Garden Slideshow

It’s cold and grey outside. We have no snow, but it has been wintry cold. Maybe you will enjoy my new garden show?

I confess that I stayed up last night working on this slideshow. And then some more time early this morning. Is this how a mom with three kids spends her “free” time? Well, that’s my habit, anyway.

So for those of you who like the technical details, I did this in Actionscript 3. The pictures are all external to the Flash (.swf) file. They are listed in an XML file, as are the captions, so if I feel like adding or subtracting one more pictures, I don’t have to touch the code. It worked fine on my computer, but then when I uploaded it to my web server, not too surprisingly it needed a preloader. I put in the most basic preloader I could find. That’s those little numbers (and “images coming…”) you may see on the screen before the winter pic comes on.

So here’s a list of stuff I might add if I wanted to continue with this project:
1) fancier preloader
2) something more interesting at the end than “the end”: menu? redo? “the end” typewriter style? a fade out?
3) fun with tweens — meaning fancy effects
My last attempt with tweens in Actionscript 2 didn’t go so well. Some of the tweens worked, but some failed in Firefox, for some reason that I will probably never know since I am now delving into AS3. I do hope I get some mastery over AS3 before AS4 shows up.
4) Maybe get that frog that I drew really quickly for Parshat Vaera to jump through the garden? Or let the user control how it jumps? Or hide the frogs in one of the pictures and see if the user can find them? Time to do some more skill building…

All the photos are taken by me of my garden, except the tulips are from my neighbor’s yard.

My 5 year old daughter and her friend’s reaction? Beautiful pictures, but boring.
Well, I gotta learn some more Actionscript 3 before I do anything terribly interesting with it.