SmartMouth is now available for download and purchase. Check out this super quick demo:

We’re keeping quite busy around here! Here’s a quick round-up of some recent articles that I’ve published.

5 Flash Animation tips in 5 days on the Peachpit blogs:

• Flash Animation Five Tips in Five Days: Tip 1 – Easing
• Flash Animation Five Tips in Five Days: Tip 2 – Distribute to Layers
• Flash Animation Five Tips in Five Days: Tip 3 – Bitmap Masking
• Flash Animation Five Tips in Five Days: Tip 4 – SWF History
• Flash Animation Five Tips in Five Days: Tip 5 – Targeting Nested Symbols with ActionScript

Also on the Peachpit site, there’s an excerpt on Character Animation from our recent book with Chris Georgenes.

I also have a new video tutorial over at ActiveTuts+ on Creating Advanced Motion Presets in Flash with JSFL.

In addition to the recent advice page I added on Learning Flash, I’m working on a page about becoming a graphic designer/Flash animator/digital artist. It includes some of my background and lessons learned. That article is pretty much on hold as we work toward the SmartMouth release (hopefully just another week), and I will pick it up after that.

I recently completed a book with with star animator Chris Georgenes entitled Animation with Scripting for Adobe Flash Professional CS5 Studio Techniques. My wife AJ, the other half of Ajar Productions, also served as Technical Editor on the book. As you can imagine, we’re very excited about this book’s release!

Here’s the info from the back cover:

In Animation with Scripting for Adobe Flash Professional CS5 Studio Techniques, top animation designer Chris Georgenes and designer/developer Justin Putney reveal how to create and successfully animate characters in Adobe Flash Professional CS5 and how to push the limits of timeline animation with stunning visual effects using ActionScript® 3.0.

This Studio Techniques book is designed for intermediate or advanced users who understand the basics of Flash and want to create a more immersive interactive experience. The book includes coverage of storyboarding, 2D character design and rigging, character animation, visual FX with code, workflow automation, and publishing your animation on the web and to mobile devices.

You can order the book from these fine retailers:

Peachpit | Amazon | Adobe Press

Let us know if you have any questions about the book. We hope you find it useful!

*** UPDATE (11/3/2010) ***
SmartMouth is now available: http://smartmouth.ajarproductions.com
—

Here’s a little sneak preview of a new extension that I’ve been working on:

Short Version

See SmartMouth in action in a matter of seconds…

Full Version (10 min.)

UPDATE (9/6/2010): I’ve added thumbnail previews of the mouth shapes to the SmartMouth extension.

UPDATE (10/22/2010):
Nearly all systems are go. We’ve completed the license docs, the payment system is ready, and SmartMouth is almost ready for release. We were hoping to have it ready for release the week of Adobe MAX, but we still need another week to complete testing, produce user documentation, and make some minor refinements. At this point, we’re hoping to have SmartMouth ready for release during the first week of November. If you’d like to be notified of this release, you can sign up for our newsletter.

I’ve had a number of users contacting me regarding ways to learn Adobe Flash Professional. There are a lot of great resources available for users interested in animation, design, and development in Flash.  Whether you’re an advanced user, or totally new to Flash, there are tons of resources available. Over the years, I’ve read dozens of books and visited hundreds of sites. So, I decided to put together a single page with many of my favorite Flash learning links. Enjoy!

FrameSync is a Flash extension, originally released nearly 2 years ago, that allows you rapidly lip-sync your characters with an audio track. With this newest release, you can sync your characters even faster and easier than before.

In the process of putting together a Flash CS5 animation book with Chris Georgenes, I started looking at new features that could be added to FrameSync based on the updated extensibility layer in Flash Professional CS5. In addition to that, I had a few requests from users about displaying label-less keyframes in the FrameSync panel. While I was under the hood making these changes, I made a few other improvements as well. Hope you enjoy!

New Features!

The new features for version 2.0 are as follows…

(more…)

Here’s a sneak peek of the new version of  the FrameSync Flash extension. These new features should save you even more time!

Sorry that the audio quality is so low. The video was recorded in a hurry. Now, back to work…

UPDATE (8/16/10): These features are now available.