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I was looking for a no-sweat way to introduce Flash presentations into my blog for all the usual reasons: richer interactions without web server intervention, more space efficient way to present photos and videos, and just the plain fun of embedding multi-media into my text-centric blog. When I saw Frontal’s presentation at New York Tech Meetup last month,  I was inclined to be very receptive to a free development environment, simple scripting language, and easy deployment scenario (also, free) for creating and rendering SWFs. Did I mention the whole thing is free?

There are other shareware Flash tools out there, and  so I wanted to take a quick peek at the competition before making my commitment to Frontal.  It didn’t take long during my survey to realize Frontal’s advantages.  Most of my issues with the likes of MiniBuilder, FlashDevelop, and a few others involved having to learn Adobe’s ActionScript, deal with compilers, or overcome my severe allergic reaction to integrated development environments.

I was sold.  On page two you can see an embedded Frontal photo slideshow I put together in under 15 minutes.

Having grown accustomed to a keep-it-simple approach to infrastructure from working with Twilio and Tropo in the telephony realm,  I readily grokked Frontal’s HTML/CSS -ish framework for developing basic Flash —slide shows, embedded video, animation.  I had just enough room in my working memory to deal with their straightforward script language.  It’s a Javascript variant, which should be second nature for real developers.

The workflow for Frontal is completely intuitive. Their pared down HTML tags are for layout, add the script sauce for interactions, and use Frontal’s own CSS for display.

To help out with interactions, they’ve created two of their own HTML tags, manager and transition, to indicate which HTML elements will be managed for transition effects and how the transitions will take place— slide left, slide right, fade in, etc.  In fact, you can get basic Flash animation without a lick of scripting, just sticking to their HTML and CSS tags.

The site has excellent documentation including plenty of code samples and tutorials to get you quickly off the ground. And they have an incredibly friendly development sandbox where you can rapidly sketch out ideas.

So here’s the entire HTML part for a slideshow I worked out, which will eventually become the core of this blog’s photo album widget:

         


       
       
       
       

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Updated: I meant to add the actual Frontal demo yesterday, but was having WordPress challenges in getting the Flash embedded in my post. I finally slew the “shortcode” dragon, and here it is:
[slides file="slideshow.xml" height="452" width="602"]

I’ve already put my Frontal skills to use by creating a slidehow of hot posts on my home page (top right corner). It’s really just an extension of what I’ve shown you, along with a few well placed event-driven scripts.

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• Frontal
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