Timeline Versus Scripting
The simple demo above shows the difference between what can be achieved using just the visual design tools in Flash (frame animation in the timeline) and what can be done with ActionScript. The motion of the gray ball is entirely governed by keyframe animation. The red object executes ActionScript instructions on every frame to determine its horizontal and vertical position and its rate of travel.
If you watch for a few seconds, you'll see that the path of the gray ball is entirely predictable. It chugs along steadily within the diamond shape. Meanwhile, its counterpart can move along a straight line in any direction, at variable speed. When it bounces off the invisible walls of the movie window, its trajectory changes unpredictably.
If you want to create simple presentations -- unchanging wrappers for static information, delivered essentially without regard to context -- then timeline work will probably suffice. Or you could always consider PowerPoint. But static or singular presentation, while undoubtedly still important, no longer occupies a dominant place in our information ecology.
No one can say for sure when the Age of Presentation officially ended: some would say 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee first unveiled the World Wide Web, others would point to 1996, when Sun brewed its first batch of Java. A few will point further back, to 1945 when Vannevar Bush published "As We May Think," or 20 years later, when Ted Nelson invented hypermedia. In any case, information design for the Web and other modes of digital delivery now favors flexible, emergent, or so-called interactive structures. Moving ahead from presentation, the field of design now turns to simulation, as the basis of communication in computational media.
To cross into this conceptual space, you'll need to step off that timeline and begin your encounter with script.
|