Download Progress Bar and Flash + After Effects

Today I added a progress bar to my ASP.NET page for downloading YouTube videos. I’ll probably blog about this later at http://weblogs.asp.net/rrobbins/.  I moved the code that does the file download to a web service. It makes more sense to have a web service handle the file download instead of using an asynchronous task initiated by the page itself.  The WebClient object has a method for getting the file download progress as a percentage so I took advantage of that. Then I used a Script Manager to create the JavaScript proxy for the web service and wrote some JavaScript to call the web service methods. One of the web service methods gets the download progress and returns the percentage to the client while the other method is passed the url and file name of the file to download and returns a message indicating success or failure. The client page contains a progress bar which only needs to be supplied with the download progress percentage at regular intervals.

Last night I browsed through the Adobe Illustrator CS Wow! book and read a chapter on “Making Artwork for a Flash Animation“. This was the only chapter on using Illustrator in combination with Flash but it is exactly what I was looking for. Today I got the Amazon book I ordered on using Flash with After Effects, “Flash + After Effects” by Chris Jackson. I want to have all the After Effects books available because I’m putting a lot of effort into mastering that software but I managed to overlook this book. It was published in 2008 so maybe it just wasn’t available until recently. According to this book there is an amazing new set of Puppet tools introduced in After Effects CS3. The Puppet tools allow you to animate the joints of a character.