How did they do that? [NY Times]

[Purdy]

I am BRAND new to Flash/ActionScript, coming from a Web development (Perl/CGI) background. My boss is enchanted by the NY Times Audio Slide Shows (see examples on this page) and wants to do something similar with our content.

I took a look at their stuff and it is a Flash setup, so I downloaded an eval of MM Flash MX Pro and I am not sure where to begin. I'm not really interested in the graphics aspect of it, but really the technical guts of what's going on behind the scenes.

Is something like that one whole document? Or would that be a Scenes/Presentation type of structure?

I've been through a lot of the help docs and tutorials, but where I'm getting stuck is how to get the big picture of how such a project would be organized (and hopefully extended to other pieces of content easily). If anyone has pointers to a good book (or site), I'd appreciate it.

Thanks In Advance!

- Jason

[Gibberish]

if its the slidwshow when you click on th image there is no flash being used. Only flash was the news correspondence. That is done with a built slideshow and synced audio.

It would be hard and a lot of time to explain how to create something like that, I would suggest looking for a tutorial. That would be like me asking you to explain to me how to make a full program in CGI.

try searching for photo gallery or photo slide show. This is a link tot he top result when i search photo slideshow here: http://www.actionscript.org/forums/s...hoto+slideshow

[Purdy]

Hi Gibberish -- thanks for the response.

I'm looking at the "Working With a Gold Leaf Artist" example, specifically. When that loads up and plays, if you right-click on the image(s), you get the MM "Settings" & "About MM Flash Player 7", so that's why I was thinking the whole thing was Flash. Plus there's a nice Fade transition between photos.

Since I last posted, I wrote up a program design, where I could write a Flash app that would basically have the top stuff and the UI controls and an XMLConnector piece. Then I use the XMLConnector piece to load up a XML file that contains the presentation specifics, with an Array of slides that each contain a photo and audio link. It would go through the Array once to calculate total runtime for the progress bar as well as some sort of timeline data structure so when the user reset the progress bar, it would know which slide to show and where in the audio to jump. Then it would go through the Array again to show the presentation, playing each audio piece and fading in the current photo and fading out the previous photo (unless we were on the last photo). Then there would be event handlers for when the user pressed play/pause/rewind and slider bar update.

The tricky part is having the multiple audio pieces, but under one presentation and slider.

But the nice part is that if I can pull this off, then I can create new presentations by simply tying all the media files together in a new XML file.

I'm @ home now, so I can't just copy/paste the concept -- so I may have missed a step or two, but that's my general concept so far.

Any refinements or pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks!

- Jason