to. I had flashbacks to my old days using DOS prompts. Whoever wrote the guides and manuals obviously wasn't expecting normal people to read them. It took me almost as long to figure out the cluster account as it did to create the maps. I'm armed and dangerous now, though. Watch out world...I'm Web-enabled!
The link to the map is listed above. I had difficulties with a couple of things during this lab:
(1) I created a cool neatline and caret but when I went to publish, Flash told me that the viewer version didn't support the enhanced features even though it allows you to actually create the graphics on the screen; so, it published as just black. I ended up having to create less cool versions of the neatline and caret just to get the thing to publish what was actually on the screen. Kind of a cheesy bait and switch mentality on the part of the program...I'm sure my beloved Illustrator would not be so lacking in integrity.
(2) Because I used the boundary layer that required using the paint bucket rather than the fill tool, I ran into an odd problem. I was working with color schemes that had radial gradients. Apparently with the paint bucket, the center of the radial gradient is not placed at the center of the area to be filled but rather where the paint bucket touches the area. As a result, I got a flickering effect between years due to having touched the bucket to different parts of the states each time I colored them. It took some doing to minimize this through trial and error. I don't think the fill tool works that way...it just puts the center of the radial gradient in the center of the polygon being colored.
(3) Finally, I now know more about the Mason cluster/UNIX/etc. than I ever wanted to. I had flashbacks to my old days using DOS prompts. Whoever wrote the guides and manuals obviously wasn't expecting normal people to read them. It took me almost as long to figure out the cluster account as it did to create the maps. I'm armed and dangerous now, though. Watch out world...I'm Web-enabled!
# posted by Anne Dement @ 1:51 PM 
