Authors Benjamin Chan Jonathan So Shawn Tay Jen Yu WangCHAPTER 1 Introduction to F2 1.1 Background The development of information technology has revolutionized this 21st century. The existence of the World Wide Web continuously changes the life style of modern man as well as the business practice of the market. The invention of the Shockwave Flash software lies in the center of this internet age. The concept of the Internet gives rise to the idea of transporting graphics and animation across the web. Presently, over 436 million people around the globe have access to a variety of Macromedia Flash content. Macromedia Flash is a graphics, animation generation technology that provides a consistent display of graphical experience across different system platforms. Flash allows users to create scalable, interactive animation and 2 dimension graphics for the web, such as animated logos, long-form animations, navigation controls, and even complete websites, all delivered via Shockwave files (.swf, the exported Flash file format). Unlike traditional animation and movie file formats, the content and concept behind Flash is intuitive and easy to grasp for users. At the moment, Macromedia Flash and Director Programs are the two main sources available for authoring web-viewable Flash files. Both softwares rely heavily on an elaborate and expensive graphical interface. (Flash sells for $499, and Director $1,199.) Furthermore, these softwares lack portability across different operating systems (Only available for Windows and Macintosh users). The programming language F2 is an alternative for users to produce viewable Shockwave files. This language has overcome several deficiencies that plague Macromedia Flash and Director programs. The language is designed to enable the user to program simple Flash functionalities in a non-graphical, traditional text-based programming environment. Oh yes, it’s free. 1.2 Design Goal of F2 F2 is a flash graphics-purpose, object-oriented programming language. It is designed to be simple enough that it can achieve fluency similar to many commonly used flash functionalities. The F2 programming language is related to Java but is organized for the purpose of an intuitive coding approach towards flash graphics.1.2.1 Precision Since both Macromedia Flash and Director are graphical environments, certain operations such as the aligning, spacing, sizing and positioning of objects rely entirely on visual estimation. F2 eliminates the need to approximate during situations such as centering, horizontal line up, or exact positioning given a fix pixel number in height. F2 allows one to explicitly specify the object properties and position coordinates. 1.2.3 Availability The availability of Macromedia Flash and Director has been greatly reduced by the expensive cost of these software. Although not as powerful and comprehensive, F2 is an open source program. It is free for all users who want to make flash graphics. Moreover, users running Linux or other popular Unix-based operating systems can overcome the inaccessibility of Macromedia programs through F2. F2 is compatible with all popular operating systems, not limited Windows and Macintosh. Built upon Java, which is extremely portable language, F2 has also inherited this nice feature of Java. 1.2.4 Simplicity F2 is a clear, simple, and intuitive language that allows the user to construct graphics and animation through coding. Based on the concept of Macromedia Flash, F2 attempts to recapitulate the functionalities provide by Macromedia Flash without the incorporation of a user interface. In addition, it is not a graphical extension of a non-graphical language such as Java’s complex graphics libraries Swing or AWT. F2 is in itself, a programming language that can produce simple Flash graphics and animation. 1.2.5 Sharable and Editable Today, JavaScript source code is widely shared over the Internet. In fact, the complete structure behind internet websites is devoted to sharing source codes such as JavaScript. This trend supports the notion that F2 could potential become a widely-shared language like JavaScript. There are several reasons: • As mentioned earlier, F2 is a free language. Combined with the fact that F2 is compatible with all popular operating systems, F2 can potentially capture a large number of beginner-level Flash developers. • As a programming language, F2 incorporates into .swf movies the ease in editing that is only natural to text-based source codes. The difficulty in editing .fla (the editable Flash file format) files through a complex graphical interface gives F2 a comparative advantage.CHAPTER 2 F2 Tutorial F^2 is a simple but powerful animation language. In general, the language and syntax is very similar to Java, especially for variable declarations, arrays, for loops, while loops, and even object and frame declarations. Semi-colons are used as separators. To begin writing F^2, it is important to know the grammatical structure of each animation or movie. Each movie must start with the Header Statements, which are shown in Figure 1, lines 3 to 8. These specify the general characteristics of the movie. The sample program below outputs a movie called mymovie.swf, which has a width and height of 100 pixels, plays at 12 frames per second, contains 100 frames total, and has a white background color (refer to the LRM for the complete list of colors). Also, the Header variables must be declared in capital letters. 1. import “othermovie”; 2. import “othermovie2”; 3. MOVIENAME = “mymovie”; 4. WIDTH = 100; 5. HEIGHT = 100; 6. FPS = 12; 7. NUMFRAMES = 100; 8. BGCOLOR = WHITE; 9. 10. Movie { 11. 12. 13. Frame (50) { 14. 15. 16. } 17. Frame (50) { 18. 19. } 20. } Fig. 1 - Program Structure After the Header we are ready to start declaring variables, creating objects, and adding them to the frames of our movie. All this happens in the Movie body, as declared on line 10 (the end brace is on line 17), in Figure 1. It is important to note that all variable and object declaration must be declared before any Frame blocks, for example within lines 11 and 12 in the sample program. Some declarations are shown in Figure 2 below.1. int x = 12; 2. String y = “jon”; 3. Text myText = new Text (y, 30, BLUE); 4. Circle myCirc = new Circle(10, RED); Fig. 2 – Variable and Object Declarations Now that we have created a
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