Digital Workshop

This is still a work in progress, but most of the main facilities are in.

It's a bit of fun made for the Broomstick Ball which is a funding event for Cancer Research UK
All done in Opus Pro 04.50

http://www.broomstickball.co.uk

Interested in comments ... good and bad.

Hi Andy

This is a well-designed fun site.

I had no trouble accessing it using both IE6 and Firefox.

I hope you find more people who are willing to download and install the iOPlugin than I did.

From what I see the front end is the part he did. It is made in Flex. I think he just linked to existing sites. Some of the ones I looked at had php and I know Flex or Opus with the plug-in doesn't do that.

Have you tried making sites in Flex. Flex will play in Macs and the io plug-in does not. It worked for me but found swish easier to use for sites in flash.

Evereddie

Some years ago, I spent months working on Flex publications because of its ability to work with both Windows and Macs.

Unfortunately, I found there were so many limitations on what was not supported in Flex, that for my purposes, I had to give up on Flex.

I actually found that Opus and the iO Plugin produced sites with which I was very pleased. They did everything that I wanted.

Unfortunately, the negative responses from people who were just not prepared to download an unknown plugin, made the sites non-commercial. As a result, I dismantled the one site I made public and have put the others on hold.

I have no interest in learning php, etc as possible alternatives.

I'm not a great fan of Dreamweaver, but very reluctantly, I might have to try it.

I have just bought a copy of Namo Webeditor, and my initial evaluation suggests that this might provide what I want.

I can live without Flash and I did not like Swish.

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It's not just flex, it's the swf format. When you get spoiled by opus when making interactive Cd-roms, which is how I started, anything else is a downer. I like Swish for web cause it has exact placement just like Opus for Cd-Roms, unlike html where everything moves around in differrent browsers. I actually have Dreamweaver but only use it to update sites already made.
I looked at Namo a while back and it's worth a look again. I got one called 'Antenna' a while back and like it too.
Wish Opus would get a little more into web (but not Flex and not IO plug-in) cause it can't be denied that is where a lot of work is. I just like the way Opus thinks.
Here is one of many sites I made in Swish.
http://www.stalite.com

A bit more info:

The Haunted House page is a Flex publication and apart from the animations and sound just opens new sites in their own browser window.

I'm fortunate that the company I work for allow me to mix and match the software I use. We have Flash MX and Swish but I still prefer to use Opus for generating Flash content because the development time is so much less than with Flash, and I find Swish much more limited in what can be acheived.

The animated elements were constructed in Jasc Animation Shop where needed.

The only reason php was used for launching the new web pages, is that I needed to have a 'click count' on pages viewed and launched, this info is stored in a MySQL database. Advertisers (Sponsors) buy a window for their logo and website so they may require feedback on how many times their window was 'hit'. It's allready thrown up some interesting stats, the Home Page has been viewed 51 times since posting here, and the Haunted House Page has been viewed 40 times..does this mean that the the link to the Haunted House page is not obvious?

I tend to test on IE6 NE6 and Firefox as this now accounts for approx 20% of browsers used ref ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp )

Thanx fro the additional info Andy. It all ties together nicely and all the sites look good. Yes, Opus is really quick and easier for anything it can be used for. I always try to do whatever multimedia projects I have in Opus first if possible.

Do you mean "not Flex" because Flex is doing basically what Swish does in terms of producing SWF output. HTML is far too limited for multimedia and interactivity, and there are all the problems of it looking different on different browsers.