This is the GIF Dingo Movie! It was made with Macromedia's Flash 2 (and later versions), as are all the movies on this site. It uses all 3 techniques available in Flash 2/8 (backgrounding, frame-by-frame and tweening). By the way, those are bush flies as the decorator motif (if the flies get in your food, they become bush "currants"). Visit Macromedia software goodies HERE.

This is where I get to talk a bit about the software I have spent years using. I have used FreeHand since it was a baby (remember Aldus?) and really appreciate the elegant interface of FH 7.0.2 (now with Macromedia). Macromedia bought an animation program which could export VECTOR graphics, renamed it Flash and included a Flash 2 document for FreeHand 7.0.2. If Macromedia has some smarts (and I think they do) they could make Flash plug-ins for a bunch of other programs which can create vector graphics (say, for instance Canvas 5x and Illustrator 7x, both of which I have). Flash 2 (which is very cool once you get past the rather incomplete user---uh---guide) can put out lots of different movie formats from the basic animation you create. I combined the FreeHand and Flash outputs in Macromedia's public release of Dreamweaver, available HERE.

That is how I did all the movies on this site. I created a basic animation, using FreeHand (and Adobe Photoshop on the high res PICT file outputs from FreeHand) wherever I felt like it. All the biomechanics animations were created in FreeHand as a vector-based model, exported frame by frame as Flash 2 documents, imported one by one (importing the numbered frames (filename001.swf to filename0xx.swf) as a group is a really bad idea until they get the bugs out of the batch handling code).

If you want to develop a Web site, you just have to put up with some glitches. Stay with SNAFU (Situation Normal All Fouled Up), stay away from FUBB (Fouled Up Beyond Belief) and under no circumstances get involved with FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition). Software development is a moving target, what with HTML and JAVA updates, browser capabilities all over the map, HTML editors like PageMill, CyberStudio and Dreamweaver trying to catch up with developers and all those different user computers snorking around on the Internet.