We will be able to create HTML5 animations from Flash CS6 projects. Use Flash as normal, and instead of — or in addition to — the regular SWF output, we export as HTML5.

This requires a collection of open-source plugins (for tweening, audio, etc.) that get installed using the Extension Manager, but at least it has to be done only once.

This means that while the SWF format is falling out of favor, the Flash authoring program is very much alive, and will be a tool for developing for mobile devices that don’t support Flash animation.

The results of the HTML5 exports are nearly identical to the SWF exports, but it isn’t identical….yet. For example, bitmap fills aren’t supported.

Here’s a demo from Paul Trani, evangelist for Adobe, and lynda.com author:

Like that old guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Flash isn’t dead, yet. Ten months ago, I wrote that Adobe had a publicly-available beta of a 64-bit Flash player. The beta is now complete, and Adobe released the player today. You can download it from their web site. If you’re running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 (or Vista, heaven forbid), do this. It will improve your experience and make your browsing more stable.

If you aren’t sure whether you’re running the x64 version of Windows, here’s how you find out: press + Pause. This displays the System Properties screen, where you should see something like this:

A few things to look out for:

The installation page might guess wrong that you’re running 32-bit Windows, and show you this:

If that happens, click the “Do you have…” link and choose 64-bit. You may also need to download two versions of the installer: one for Internet Explorer, and another for all other browsers.

One other gotcha to look for: the screen will display a check box to install the Google toolbar or a trial of McAfee anti-virus. By default, the box is checked, so I had to make sure to un-check it. This is very irritating. Whether you call it “shovelware” or “foistware”, it’s very easy to overlook, and then your computer has stuff you didn’t want, slowing it down. This is especially bad for installing anti-virus software, since it will conflict with the one you already have one running. You do have one running…right?

Back in June, I posted that if you’re running the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office, you couldn’t insert Flash movies, since the Flash player is only a 32-bit plug-in. Users of 64-bit Windows have also experienced a lot of problems when watching Flash videos, which is the format of most videos on the Web, like on YouTube, Vimeo and elsewhere.

So it was an excellent gift today when I downloaded the beta of Adobe Square, the x64 Flash player. There are actually two downloads: an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, and a plug-in for Firefox and every other browser. You’ll probably want to install both.

As soon as I did — wham! — I was able to place Flash objects into PowerPoint and Excel. On the Insert tab, select Video/Video from File.

Someone had sent me an Excel workbook that contains videos (a teaching aide that I’ll review in the near future) and originally, all I saw were blank boxes. Once I installed Square, the videos played just great. I also noticed that YouTube videos play a lot more smoothly, without jumping, jittering, starting-and-stopping. Flash player 10.1 fixed a lot of that already, but Square seems even better.

A couple of caveats: since Square is still in beta, there’s no guarantee of anything, so if you experience crashes and whatnot, don’t say you weren’t warned. Also, the beta won’t update itself automatically and you won’t get reminders to do so. It’s up to you to visit the download page every so often to update it manually. Download it here.

It’s no secret (to say the least) that the iPad doesn’t support Flash. This isn’t a bug; Apple did this on purpose. So if you have an iPad and surf to a web site that contains SWFs, you won’t see them.

As a web developer, you can work around this. Instead of serving your SWFs in the default player embedded by the Flash application or something like SWFobject (used by Dreamweaver), use Flowplayer. Flowplayer uses the QuickTime player that comes with the iPad and iPhone. There’s a free version that displays their logo, and there are logo-free licenses starting at $95. You can use any of them commercially. Get it at www.flowplayer.org.

Now that I have the full Master Collection of Creative Suite 5, I’ve been using some of the great collaborative features. One that I really liked is cue points. One of my clients had videos of someone speaking, and they wanted animated text to appear next to him. As he spoke certain phrases, the wording needed to appear.

After Effects and Flash made this a piece of cake. I brought 6 short videos into After Effects and created a separate composition for each one. I then added 4 or 5 cue points to each comp, where the speaker was saying certain phrases. I exported each comp to a Flash video (FLV) and brought those into Flash projects. A few lines of ActionScript 3 had Flash read each cue point and place the play head at a frame label that had the same name.

Here’s the code:

import fl.video.MetadataEvent;
video_MC.speakerFLV.addEventListener(MetadataEvent.CUE_POINT, playCuePoint);
function playCuePoint(event:MetadataEvent):void {
    gotoAndPlay(event.info.name);
}

The instance of the FLVplayer object is called speakerFLV, and that’s inside a movie clip called video_MC. The key is the last line of code: gotoAndPlay(event.info.name). If I created a cue point called Hello, this script will detect it, put the play head at a frame label called Hello, and play the animation (text animating in, then animating out). Since this happened 4-5 times in each video, I simply put a stop() command between each sequence. You can see it working at www.vision2voice.com.

Occasionally, I’d lose my place as to where each cue point was — maybe I’d forget if there were 4 or 5 or what their names were or where they were in the movie. When the FLV player was selected, the Properties panel listed them:

Do you notice the plus and minus signs in the panel? You can create your own cue points in the video. But where the cue points embedded in After Effects can be used in any application (even those not from Adobe), the cue points created in this panel will only be recognized by Flash. But maybe that’s all you need.

All of the Adobe CS5 applications have at least one, new killer feature, and my favorite one in Flash is the Deco tool. It lets people (like me) who have no drawing skills to draw basic, but decent illustrations.

Select the tool , then in the Properties panel, choose a drawing effect. My favorite is buildings.

Then simply draw on the stage.

Some of the Deco tool effects are self-animating. For example, you can draw fire that goes for 50 frames. The animations are all frame-by-frame, which means that you can remove the first few frames of the fire animation where the flame ignites.

Just be aware that “Deco” is an appropriate name for the tool. The illustrations aren’t meant to be photo-realistic or even high art. But there are still many instances where the tool will get the job done.