The last days i was quite busy by producing a IceAge2 CD-ROM for ferrero (more on that, when it’s released). And i had superfun with zinc v2.5. Two years ago i worked with that program (how was it called back then? :)) and in my memory it was buggy and not usable for serious production. But it really progressed. Although the old heads in the forum are cursing about the new v2.5 script, but for me as a new developer i can say, that the language really improved. And they redesigned the helpfiles, so you have quick and intuitive access to all the methods.

No, i’m not getting payed of them. I’m just pretty pleased, to show the clients nice transparent effects and hearing them asking “that is flash?” for what a produced in a minute. Filesystems access is working smooth now and the API has some nice build-in goddies like the method setWallpaper() which was usefull for my application. I really recommend this program and looking foward to produce a dual-os (win/mac) application with it.

I recently used my favorite Freehand Trick again. Its at the same time so easy and unpredictable.

Lets say you want to add a few objects to a path. Maybe to make a cool loading cycle like this.

Now you could position al the stripes by hand, which takes long and is hard to modify. Lets do it the cool way: Draw a cycle on the stage and break it. We use it later to add the stuff to this path. Then draw one stripe on the stage and copy it. Now draw a textfield, copy the stripe and paste it into the textfield. Just like usual, you can now add the textfied to a path and manipulate it (i.e. the distance from stripe to stripe) with the textfield params.

I love this Trick and i hope with illustrator its just as easy because certainly freehand won’t be last that long…