Flash deConstruction Book

Flash deConstruction has something for everyone whose working life involves Macromedia Flash. Essentially it's an inside look at Juxt Interactive, the company Todd Purgason founded in 1998 and whose award-winning Flash work includes sites for Macromedia, Billabong and its own juxtinteractive site. In Flash deConstruction Purgason and his co-authors address the problem facing individuals and companies graduating to large scale, complex Flash projects. Although a huge number of Flash sites are still built by individuals, increasingly a Flash project is a collaborative effort involving designers, motion graphics artists, information architects and programmers. The preliminary chapters show how Juxt manages this process, from team structure, initial planning, strategy and concept development right through to beta testing and delivery. The meat of the book, however, is devoted to deconstructing individual Flash projects. Here you'll find a ton of ActionScript developed for the juxtinteractive site, US sportswear company Billabong and nDecision--a movie maker application developed for k10k.net that makes use of Flash 5's XML capabilities. As you'd expect there's some very advanced ActionScript to pull apart, but you're gently eased into it with a chapter on ActionScript basics. For a little light relief, each chapter kicks off with an interview. Flash luminaries like Joshua Davis, Brendan Dawes and Glenn Thomas talk about themselves, Flash and design in general. Audio of the full interviews, together with source files and other resources are available on the juxtinteractive Web site. --Ken McMahonRead More