information about the site

SITE DESIGN

The information below pertains to the Flash incarnation of this website and was written after its last overhaul in 2009.

Since 2009 Flash has become less and less relevant. At the end of this year, 2020, Flash will no longer be supported by any browser, nor will Adobe, who acquired Macromedia, be making any further updates to it.

I still like the idea of the visuals leading the navigation, hence I re-created a version of this site that uses plain html and gifs to achieve a similar look and feel.

Once upon a time readers seemed interested in this kind of stuff. I'm not sure anyone really cares now.

below, vakras.com in March 2020 prior to its overhaul

The concept behind this site was to create a design in which the visuals, without written text, dictate the navigation. With this site I took advantage of the new possibilities offered by electronic publishing. A publication, at least electronically, need not be of static pages of the kind found in a printed book.

This site was built using Macromedia Flash 4 in April 2001. It was built on an Apple Macintosh computer (a PPC G3 on OS 8.6). Since March 2008 a dual 800mhz PPC G4 Mac has been used. The G4 was purchased used. It can run both the traditional Mac OS and the newer Mac OS X, and can boot in the old Mac OS if that is required. The purchase of the G4 was made necessary after buying a new Intel Mac in December 2007. (The G4 is run by Tiger 10.4.11, and can boot up on 9.2.2).

Modifications to the "fla" files on this site are still made using Macromedia's Flash 4, run in Mac Classic, even though I have Adobe's Flash CS3 installed and Macromedia Flash MX. The newer MX and CS3 Flash versions somehow alter the code for the preloader, even if the only change I make to a file is to the email address link. (The CS3 version of Adobe's Flash was used to re-edit a micro-version of my site, in flash, in the Greek language - which is something older flash versions could not do:
http://www.vakras.com/fantastos )

A screenshot of the launching of Flash 4 on my G4 Mac appears below:

Because Apple computers now use Pentium Processors instead of the native Mac "PPC" processor, new Macs no longer run what is now referred to as Mac Classic, but they do run Windows. On my Intel Mac I run Windows XP via Parallels, and have since bought the Windows version of Flash 4, so that future modifications in Flash 4 will not mangle the preloader. There is one proviso to editing FLA files on different platforms, fonts used in the movie have to be re-selected otherwise they will be re-edited. Below is a screenshot of the launching of the Windows version of Flash 4 on my Intel Mac running Windows:

As a consequence of using Windows, I have come to appreciate how irksome the Windows OS is. It is impossible for me to understand why anyone would voluntarily even consider buying a Windows PC with its constant histrionic warnings of impending doom because of the vulnerabilities of the Windows OS to viruses, and to Windows' endless other warnings! So why did I buy Windows XP OS and Windows versions of programs to run on the Windows partition on my Mac? Annoyance. I had an entire suite of programs which work only up to Mac OS 9.2.2. With the Intel Mac none of these programs work. I had every intention of not buying a Mac ever again because of the feeling of betrayal. However, after experiencing Windows it is impossible that I ever consider buying a Windows machine.

Why Windows is awful

Why Apple should be avoided if you require customer service
Apple Sux

Merits of Windows
Of course there is merit with the Windows OS; Microsoft, unlike Apple, supports its customers.

With Apple, a user may have bought a copy of Photoshop 6 (released in 2000) for their Mac, and find that with subsequent revisions to the Apple OS it has to work in emulation ("Classic") mode; and then find, as happened with the introduction OSX 10.5 (Leopard), that it won't work at all. The same user might buy another version of Photoshop, for instance Photoshop 8 (CS1), which works on OSX, and continues to work on Intel Macs via "Rosetta", but realise that with new releases of its OS Apple might jettison PPC support. Apple, unlike Microsoft, does not realise (or care) that the OS is merely a host for programs. People don't buy Apple computers to listen to the Apple chime on start-up and admire the bouncing icons on the dock as programs launch. Apple expects that with every few revisions of their OS that users of their product should not only buy new hardware, but replace third party software suites already owned, even though these programs still fulfill their intended function; meanwhile, the Windows versions of these programs released for versions of Windows as early as Windows 98 (such as for instance Macromedia Flash 4) still work in Windows XP (and most likely in Windows 7) in 2010.

The graphics on this site were created in Adobe's Photoshop 5. The photography used for the Photoshop images is my own. The camera used is a Pentax Super-A (film camera). Imageready was used to optimise the images and to export the Photoshop files as gifs with transparent (0 alpha) areas.

The html was edited manually.... (though I have gone on to use GoLive and Netscape Composer - which is now SeaMonkey Composer)

The background sound for this site was created by Jac Grenfell. The track is titled "voiceless"

Jac' site:

This site was revised 20/6/2009 and almost all of the sounds have been removed. Only the above-mentioned "voiceless" and an effect titled "Xmuzikc" by "Xmuzik" (downloaded from http://www.flashkit.com/soundfx/Electronic) remain.

The Demetrios Vakras site, the surreal & fantastic, was first launched on the internet on the 15/9/1999. I had paid for someone to build it and it looked nothing like this! After many facelifts it was completely rebuilt from scratch in April 2001. And, although I really didn't need to build another site, I thought that if I built one with Flash it might assist me in gaining work in web/graphic design, so that maybe I could earn the income to afford the time to create real art: oil paintings. In Australia this is wishful thinking. In Australia it is not what you can do that matters, but rather it is who you know or whether you have a piece of paper to prove your abilities. No amount of physical proof of one's abilities is compelling enough to overcome this shortcomming ..... And, as the only art that sells in Australia is either "Australiana" or the internationally celebrated faux-avant-garde** I haven't got a chance in hell of making money from my art....Nor is there any chance that I will make any money from graphic/web-design...

One of the considerations that went into the design of this website in 2001 was that electronic publications in the form of a website are not limited to a static printed page - hence the animations and sounds. Why create an online version of a static page if the medium allows you to do more?

** the art described as avant-garde is not. Nearly a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp declared "found objects" to be art. And, it was 1938, at the International Exhibition of Surrealism (Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris) that Salvador Dali exhibited his installation Rainy Taxi. It can no longer be avant-garde!

Below, one of the first modifications to my old site, an animated gif created with Fireworks 1

2002 REVIEW of this site

see the review

FLASH RESOURCES

the url was:
http://www.extremeflash.com
now there is a redirect

tuorials and resources for animated buttons, preloaders and java-script %preloaders

the sound-effects come from this site. Great fonts, plus tutorials for preloaders, etc

tutorials on preloaders, + %preloaders, etc

post script [2009]

We all know that Steve Job's iPad is an iDud. Below are some of the sites that you will not see using the iDud
(or any of the other "i" devices by Apple):

~NOTE: all of the above sites work flawlessly on mobile devices running Android 2.1~

Apple's television advertising of their iPad in Australia claimed "all the world's websites in your hands". Apple knows this is a deceptive misleading claim; well before the airing of these advertisements Jobs had already asserted that his mobile devices will not now, or ever, load Flash sites. Jobs wrote this in April 2010 "Thoughts on Flash" http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash .

In the UK Apple made the same claim about the iPhone. The UK's "Advertising Standards Authority" found, in summary, that Apple's claims were deceptive/misleading (http://www.asa.org.uk/Complaints-and-ASA-action/Adjudications/2008/8/Apple-(UK)-Ltd/TF_ADJ_44891.aspx). These advertisements were pulled.

I made a complaint to Australia's regulating body ... which, in typical Australian fashion, came up with an excuse to do nothing and allowed these deceptive advertisements to continue.

Despite Jobs' antipathy toward Flash, users of his company's devices have demonstrated that Flash functionality is something that many want. When the (partially) Flash-capable SkyFire browser launched on Apple's "App Store" it it sold 100 thousand copies in a few hours, and hundreds of thousand copies since; despite SkyFire's limited Flash-player support which does not allow users to navigate those sites which can only be navigated via Flash-player. Other tablet manufacturers such as Samsung (Galaxy) are, unlike Apple, manufacturing tablets which are fully compliant with Flash-player 10.1. And, as I type this, previews of RIM's forthcoming "Playbook" show that it too offers Adobe Flash. Increasingly, Apple is isolated in its stance

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20022429-233.html
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-Tab-T-Mobile/dp/B00480P67K
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/16/rim_demonstrates_playbook_with_faster_web_browsing_than_apples_ipad.html