Link: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-JavaScript-Image-Rollover
E-cards
/ Email attachments
An electronic card (e-card) is a special
occasion, greeting or post card created and customized within a website and
sent through the Internet to the recipient. Customizations may include a wide
variety of backgrounds and text fonts including some as cursive writing,
graphic images, cartoon-style animations (proprietary to Adobe), video and
sometimes even music.
Nowadays animation can be fun, inspirational
and entertaining which is why people tend to attach animation to emails. Emails
can generally be passed on to others or even around the world once they have
been sent to one group of people. People can send animations to others to show
what they are thinking if they cannot write a full email message. Smiley faces
can be sent as an animation to show that they are happy. Viral advertisers have
taken advantage of this new phenomenon and use it as another way of spreading
news of their product, using digital word-of-mouth.
E-cards are a new form of sending paper-based
cards via email. These E-cards are generally animation and often have sound as
well. There are some sites that charge E-cards at a high price if the quality
of the animation is high or if it is with a message, but there are some E-cards
that are free. You can usually customize the E-card such as changing the
greeting and message. For example, changing ‘Happy Christmas’ to ‘Happy Xmas’.
What are the advantages of E-cards
1.
Almost all e-cards are free or cost only a fraction of a standard paper
card.
2.
You can send e-cards from the convenience of your own home or office,
saving you the time that it takes to physically go out and purchase a card.
3. In
addition, you can send multiple cards at once. This can be a huge time saver,
particularly if you are sending out a large batch of thank-you cards.
4. It
also considered more environmental friendly compared to traditional paper cards
What are the disadvantages of an E-card
1. It
could be impersonal because the person sent it did not get to write it and sign
it personally
2.
The receiver might not check the message or get to receive the message
3. It
could take long time to load or show up if the receiver has a poor internet
connection
4.
Nobody knows if these e-card sites are really trustworthy and
responsible for handling clients’ e-mail addresses
Email
Attachments: When a user tries to send an email with a file attachment to
another user, the file size builds up and may take longer to send. This is
because most files sent over the web could be documents, images, links to pages
etc..These files could be between 1MB to 100MB. Most email sites have a limit
of around 10 Gigabytes.
Sending
animation formats such as gif and flash, may need to be compressed or reduce
the file size within the programme because of the amount of space it requires
for it to be sent.
Viral marketing
On the Internet, viral
marketing is any marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on
a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential
growth in the message's visibility and effect. One example of successful viral
marketing is Hotmail, a company, now owned by Microsoft that promotes its
service and its own advertisers' messages in every user's e-mail notes.
Viral marketing techniques can include e-card plugin
services, free software with embedded banners, surveys,tell a friend forms (word of mouth) with incentives and some
referral programs. It makes it more fun
By implementing viral marketing strategies, you
provide an incentive for web site visitors to carry a sales message. This
incentive is usually a free "carrier" tool for that marketing message
or a means by which it is easier for people to spread the word about your
products and services. The main idea is to make your visitors into delivering
your sales message to others.
Output Device Issues
Output devices: An output device such as a
printer will print out animations onto paper from office applications or
straight from the web. When printing out paper that displays a fair amount of
colour, it will take longer due to the amount of colour and text that is
produced for using on paper.
Also a monitor is classed as an output device where it will display the actual
animations. For your computer to display animations and media content on the
internet, it needs to have flash installed to display various features on
websites and Java needs to be installed to play video games that contains
graphic animations.
Mobile Devices:
Some animations are
designed for portable devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. Mobile
devices don't have the same compatibility form as computers do. All websites
created for computers and mobile devices have two separate formats for each
one. When websites are created, they develop the website in a different format
so mobiles can have the benefit to navigate to these pages.
Although a very large
percentage now have full colored screens. If any animation is to be projected
on to a larger screen, some of the quality that you will have on the smaller
screen will not be there on the larger screen because it has been enlarged and
the animator must take this into account before producing a small animation
When a mobile device navigates to a website that only has computer
compatibility, everything within that site will be small for the user to see
and will have to enlarge the screen size. Mobile sites will automatically be
fitted to the right screen mode for mobile users to interact on the site.
Processor speed and memory:
Both the processor speed and memory affect
animation playback, especially if the animation is very long or includes
multimedia, such as bitmaps, sound or a video clip. In other words, you have no
control over this factor unless you are developing an animation for playback on
a specific set machine
Internet connection
When an animation is added to a web page, the speed
of the user’s internet connection will certainly affects how quickly the
animation downloads and plays on their computer. Therefore, you have little or
no control over this factor because, even though you are targeting your
animation for a specific machine with slower internet connections, internet
congestion may force download speeds of much less than that.
Animation Size:
A large animation
files, containing complex animated effects, lots of gradients and transparent
images, video clips etc. – take longer than small files to download or stream
over the internet. They can also take longer to play as large files tend to
suck up all the memory on a computer. However, you can control this factor by optimizing
your animation to keep the size as small as possible.
Factors which need to be taken into account
when creating animations for the web. These could include factors such as:
- file size
- file type
- Image dimensions
- Frame rate
- Web interactivity
- Sending the file
File Size
The larger the file size means
the longer it will take for the animation to load for the end user. If it is
too large and takes too long to load some people won’t be patient enough and
will leave it and not see the animation as they are getting annoyed at it. This
means that you should aim to get the size to not be that large so people can
access the animation quickly.
There can be
various ways for minimizing file sizes. One of them would be to crop parts of
images that aren't necessary, this way it will reduce the size so they can be
sent quicker over the internet through emails. There are other methods as well
such as sizing down the pixel dimensions, although it reduces the quality of
the image and may not be as clear.
Software:
Another method that can be done within graphic software's where you can change
the aspect ratio of the image you are creating. This reduces the file size and
prevents the image from being stretched or distorted when it is finally produced.
Sending the file
The most common way for sending files to someone over the web is to compress
the files, where it's turn into a .zip file where it's the smallest type of
file format. This is an easy and quick method you can do in your desktop
library, compressing files reduces the file size so it is quicker to load these
files up somewhere. When a user receives the files, they will still be
compressed so they would have to extract them where they will turn back to the
original size.
File
Type
The file type can determine the quality, the
amount of people that can view it and other points. The SWF file is normally
better quality however people need a specialist copy of some software so not
everyone will be able to view the animation so you are limiting the audience of
your animation. Another file type is GIF, this isn’t that good quality however
you don’t need special software to view it so anyone can view the animation but
it will have limited quality so the experience won’t be as good as a SWF but
will be accessible by more people.
Image Dimensions
Image
dimensions are about the size and the quality of the image. For web you may
want to reduce the image dimension for it to be compatible and quick to load.
The dimensions shouldn’t be bigger than what you want the animation height and
length to cover as you will be having part of the animation out of the border
that is being useless.
Frame
Rate
The frame rate can be higher and it will be a smoother animation as more
frames will be showing per second so it will have an easier blend for the
‘Persistence of vision’ theory. This will make the animation easier to watch
however you will pay for the smoothness with the size of the file; it will be
increased dramatically so it will take longer to load. If you have a low frame
rate it will be the opposite so you will have an animation that is unpleasant
to view however it will have a small file size and be quicker to load.
Web Interactivity
A web designer or animation creator can add a
rollover buttons and buttons that change image once clicked to your website so
when you click the button it changes to another frame to give you a response so
you know your request has worked and it is loading the next page, this is very
useful in a website as the user won’t be clicking again and again not knowing
if it is processing their request.
You can also put a flash game in the website
that is an SWF file format that can give you a better experience with the
website as you are having fun and it gives you another reason to go back to the
website. The only problem with this is that you need some software that is free
but you need to install it and a few people might not have or want that so
cannot access some of your content on your website.
Frame
Disposal
Disposal of frames is simply
removing some frames to reduce the amount of frames and the length of the
animation, as an effect of reducing the frames you will reduce the file size.
To do this you simply need to select the frame you wish to get rid of in animation
creation software and click the delete button.
Disposal of frames is simply removing some frames to
reduce the amount of frames and the length of the animation, as an effect of
reducing the frames you will reduce the file size. To do this you simply need
to select the frame you wish to get rid of in animation creation software and
click the delete button.
In
addtion, with there is a frame disposal, you need background in every frame
therefore, each frame is larger ( space) on the other hand, if there is not
disposal on the first frame, theres is background in the first frame only
therefore, all other frames need less memory . Howver, you would
select a disposal method when working with animations that include background
transparency in order to specify whether the current frame will be visible
through the transparent areas of the next frame.
Auto Crop
Auto crop once clicked can get
rid of part of an image that is outside of the view so that it isn’t taking
file size up by being there but not needing to be there. It makes it so the
animation doesn’t need to add more data (file size) about an image that isn’t
even viewable so it ‘won’t be missed’.
Libraries
All your pictures are in one
place so it’s not wasting time and file size by having to search all over the
place for each frame or picture. You do this by at the beginning of creation of
the animation you import all of the images you will be using into the library
and into one folder with the animation.
File Format
You can change the file format
to help with reducing the file size, a SWF file format is a large file size as
it holds more information in it to give a better quality animation. You can use
a GIF that requires less file size but takes some quality away so the frames
aren’t as detailed.
FPS
FPS is the time each frame
stays for, so instead of each frame lasting 0.2 seconds, change it to 0.1
second by applying that update underneath each frame by the drop down box that
is on most animation software, or right click on it to change it that way. By
it being quicker it will be running for less time and the file size will drop
dramatically.
Dimension
Dimensions
are about the size and the quality of the image. For web you may want to reduce
the image dimension for it to be compatible and quick to load. The dimensions
of the image in the animation shouldn’t be bigger than what you want the
animation height and length to cover as you will be having part of the
animation out of the border that is being useless.
D1
In this distinction I will be comparing the differences between Blender
and Adobe Flash
One of the biggest differences between the Adobe
flash software and the Blender software is that Blender is a 3D animation
package. Blender is for building shapes made from polygon meshes, Flash on the
other hand is for 2D sketches and drawings where you would use it for simpler
animations.
Blender is a programme that most experienced
animators would use to create 3D shapes and effects. It is software that lets
you change the layout and adapt to the components and tools within the
programme to make it easier to use.
This software includes a suite of tools that will enable you to create 3D
animations and interactive 3D content. The programme will offer functionality
for mainly modelling, animations and rendering. Blender is mainly targeted at
the media professions, where it's used in commercials and most other broadcast
linear content.
Some of the features included with this programme
are:
·
A full made creation suite.
·
A small and executable size that's easy for
distribution.
·
A high quality of 3D architectures that will enable
to have fast and efficient work-flow creations.
Adobe Flash on the other hand is a type of
multimedia software that is used to create mainly just animation features for
commercial use, this software can create navigation buttons, web banners,
slideshows, introductions, moving text, and various other things that are to do
with flash creations.
This software
isn't that advanced compared to Blender, but it can create simple animations
easily that you would find on most websites such as, logos, buttons, roll
overs, flash banners etc. This software isn't for 3D object creations like Blender;
in fact it's a totally different type of software in terms of what you can
produce with the programme. Some of the features included with Flash:
·
It has an efficient Work Flow for multi-target
contents.
·
A content scaling method when resizing stages,
which allows you to resize your symbols and motion paths for various different
screen sizes.
·
It has Enhanced layer controls, allowing you to
have more control over layers including different abilities to copy and paste
to other timelines.
·
An Enhanced code snippets handling, allowing you to
add quick and easy ways for adding Action Script 3.0 code to the projects. It also
gives the ability to preview code in HUD.
·
Allows you to resize applications and components,
which makes little work for when creating applications that look great.
·
A Flash library panel gives you more power where
you can store animation components in an organised order.
Blender
Blender is free software for 3D modelling and
design compare to Adobe Flash which cost £499 , and is a bit slower than Flash due to the dedicated backup. It has
fewer and simpler features compared to Adobe Flash, but can be very useful for
creating 3D animations and it can be very good, considering it's a free
software.
| 
