Open Source Options for Graphic Design?

[Chris Dawson]

I'd pipe in and say that you might look at using Ajax instead of
Flash.  You can author it completely with a text editor, and the
prototype.js library (and associated scriptalicious libraries built on
top of that) are really easy to use.  You can do things like
fade-in/fade-out, drag and drop, and lots of other cool things that
used to be only in the realm of Flash.  I definitely like Flash, but
it is impossible to author (with a few exceptions) without the Flash
dev environment, and that makes me more interested in Ajax since I can
make changes and fix bugs from within a terminal window.

Chris

On 1/9/06, Dave M G <martin at autotelic.com> wrote:
> Ubuntu Users,
>
>         I'm a Windows refugee, finding my home with Ubuntu Linux. So far,
> everything is running smoothly. I've switched over to open source
> options for all my tasks that I used to do with Windows.
>
>         I do some web design, mainly for friends and groups that I associate
> with. I've been slowly switching all my web site development from things
> like GoLive and PhotoShop to Quanta and Gimp. And, on the results end,
> making my web sites completely W3C compliant and CSS driven for layouts.
>
>         So far so good. However, with one of the web sites I work on, some of
> the people who rely on me to design it for them are really keen to have
> a Flash component for part of it.
>
>         Now, to be completely accurate, they don't really care *how* the web
> site is made, whether it's Flash or whatever else I use. It's just that
> a previous web designer used Flash for this one element, and so that's
> the model they are starting from.
>
>         What they want is relatively simple. On the top page, they want to
> rotate through a few images. Right now, the Flash object that handles
> this task just cycles through the images like a slide show, flashing
> white in between each image.
>
>         I'd like to be able to accommodate them with at least some animated
> design element that meets their desires, but I want to be able to do it
> with an open source solution.
>
>         So I looked on the web and saw that there are open source methods of
> creating Flash objects, but that they are extremely complicated (to my
> newbie eyes) to install. I looked into animated PNGs, and found that
> there's all sorts of controversy between aPNG file formats and MNGs...
> and that's even before one considers issues of browser support.
>
>         This being a pro-open source group, can anyone help me come to grips
> with what my options are with open source choices for delivering
> animated content? I'm a little overwhelmed by the information I'm
> getting on the web.
>
>         And, while I'm at it, are there any good mailing lists that are dedicated to open source graphic designers that anyone knows about or can recommend? I just did a Google search and didn't see any.
>
>         Any advice would be much appreciated.
>
> --
> Dave M G
>
>
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