Minor Project 2: Our Own Slideshow

In minor project 2 we had to create our own slideshows with images of our choice.  We then had to replicate what we learned in class.  I decided to make a slideshow on my favorite athlete, Maria Sharapova.  I took images off of http://www.australianopen.com/en_AU/index.html because Maria Sharapova was starting the tennis season off with the first big grand slam the Australian Open.  The last grand slam she won in 2008 until her shoulder injury that caused her to sit out of the tennis season for a while.  It is her second year back since her comeback and has gone back to her original service motion.  To make the slideshow more impressive I decided to put mini captions of what the photo resembled and what was going on in the photo.  I also felt the buttons were very small and covered the photos when clicking through the slideshow.  To make the buttons visible and useable I decided to make the buttons a little bigger and shifted the alpha to 50%.  The next challenge of this project was to figure out how to make the last frame loop back to the first frame.  I researched how to do this but found the only way to use code snippets was to use the option go to frame and play.  To make this work I had to put this action on the forward button of the last frame of the slide show.  This allowed the slideshow to loop back to the first image of the slideshow.  Even though I was able to make the slideshow loop back to the first image it forced my slideshow to end at the first image.  I hope to learn in class how to make my slideshow loop and not stop at the first image.  

Minor Project 1: Slideshow Demo

In class we learned about Flash and ways on how to "cheat" or pretend that we know how to use code by using code snippets.  Code Snippets allow us to make buttons and put code into our flash projects.  By putting in code it allows our projects to be interactive and fun to use.  We made four layers one called photos, another called actions, another called forward and the last one called backward.  In the photos layer we made three separate blank keyframes and places a photo in each blank keyframe.  In the actions layer we also made three blank keyframes and used code snippets to do stop().  The importance of this step is because when the frame moves to the next image it stops so people can look at the picture.  We then made two buttons one button that was made on the forward layer and another button made on the backward layer.  We then used code snippets to use code to allow the buttons to become interactive.  We made the forward button go to and stop at the next image and for the backward button we did the opposite of the forward button.  In the end we created a small slide show that brings interactivity.  This lesson in class showed that you do not need to know code to make a successful slideshow but know how to cheat the system and pretend that you know how to use code.