Adobe Flash Platform from Start to Finish: Working Collaboratively Using Adobe Creative Suite 5 [Paperback]

Aaron Pedersen (Author), James Polanco (Author), Doug Winnie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0321680715 | ISBN-13: 978-0321680716 | Edition: 1

Create and execute cutting-edge projects using the Adobe Flash Platform!

This book explores a Flash Platform project’s life cycle, diving deep into each phase — planning, design, development, build and release, and continued maintenance.

This comprehensive guide is for your entire team to refer to during the development process, including business executives, project managers, creative directors, designers, developers, and quality assurance and build engineers, explaining how each role contributes to the overall process. The book also highlights the Adobe applications — Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Builder 4, Flash Professional CS5 and other Adobe Creative Suite 5 programs — so you can leverage the latest technology to accomplish the task at hand.

Whether you’re a one-person shop or a large multi-department team, this guide details the process and scales to the key requirements of your project.

About the Authors:

Aaron Pedersen is cofounder of DevelopmentArc and has more than a decade of Web application experience for small startups and Fortune 500 companies. He focuses on user interface technologies, including Adobe Flash Platform (Adobe Flex, AIR) and JavaScript. He has been a lead, planner, and architect on many groundbreaking projects for Lexus.com, Scion.com, Adobe Marketplace, Yahoo Mail Flickr application, and WorkflowLab for Adobe.

James Polanco is a Web application architect and cofounder of DevelopmentArc, focusing on ActionScript development, design patterns, and component implementations. He has worked with such clients as Scion.com, Lexus.com, Toyota.com, Libsyn Podcast Analytics Dashboard, Fake Science Music Store, Industrial Light & Magic, and Adobe Systems. He is an avid blogger, speaker, and researcher with a particular interest in technology implementations, best practices, and analysis of Web enabled tools and technologies.

Doug Winnie is the principal product manager for Adobe Flash Catalyst, Flash Platform Workflow, and WorkflowLab. He is responsible for the integration of Adobe Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Builder, driving the growth of collaborative workflows between designers and developers using the Adobe Flash Platform. Doug is also an instructor at San Francisco State University and hosts the Adobe TV shows, ”ActionScript 1:1 with Doug Winnie” and “Flash Catalyst 1:1 with Doug Winnie.”

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Aaron Pedersen is cofounder of DevelopmentArc and has more than a decade of Web application experience for small startups and Fortune 500 companies. He focuses on user interface technologies, including Adobe Flash Platform (Adobe Flex, AIR) and JavaScript. He has been a lead, planner, and architect on many groundbreaking projects including: Lexus.com, Scion.com, Adobe Marketplace, Yahoo Mail Flickr application, and WorkflowLab for Adobe.

James Polanco is a Web application architect and cofounder of DevelopmentArc. He has dabbled with Flash since the beginning, but became serious about development and research with the release of Flash MX. He has focused primarily on ActionScript development, design patterns, and component implementations—a natural fit for Flex development and Web application planning and architecture. He has worked with such clients as Scion.com, Lexus.com, Toyota.com, Libsyn Podcast Analytics Dashboard, Fake Science Music Store, ILM The show, and Adobe Systems. He is an avid blogger, speaker, and researcher with a particular interest in technology implementations, best practices, and analysis of Web enabled tools and technologies.

Doug Winnie is the principal product manager for Adobe Flash Catalyst, Flash Platform Workflow, and WorkflowLab. He is responsible for the integration and collaborative workflows between designers and developers using the Adobe Flash Platform and between Adobe’s Flash tools, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Builder. Doug is also an instructor at San Francisco State University, teaching HTML/Ajax Web design with Dreamweaver, ActionScript programming, working with XML data, and Flex application design and development with Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. He hosts the Adobe TV show, ”ActionScript 1:1 with Doug Winnie.”

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press; 1 edition (June 20, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321680715
• ISBN-13: 978-0321680716
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,904,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Workflow management comes to Flash, November 9, 2010

By 

Ricky D - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Adobe Flash Platform from Start to Finish: Working Collaboratively Using Adobe Creative Suite 5 (Paperback)

I have read all the way through this book, and I found this book to be the best resource on Flash development to date. That doesn't mean it is perfect, but it is the only book I have found that even tries to adequately detail "workflow" for interactive application assembly of any kind.

Most developers already know HOW to do things, they know the software interface and they know the hands-on part of Flash use -- plus there are any number of resources teaching which button to click or what code to type for anyone that wants to be a developer. Unlike more mature media, like Print, which has had a defined workflow for a long time, Interactive is relatively new, more sporadic and its workflow ad hoc. This book goes a long way to to resolving those problems.

This is an exploration into a Flash project's life cycle from creative brief to programming. Its not going to describe how to create an event listener or a conditional statement in ActionScript 3. Nor is this book going to explain rigging for IK animations. But it will show you how to manage these kinds of projects, people and most importantly, the expectations of all of the above.

The book is divided up into Overview, Planning, Design, Development, Build/Release and Maintenance. It covers the whole Adobe product line, including Flash Professional, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst. In addition, there are some other CS5 Suite integration as well. There's a good introduction including Adobe Workflow Lab and DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor and Informer). Concepts are general at first, defining stakeholders and scope of projects. But this book quickly evolves into specifics of iterative and Extreme Programming as it relates to Flash as well as preferred design patterns like MVC for AS3 OOP. This book is an excellent resource for management unfamiliar with these terms as well as developers unfamiliar with project management of interactive production. In my experience, that's every developer and manager.

As an Adobe Certified Flash user, this book completes the overall picture for me, providing context for all the bells and whistles in latest edition of Flash. Considering the production of applications in Flash can deploy across a variety of devices, its indispensable. You can even develop now for the iPhone with Adobe's Packager for iPhone, since Apple has had to lift its restrictions. Although anyone serious about iPhone development should probably learn Objective C -- the Quark of programming languages. Good luck finding a workflow resource, of this caliber, for that.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Project Management, Not Development Book, August 17, 2010

By 

Amazonian - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Adobe Flash Platform from Start to Finish: Working Collaboratively Using Adobe Creative Suite 5 (Paperback)

I bought the Kindle version to see what the book was like since it was about 1/2 the price of the paperback. It is 80% or more on project management (PM), which isn't necessarily a bad thing. What is bad is that the title implies it will teach you to use the Flash Platform. While there is some of that in there, this isn't the book for that. It basically goes through the development lifecycle of a project that the Flash Platform would be used for, describes which tools are good for what, and talks about how to manage all that. This book should have been titled "Project Management of Flash Platform Projects From Start to Finish" instead.

I haven't gone all the way through the book but the PM stuff seems pretty good and fairly well detailed. If you want to learn how to use/develop on the Flash platform, this is not the book - look for something else. This seems to be a great book if you are a one-man/woman show (or Project manager of small Flash platform group) who is building Flash projects for hire and is just getting started or needs to tighten up their game.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars There are better, June 22, 2011

By 

jfox - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Adobe Flash Platform from Start to Finish: Working Collaboratively Using Adobe Creative Suite 5 (Paperback)

This book is highly disappointing, compared to many other Flash tip books on the market, such as the Missing Manual and Quickstart series...