It is more important to understand the use and the functionality of the wobbler, the scroller, the wiggler and all the other effects or combinations of effects than to understand one single program. This might sound strange written in a book concentrating on Flash, but in my view it is a shorter step for a master of interactive design to become a master of Flash, than it would be for a master of Flash to understand interactive design in depth. This is why we see lots of Flash sites on the Internet that are well executed but few which are truly inspiring. So we do need to understand the tools of interactive design in depth, but to focus all our attention on learning only the details would be wrong. Good interactive design is independent of platform or protocol. Whether a wobbler is good or not is determined by where it exists and how it lives within an interactive project, not by whether it was made in Flash, Director, Java, C++, OpenGL, etc.
I use Macromedia Director for most of my work. This makes me feel that, since Director 7 I have been using Flash without knowing it, simply because all vector-based media in Director is handled by the Flash assets extra. Recently I have been integrating little animations made in Flash into Director movies and IΓÇÖve started to make Flash movies communicate with Director movies via scripts.
The wobbler came about through an odd sequence of events. ItΓÇÖs even stranger to be writing about it in this particular book for the simple reason that my source of inspiration for it is writing in it too: Yugo Nakamura.
About a year ago, I received an e-mail from a dear friend of mine suggesting I have a look at www.yugop.com.
So I did. "Fascinating," I thought; "So you can make highly interactive and interesting sites in Flash after all!" I told my colleagues ant and Tom to have a look. Tom was particularly taken by the wobbling face of DaVinciΓÇÖs Mona Lisa. He suggested adapting this movement for a navigation system. We did. What we came up with was the navigation system that you find at www.tomato.co.uk.
