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Introduction
This book marks the fifth time in 10 years that I have written a book for Apress about Animate CC when it was still known as Flash. The first book was the scariest because the “Foundation Flash …” series was one of Apress’ premiere titles and best sellers. It was both frightening and exhilarating to be the author and, I must admit, it was one heck of a lot of fun. Then Steve Jobs stepped in with his infamous rejection of the Flash Player on the iOS platform and … that was that. In fact, one of the most memorable conversations I had with my editor at the time was when I had wrapped up the Flash CS5 title and he said, “Well, this is probably the last Flash title we will ever publish.”
Here we are again and I can’t help but thinking, “Isn’t it funny how things turn out?”
This software has had some pretty dark years and in many respects, it needed them. Flash, now Animate CC, was software looking for a market and really not succeeding. That started turning around a couple of years ago when Adobe started slowly turned the application toward the HTML5 universe, removing a lot of bloat—Device Central is a good example—and stripping it down to its current incarnation with a sparkly new name —Animate CC. That is the subject of this book.
This book is quite a bit different from previous editions because waltzing between HTML5 Canvas and ActionScript 3.0 documents creates some pretty interesting challenges when it comes to things like what code snippet to use or what video format to use in the video chapter. Then it occurred to both of us that that we were asking the wrong questions. The question should have been, “What do you need to know and why.”
That was when we realized, “Nothing has really changed, just how we talk about it.” Thus, the tone of this book is friendly and inviting, and there isn’t a ton of what we call “techie talk.”
One thing we did notice as we started planning the exercises is that Animate CC is one seriously cool, mobile prototyping tool. This explains the numerous exercises that demonstrate a technique but the explanation takes place in an Android or iOS interface. As one of the authors has been saying for over two years, ”You can’t talk about motion. You have to show it.” Animate CC has all of the tools you need to do just that and in less time than you may think.
One other aspect of this book is that we had a huge amount of fun developing the exercises and examples in this book. The word “fun” is important because if learning is fun, what you learn will stay with you. Explaining 9-slice scaling is a lot more fun when applied to a Chinese Olive Seller. Explaining how to “swap” movieclip instances is more understandable when you drop an anvil on a rabbit’s head. Nested movieclips become more real when explained in the context of a Hostess Twinkie. Want an Animate CC quick start? Welcome to Lake Nanagook.
As you may have guessed, we both continue to exhibit a sense of joy and wonder with Animate CC and we hope some of that rubs off on you as well.
Book Structure and Flow
This is not a typical software book. There is no common project that runs throughout the book. Instead, each chapter contains a number of exercises and examples designed to give you experience with the core concepts of Animate CC. Then, in several chapters, we turn you loose with a “Your Turn” exercise.
■ IntroduCtIon
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We start by taking you for a walk through the Animate CC interface, pointing out important areas and showing how they work. We finish up our stroll on the shores of Lake Nanagook and create a scene with a moonrise and howling wolves. Chapter 2 introduces you to working with the graphic tools and finishes with showing you how you can bring your Illustrator, Photoshop, and Sketch 3 work into Animate CC.
Chapter 3 introduces you to the all-important Symbols and Library features in Animate CC. In this chapter, you learn about 9-slice scaling by meeting an olive seller in Guangzhou, China. We show you how filters work by adding a realistic drop shadow to a dancing fool; you discover how to use the Animate CC Library and your Creative Cloud Library as repositories for reusable content, including “bunny bits”. We then turn you loose on Catalina Island off the coast of California to bring clear skies to a foggy day.
At this point in the book, you have been exposed to the fundamentals of Animate CC and the time has arrived to dig into the coding aspect of the application. This is the focus of Chapter 4 and is ideal for those of you who have never used ActionScript 3.0. Chapter 5 starts by explaining how to use audio in Animate CC and finishes up with you creating a rather intense rainstorm. Chapter 6 reinforces the message that “text isn’t the grey stuff around your graphics”. We show you how it is both serious and fun and how to use two of the most extensive type libraries out there—Adobe Typekit and Google Web Fonts—right from Animate CC.
Chapters 7 and 8 are extensive overviews of the animation features of Animate CC. In these two chapters, you will be dropping an anvil on a rabbit’s head, banging hammers, fixing a neon sign, learning about bones with bones, and animating an fully rigged Inverse Kinematics model.
Chapter 9 is devoted to the 3D aspects of Animate CC. In this chapter, you use a vanishing point to put an image on a wall-mounted computer screen, opening and closing doors and setting an astronaut loose in space by using the new camera feature of Animate CC. Chapter 10 moves into the realm of video in Animate CC. Here, you will learn how to create and deploy video in your HTML5 Canvas and ActionScript 3.0 projects. We even show you how to create a cinemagraph in Animate CC.
Chapter 11 is a rather extensive look at many of the HTML5 Canvas and ActionScript 3.0 components that are packaged with Animate CC, along with an overview of XML and JSON data structures. We finish up by answering the inevitable question, “How do I deploy my Animate CC projects?”
Finally, Joseph and I are no different from you in that we, too, are learning more about what you can and can’t do in Animate CC. Although we may be coming at it from a slightly different level than you, the constant stream of updates and feature additions to Animate CC makes this a pretty exciting time for us as we discover where Animate CC fits into the mobile, app development, and web design fields.
Our final words of advice are these:
“The amount of fun you can have with Animate CC should be illegal. We’ll see you in jail!”
