Oscar Trelles

At the request of some fellow Flash Designers from Latin America and Spain, I am making available to them a translated version of the original Preloaders. Hopefully, it will be found useful.

When you register a domain name, it needs to be translated by DNS (Domain Name Service) servers into the IP address of the server that is hosting your web site. If you pay $35 to Network Solutions or Register.com, this service is included in the package, and you are free to change the settings of your domain name at any time, including th IP address of its hosting server. When you pay $8.95 to GoDaddy Software to register a domain name, the translation service is provided for free ONLY if you use GoDaddy’s hosting services. So far, no problem. A lot of hosting companies encourage you to use their DNS servers when hosting your web site with them; some of them charge you an extra fee though. From my personal point of view this is a questionable choice, since you are limiting your control over your domain name by letting the hosting company configure its records: you will need them to make the changes for you if, for example, want to change the name of your mail host.
In my case, the company I work for has its own ‘dedicated server’, the one I manage everyday. This is service is provided to us by NTT/Verio, and it is like having your own server, just accesing it remotely, since the company is physicaly located in Colorado. So, my company offered me space in the server for my websites, at no cost. When I called GoDaddy’s Customer Service to ask why I couldn’t change the IP address for my websites, their response was a plain ‘you can’t do that’. Lucky me, NTT/Verio provides free registration in their DNS servers to their Dedicated Server customers. Still, I can’t make changes to my domain name records directly, I have to ask NTT/Verio to do it for me.
In conclusion, if you can use the DNS servers of your hosting company at little o no cost, registering your domain names with GoDaddy is very cheap, just keep in mind the limitations of doing so.

Lately, a lot of people is making questions regarding transparent backgrounds in animations made with Flash. For most cases, the reason is the surprises we find some times when we visit Yahoo and other sites, and from all sudden a rhinno breaks the page you are reading or autum leafs start falling across the screen.
Here is the official word:
How to make a Flash movie with a transparent background
The document states crearly that the feature is only available for Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 3+) and the PC platform.
But curiously, the document (dated back in 1999) also says that movies with transparent backgrounds can be created with Flash version ’3.0 and above’. So, why is that nobody used transparent backgrounds before? Publicly, I mean.

The Bytes-based Preloaders are now available for download from Flashcomponents.net, a site dedicated to collect and share Components for Flash MX. Thanks the people at Flashcomponents.net for the invitation and the quick publication

After some weeks of waiting, the new Bytes-based Preloaders are finally available for download from Macromedia Exchange. Four versions of the original Bytes-based Preloader (also available for download from the Exchange) are included in this package. The main improvement in this version is the use of dynamic drawing to make the Preloaders even lighter, but limited to use with version 6 of the Flash Player. Drop me a note with any questions you would have. Comments ans review are highly appreciated.
With this announcement I am starting my Web Design Blog. Although this blog is being powered by Blogger, it is in part an experiment where the data for the messages is being handled with XML and PHP. This is not something new: I got the idea from a couple of tutorials I found in the Net, featuring this technique. Well, I am trying a new approach, addressing the problem from a point of view more of a designer.