Flash Cartoon Animation

Over the weekend I finished reading the book “Flash Cartoon Animation” by Kevin Peaty and Glen Kirkpatrick. Flash cartooning interests me because it could be an easy way to create original content for video sharing sites. A simple Flash cartoon series could generate some income on the sites that share revenue. My previous employer used to create a few Flash cartoons for advertising purposes but I was not involved in that. After Effects is also considered an animation tool and my books on Flash animation recommend enhancing the work in After Effects.

I’m currently devoting most of my time to client projects but I have been doing some PHP research. I’ve been studying CakePHP which brings the Model View Controller architecture to PHP web application development. Microsoft is currently working on MVC for ASP.NET so CakePHP allows me to familiarize myself with the basic concepts. I’m learning about models, controllers, unit testing, scaffolding, and views. MVC is a really hot technology in the web application field now because it allows you to quickly create the admin for a web site. Ruby on Rails made it very popular so now it is being imitated for other scripting languages like PHP and ASP.NET.

In addition to CakePHP, I’ve also been exploring the Joomla content management system because I may be dealing with a web site built using Joomla soon. So far I have learned how to manage the site content and a little bit about applying templates and creating custom designs. I need to learn more about creating custom modules.