This is a collection of considerably old news items, that may (or may not) be of interest to you:
As you probably will have already noticed, the current area of the site you are in has its tabs at the top in a different colour. This will help visitors from search engines to know exactly where they are and to help prevent you accidentally reloading the page you are on.
Posted by Harry on December 27, 2007.
We at Foundation Flash want it to be a great place for learning and development when it comes to our Flash tutorials. To help supplement our tutorials, we will now be providing a store (or shop if you prefer), where you will find many nifty items such as books and software to help you on your way to becoming a Flash success. If you go to the store you will see that it is powered by Amazon so you get all of their security and delivery and none of the fuss. Plus at no extra cost to you, you will help fund all our future tutorials. It's a win-win really.
An example of a great book you can buy is the one that I learnt much of my AS3 knowledge from is . The book retails at £28.50, and it's £18.53 on Amazon.co.uk, but here at Foundation Flash we have it for a mere £14.39. Yes, that's right, we are cheaper than Amazon. Can you pay in other currencies? Probably, so go check it out right now.
For Photoshop CS3 fans, we have Steve Caplin's . Our view of it couldn't be much higher. Practical stuff using Photoshop, it covers a massive range of very impressive uses. Judging by the Review section of Amazon, most people agree with us, all giving 4 or 5 star ratings. Half price now, at £12.50. More details of what the book covers can be found in the store (follow the link above).
Posted by Harry on December 26, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
This Christmas treat is for those using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and those who like viewing the site at slightly larger text sizes. I have fixed the navigation bar so that it doesn't break at larger sizes and in IE6 - it should all display perfectly. Cheers!
Posted by Harry on December 18, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
Today's new tutorial is about dynamic brushes. It's a Photoshop tutorial so you can find it in the Photoshop section of the tutorials page.
What is a dynamic brush? Well, a normal brush uses just the foreground colour, but a dynamic brush uses both the foreground and background colours. It paints a random series of brush strokes, coloured with colours off an imaginary gradient between your foreground colour and background colour.
Posted by Harry on December 18, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
I'm sorry there wasn't a tutorials last Tuesday. I could go into a lengthy explanation of why that failure occurred but needless to say, in short, it wasn't my fault, at all, so I think we should all draw a line under this, move on, not rake over old ground etc etc. By the way, due to it being Christmas (yay) next week, we won't have a tutorial on Christmas day.
Posted by Harry on December 18, 2007.
You don't want to miss this supplement of the pong tutorial. We finally get to give our opponent Artificial Intelligence. That is what I call awesome. You better check it out. Go on! Now!
Posted by Leon on December4, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
Our Christmas decorations are up, are yours?
Posted by Leon on December 2, 2007.
It's that time once again. It's tutorial day, and it's time for the second part of the turret tutorial, where we get to kill some enemies. Oh yeah!
Posted by Leon November 27, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
This is probably the biggest change to Foundation Flash for a while, so read this. All our tutorials are currently lumped together in the main folder of the site, and it's hard to access the tutorial you want. This is why we're introducing a semantic URL system, which means that all our tutorial URLs are going to be changing, for the better.
An example of what will be happening is that project.php will become /tutorials/project/. You may need to update any bookmarks you have of this site. These changes will be happening over a period of utter madness (i.e. the next couple of days).
Posted by Harry on November 24, 2007.
Don't worry, this announcement isn't late, I actually released this yesterday. Figure that one out Mr Clever...
It's about the curves panel in PhotoShop.
Posted by Harry on November 20, 2007. Press on the post title for more information
Pong. Pong. Pong. Oh yes, it's here, it's pong part 2. Learn to make the ball. You had check this second Pong tutorial and not miss some serious fun!
Posted by Leon on November 13, 2007. Press on the post title for more information
Hear that sound? That faint ratatatat? That's the sound of awesome! It's the sound of your turret that you will make by the end of this three part tutorial. It's the sound of you clicking on this link and not missing out!
Posted by Leon on November 6, 2007. Press on the post title for more information
And to celebrate this event I deliberately deferred yesterday's new tutorial release until today. Yeah, of course. No, I didn't just forget. The new tutorial is the start of an exciting new AS3 project, making the game "Pong". It's a classic '70s arcade game, much recreated, but now we show you how to make it. This week, responding to keyboard events and a whole host of other stuff, so go check it out!
Posted by Harry on October 31, 2007.
So I was driving down that new rainbow road they've built, doing nothing wrong and along comes this stinkin' star person and just pushes me off the edge into space and I fall forever into nothingness! And then, get this, I was floating along and... hang on, that was Mario Kart... well anyway, to cut a long story short, we ended up with a brand new Flash tutorial which will teach you how to create a custom right-click menu in AS2, and that damn star person ended up with a red shell up his... exhaust. Anyway, go check out our new tutorial!
Posted by Leon on October 23, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
Well, there's a wonderful new tutorial on depth, in AS3, and controlling it, sending to back, and bringing to front. Pretty damn exciting if you ask me.
If you're interesting in AS3, you should probably go look at it - it will only take you a couple of minutes to read.
Posted by Leon on October 16, 2007. Press on the post title for more information
I was away last week, so thanks to Harry for doing the news post. But now I'm back (Hooray!) and we've got another awesome new Photoshop tutorial on using masking to create neat icons, so click here. Enjoy, and make sure to leave a comment!
By applying a mask to a layer, you limit its area. In the tutorial, you can use it to create an easy cut-out, to create an icon effect, which has a number of uses, including forum avatars. It is a wide spanning area, and so James has included some possible variations on the theme.
Posted by Leon on October 09, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
Long live AS3! In this new version of a somewhat old tutorial, we will be talking through making a cool, move to mouse thing. To understand properly, you're just going to have to check it out yourself. IT deals with the setInterval function, which although less powerful than the new Timer, is simpler for you to learn and me to teach.
What it does is carry out a function every "x" number of milliseconds. In case you don't know, that is a thousandth of a second. So, say I had a function called "dosomething", and I wanted that function to be carried out every 5 seconds. How would I do that? With a setInterval. So, I'll call my interval "howLong", and assign it that function and time:
var howLong = setInterval(dosomething(), 5000)
Posted by Harry on October 2, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
LATEST NEWS: Badgers are running wild across the land, killing everything in their path. Stay in your houses! In more important news, it's tutorial day today and there's a brand new tutorial, which has nothing to do with badgers. In fact it's on the basics of if...else statements, which although simple, has never properly been covered. So avoid the badgers and check it out!
Every minute of every day you will most likely make some kind of decision. For example, while I am typing this I am making decisions about what to type next. These, when found in ActionScript, are called If statements. You will inevitably come across these soon in game development, or in fact, in any type of interactive application. Although this might seem a bit daunting, we shall start off simply...
Posted by Leon on September 25, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
As we have now hit 50 (or is it 51?) tutorials in our collection, we thought we would make it easier for all to access the tutorial that interests them, using our new "Search" facility in the sidebar - just look to the right of the screen. It is powered by Google, and we still have a few problems to sort out, but it still should be good. Try it!
Posted by Harry on September 22, 2007.
Guess what day it is... That's right, it's eat chocolate day! No, I'm just kidding (although that would be rather delicious), it's tutorial day! A brand new tutorial on hit-testing. Actually it's not brand new, it is the same as the old AS2 tutorial on hit-testing, upgraded to fit the new. So visit here.
Hit-testing in this tutorial deals with two objects, and compares whether these two objects are touching. Actually, it is the rectangle around the object. When I say object, it is mainly Movie Clips you will be using. This has many uses such as bullets, power-ups, drag overs, rollovers and so the list goes on.
Posted by Leon on September 18, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
No, it's not Christmas, and it's not Easter, and it certainly isn't Hanukkah. It's Tutorial Day! But I bet you knew that already. I bet you had it written on your calendar, and have been constantly refreshing the homepage for the last 2 hours, waiting for the latest tutorial to be released. Well, here it is. James has kindly written us a brand new Photoshop tutorial on how to draw an isometric "strong" cube. You can check it out on the tutorials page, or just click here. Enjoy, and make sure to leave a comment!
Posted by Leon on September 04, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
Huzzah! It's everyone's favourite day once again, tutorial day! In this tutorial, you will be making the Foundation Flash "Double F" Logo, and learning more about blending options.Click here.
Posted by Leon on August 28, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
You may find, on some of our more recent tutorials, that you can now leave comments at the bottom of the tutorial. This will enable us to find out what you think of the tutorials and allow us to make our tutorials much easier to understand for you. This comments system is available free from www.js-kit.com. Also, on all our tutorials, the images are now much cleaner, as you'll notice, they are centred and have a light grey border. I hope you appreciate these changes, and they make our website a slightly better place.
Posted by Leon on August 27, 2007.
It's tutorial day once again, and today we have a brand new Photoshop tutorial. Perfect for those just getting started with Photoshop., the tutorial focuses on some of the basic features of photoshop, and goes into detail on blending options. This tutorial can be found in the tutorials section, or you can just click here.
Posted by Leon on August 21, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
Today's new tutorial is about blur filters. There is also a video version of it available, so check that out as well.
Posted by Harry on August 14, 2007. Press on the post title for more information.
There are new Flash (and possibly Photoshop) tutorials on the way, with a new tutorial up tonight, and every Tuesday from now on. Today's tutorial is about setting up projects. Here are the other planned tutorials:
Posted by Leon on August 07, 2007.
We were looking over what we do, and as we expand(ed) into web design area, we are forgetting/forgot to add to the games selection and such, and nobody really looks at the games anyway. Plus we were RM banned (in schools and universities) because of our games.
So hey, the games are going either today or tommorrow, so say goodbye! Also, as I forgot to mention, there are no adverts.
Posted by Harry on August 04, 2007.
The last post is a bit outdated, because now the homepage (the one you are looking at right now) looks utterly different, does it not?
Well, we thought it was a bit odd that us, as Web Designers, not having a decent site ourselves. I mean, we've grown up a lot in terms of web design since we made the last site, and so it desperately needed this update. Although it is only this page at this time, we are frantically changing all the other pages, while we are updating loads of other stuff. One particular change that you can look forward to is a much improved members' section.
This is a work in progress, and can still be changed, so visit the contact page and let us know what you think!.
Upgrade to IE7 - (or better still, Firefox). No, seriously please do. In fact, those people still using IE6 and below will have already found out that the new look doesn't display very well in their older browsers. But we do care about all our users so you can find some links about how to update your browser undeneath this quote, which explain the difficulty we face:
Although this fix can make it work in IE 6 as well, that is counter productive for the future of the Web. IE 6 is a major problem to Web developers... Instead of using this hack, users of IE 6 should be encouraged to upgrade to IE 7. Users who cannot upgrade to IE 7 ... should use a better browser, such as Opera or Firefox. They have been abandoned by Microsoft.
So, if you want FireFox (good), you want to go to but if you want IE7 (not quite so good) you want to go to . Glad I've got that one sorted.
Posted by Harry on July 19, 2007.
Well, we haven't had much news recently, which is mainly because we are doing a web design contract, and it's a steep learning curve all the way. Of course, I thought I'd fill you in on a few small changes - the slight font change for legibility, and the removal of the
tags in favour of some nice CSS styling.Posted by Harry on July 16, 2007.
Donations Accepted
Donations
In a completely coincidently act, you can now donate to Foundation Flash, if you think the site is good. There are many costs involved in running a free website, and if you have save money by using the free tutorials, and you have a credit card or PayPal account, you can use the button underneath the affiliates. Thank you.
Posted by Harry on June 24, 2007.
A Bit of a Break
Firstly, we have a new affiliate, GrafikHaus. GrafikHaus offers similar tutorials to our own about Photoshop, Dreamweaver and QuarkXpress. We welcome them! You can visit them by pressing the "grafikhaus" logo to the right of the work affiliates, above the news.
Back to the title of this news item: Leon and Harry both have a week of exams in a weeks time, so Harry will be temporarily stopping work on the website for two weeks, and Leon will be carrying on as per usual. This will slow the rate of tutorial writing, but over the past 9 days, Harry has written 9 tutorials, so you should have enough to go on with!
Posted by Harry on June 03, 2007.
New Tutorials About AS3
Harry has even more kindly given up more of his half-term to write some tutorials on ActionScript 3. AS3 (for short) is a bit harder, and will require eveyone to relearn it, but it is TONS more powerful and brings Flash into line with other non-web based languages such as Visual Basic.net and C/C++/C Sharp. Basically, it given ActionScript OOP functionality. OOP stands for Object Orientated Programming, which is, to quote , "A revolutionary concept that changed the rules in computer program development". Yes, it is a little harder when you start out, but it gets easier. For more information on the different types of ActionScript, see the headers describing each section of tutorials.
Posted by Harry on May 30, 2007.
New tutorials and some news
You may notice that Harry has kindly produced a collection of ActionScript concept tutorials, which should teach you some basic to more advanced ActionScript concepts should you not already know them. These should come in handy. You'll notice that I have not been posting any tutorials recently. This is because of two reasons. Number one, I have a brand new laptop with vista, and I have been setting it up (it has been a right kerfuffle, believe me!), and number two, I'm working on a brand new game! I'll post screenshots in due course, but that's what I've been working on. See you soon,
LeonPosted by Leon on May 28, 2007.
HTML Validation
We have rolled out a series of changes (including adverts), that will improve and prolong the running of the site. The main change is all our pages are now php based - so there are no frames! We also took the opportunity to get all our pages up to industry standard. Don't believe me? Press the button to the left of "New Tutorials" and read that.
Posted by Harry on May 07, 2007.
Video Tutorials
We now have a rapidly increasing number of video tutorials, which should allow users to see visually the tutorials, which should help them understand more fully.
Posted by Harry on April 21, 2007.
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