Unit 31 - P5, M3, D1

P5

 

Rollovers – A rollover is an image or link that when you hover over it with your mouse it changes shape, colour or design. Rollovers are often used on websites on images so that they can have two pictures on offer without taking up much space. They are often used on links so that you know when you are hovering over a link.

An advantage to a rollover is that it looks interesting and adds to the interactivity of the website. A disadvantage though is that you have to have a newer browser to use it as older browsers do not support it.

 

a {

  display: block;

  width: 100px;

  height: 30px;

  background-image: url(default.png);

  color: white;

 }

 a:hover {

  background-image: url(rollover.png);

  color: lightpink;

 }

 

E-cards - These are cards that you send to someone electronically that contain messages, pictures, sound clips or videos, they are often sent over email. Advantages of this over a conventional card is that these are free to send and can be custom made depending on the person you send them too, they also allow you to add videos and sound clips that you can’t do on a normal card. A disadvantage of this over a normal card is that they can be slightly impersonal. On e-cards the technologies used are usually swf’s, mp3’s and gifs as these are simple files that are not large in file size. Sound can play a big part in e-cards as you can personalize a voice message to give to someone and this can be very personal and thoughtful and also a different way of delivering your message.

Many e-card websites offer many facilities to use such as creating your own, choosing from their selection and sharing it on social networking sites.

E-cards also have their use in viral marketing, if someone creastes a popular and eye catching e-card then it can catch peoples attention and they can send it to their friends and it can spread really easily.

 

Output Device Issues

When creating animations developers often make them able to be used on various different devices such as PC’s, billboards, mobiles and tablets. When making animations for PC’s there are not many constraints as they have high processing power, large number of colours, many supported formats and high resolution. The problems start to arise when you try to move this over to a smaller device such as a mobile, or a bigger device such as a billboard. The mobile would have less processing power which means it would not be able to cope with running an animation made for PC’s. Not only this but mobiles do not have the huge range of supported formats that PC’s have which means they will not be able to run the animation. Also, the size of the screen will be smaller and this means the animation would have to be shrunk down to fit on the screen. These are some of the reasons that developers have to produce different types of the same animation that can be viewed on different devices.

 

M3

The relationship between quality and file size is very simple when it comes to media files. The better quality an image or video is, the larger its file size. This is because when we say an image, for example, is a higher quality, this generally means that there are more pixels per inch than in the lower quality version of the same image. And as we all know, the more pixels there are in an image the larger the file size. This also works the other way. If an image has a low file size it either means that it is really small or that it is not a good quality meaning that it contains less pixels. Also, if you compress a file to reduce the size of the file, it will reduce the quality by getting rid of some of the information and reducing the quality. This clearly shows the link between the two.

 

These are the frame disposal settings given on Adobe Photoshop

Frame disposal is a key part in any animation and is used pretty much all of the time. Most of the time there are three frame disposal options; Default, Dispose and Do Not Dispose. The default setting just does whatever is normal for what software you are using and what your animation consists of. The dispose setting will turn frame disposal on and what this does is get rid of the old frame and its images to make way for the new frame. This means that the old frame will not be seen through the new frame. Do not dispose is where the old frame stays in place and the new frame is placed on top of it so you can see the old frame through the new one. This setting is good if your animation just adds things to the first frame in the next frames. The do not dispose setting is good for keeping the file size small because it just means that small things are added to an existing frame instead of having whole new frames with different and more data.

 

Auto crop is that something that is automatically done to the frames in your animation. What this does is cut down the size of the frames to get rid of any wasted space and help to save some room and slightly reduce the file size.

 

	This is the autocrop setting in Adobe Fireworks

 

 

Number of colours -

The number of colours in an animation affects the file size. The more colours there are the more information that goes with it and this means that the file size would be larger than if the same animation had less colours.

 

Physical size of animated image –

An animation will have a larger file size if the physical size of an image in the animation is bigger. The bigger the image is, unless it has just been stretched, the larger the file size is. This is because the image would have many more pixels, more information and in turn a larger file size.

 

Resolution -

The resolution of an animation is how many pixels it has, and the more pixels it has the more data that has to be stored which means a larger file size. A lower resolution would mean a smaller file size but it would also compromise the picture quality.

 

Content of animation -

The file size depends greatly on the content of the animation. If for example, an animation contained many large images and sound clips then it would have a larger file size than an animation that just had a few small images. This is because the more things there are in an animation the more information that has to be stored.

 

Number of frames -

The amount of frames in an animation will change the file size. The more frames there are the larger the file will be. This is because each frame has information on it and the more frames, the more information that needs to be stored.