WebDev3000 » Flash

Frontal

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:57:01 +0000

When used properly, Flash is awesome. Unfortunately, a lot of Flash sites look and feel like s**t, and increased use of devices like the iPhone or iPad could start a slow but unstoppable process of “Flash destruction,” if things continue to evolve as they did in the last few years. Speaking for myself and from the user’s point of view, I don’t want Flash to die, I just want to get best content for my desktop computer, and best content for my mobile phone or iPad (when the moment comes, probably v3 or v4 will be decent for my needs….). Considering these, Frontal could be one of those many tools needed to help developers save Flash. Why that?

Think about what Frontal stands for – this is an intuitive scripting and markup language able to generate Flash, thus enabling you to quickly create sites and Web-based apps without having to write countless lines of code! To make it all worth your time, Frontal can easily embed a wide range of Web technologies, including Ajax, HTML/HTML5, JavaScript, and it even offers support for deep linking!

The official page I linked to in the previous paragraph has a lot of examples, tutorials, and a well done user’s guide, so if you want to create fluid layouts and decrease the development time, you know what to do… after all, there’s only one price: a small chunk of your time, since Frontal comes under the terms of the BSD License. Good luck and be sure to come up with the best products that you can – Flash must not die!

Flash Platform Services

Adrian — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:02:22 +0000

If you want an easy way to distribute and monetize your application or to add social and collaborative capabilities to your applications, Adobe can help you with Adobe Flash Platform Services.

Using Distribution service you can share your application to social networks, mobile devices, and desktops. It also enables developers and businesses to track the distribution of and user engagement with their applications. Finally, it enables monetization of applications through ad hosting.

Paid promotion provides guaranteed installs for applications that might not otherwise be easily discovered by users. When you buy promotion for your application through the Distribution Manager, the Gigya network starts offering your application to users when they are embedding another application through the Share menu.

Prices for Distribution service are: for sharing the service is free, for promotion the only price is per-install, tracking is free.

Through Adobe Flash Platform Services Flex developers can easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA (rich Internet applications). For now the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service is only available as beta version. Adobe Flash Collaboration Service beta includes VOIP Audio, Webcam Video, Chat, Real-Time File Sharing, Multi-User Whiteboards, Roles and Permissions and more. To get access to the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service and Adobe Flash Collaboration Service SDK, you will need to create a developer account.

Soon, using Adobe Flash Platform Services you can enable applications to integrate with leading social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

dfGallery

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:34:00 +0000

One of these days, I will go out and start shooting. No, I am not crazy – I’ll take pictures, I won’t shoot anyone! Anyway, guns are illegal here, so we’ll stick to a bunch of images being displayed in a browser. Obviously, it’s about a free Flash image gallery, as you can see below…

… and its name is dfGallery, currently at version 2.0. Requiring only the Apache rewrite module with PHP 5+, php_json and php_curl extensions to be in place on your server, this free Flash gallery comes with a bunch of features, like customizable layout (custom themes/PNG skins), Flickr/Picasa gallery loading, AJAX & Multiple Image Uploads, background music… and it doesn’t stop here!

I don’t know what else there is to say, since the official page should say it all. By the way, the test image gallery with 3D chicks is awesome, you really need to check it out… and see how dfGallery works, too, in the process.

Compatibility: all major browsers, as long as you have the Adobe Flash Player installed and working properly

FLV Player

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:18:33 +0000

This is an awesome morning, I tell you! It’s cloudy and cool, and I just got a link to a great video from a friend of mine. OK, here’s the video, although we’re not going to talk about it. What I have for you today is a video player component for your sites, and I am sure most of you will find it useful. After all, it’s always better to have some video content on a page, riiight?

FLV Player is… a FLV player component, obviously, since its name blows away any trace of doubt, and – even better than just being freely available – it’s open source and highly customizable! While there may not be that much to say about it, there’s one thing worth being mentioned here – FLV Player comes in five player types – mini, normal, maxi, multi, and JS.

The official page has enough documentation to get you started, and I am sure you’ll find FLV Player to be extremely easy to use, especially since the JS player type allows you to easily integrate it with JavaScript, drop the graphical interface and the Flash file, but keep what’s really important: the video content.

If all the above is not enough, here’s the cherry on top of the cake: this player is available under the terms of the Creative Commons and MPL licenses, allowing you to use it without citing the author. Still want more? In that case, I have nothing else to say…

Compatibility: all major browsers, as well as less notorious ones (I tried it in Maxthon and AcooBrowser, worked perfectly in both), but be aware that script blockers may cause problems, as usual

Monoslideshow

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:00:32 +0000

Did I mention the fact that I love slideshows? Probably I did that, but I also hate them, as long as they don’t have pause and zoom features. This time, it’s all about a slideshow/image gallery script that has pause, as well as the ability to display a thumbnails gallery of all images available. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come for free, and it doesn’t have that zoom feature… but at least you can win a license worth 25EUR, if you’re lucky!

WebDev3000 didn’t reach that “givewaway stage,” but we’re working on it. Until that day comes, I think that telling you about the Monoslideshow giveaway currently running on Web Resources Depot can’t hurt… and since you also got that piece of info, let’s take a quick look at this Flash slideshow component, shall we?

With features like professional transitions, Ken Burns effect, and a fully resizeable slideshow window, Monoslideshow is available as an API for both Javscript and Actionscript 3, requiring Flash Player 9 or higher, a text editor, a FTP client, as well as a Website to host it, of course!

Other than the above… I think you should definitely give this piece of code a try, and nothing more.

Compatibility: any major browser, as long as Flash Player is installed and working (just to be sure, you can check the demo)

SilverX

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:11:23 +0000

Microsoft’s Silverlight is trying to steal a serious slice of the market share the ubiquitous Adobe Flash managed to grab so far, and maybe even outrun it. If any of these will happen, that remains to be seen, but since some people are already thinking about converting their Flash content to Silverlight format, I am sure the topic of today’s last article is a very interesting one.

SilverX is a Windows free software for doing exactly what I just said – it takes a SWF file, and it turns it into Silverlight format, allowing you to open the resulting Silverlight 3 solutions with a single click, once the conversion is complete (you should also have Visual Studio 2008 or Expression Blend 3 installed for that).

Currently, vector primitives, images, text and animations are supported, but support for more advanced Flash features, like clipping layers, sounds, buttons, filters and effects is expected to arrive in the near future. That’s it, folks, but I think waiting for a few more months before dropping Flash is the best thing to do now, especially since SilverX is only free for personal use…

Compatibility: Windows XP and Vista, probably also other versions, maybe even Windows 7 (couldn’t test on all of them, obviously)

Bumpbox

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:13:08 +0000

Integrating various media files to your website gets more interesting with each day, as the number of noobs surfing the Internet increases. I didn’t say it with a bad intention, it’s just the fact that older people getting to discover the World Wide Web, and even some of the young ones, simply won’t install video codecs, a PDF reader, an audio player, and other similar “must have” tools, because they think Windows has everything one may need out of the box. Wrooong!

Considering all the above, being able to provide a player/loader for all kinds of files on your site is a big plus, especially when your users don’t have to install anything. This is exactly where Bumpbox steps into the spotlight, offering you a bunch of features that make it stand out of the crowd, like support for displaying PDF files, next to what most people expect from similar scripts, like FLV, image, HTML and SWF support.

Bumpbox is built using MooTools, and its name seems to be related to the fact that the modal box is being displayed with a classy bump effect. Able to work with both remote and local files, Bumpbox uses Flowplayer to deliver FLV files to the end user. That’s all, folks!

Compatibility: all major browsers, but you should try a demo first, just to be sure (I am sure the Adobe Flash Player is needed, anyway…)

Wix

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:36:32 +0000

Any serious designer shouldn’t mess with Web-based site creation tools… or at least that’s what I was almost sure of some years ago. Now, I think that using online resources like Wix can’t hurt, at least in the early stages of a site’s development. Even more, you can come up with quick low-budget designs that won’t look low-budget at all, but let’s see what’s so special about today’s pick, shall we?

With Wix, there’s no need to download anything or learn to use some cryptic programming language – everything is straightforward, with drag and drop site building that should be easy even for my grandmother. Too bad she has hearing problems, so adding sounds and various multimedia elements may be a real issue to her… but I am sure you’ll enjoy doing that!

Other than the above, Wix comes with a feature called “Areas,” allowing easy layout building, and the list of elements that you can include in your site also has Twitter feeds available! (yes, I still can’t understand what’s so special about Twitter, but I am sure a lot of people will appreciate this feature)

To take a look at what can be done with Wix, you should take a look here. Other than that… Basically, Wix is free, but upgrading to a Premium account will give you a lot of additional features, as professional hosting, premium support, the ability to use your own domain, and no Wix ads.

Compatibility: any major browser running on a computer with Adobe Flash Player properly installed (you should also be careful about content blocking plugins you may have)

FlashBookmarks

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:43:43 +0000

Bookmarks… oh, my, bookmarks! No matter how much I try, I simply can’t have them sorted properly. Sure, I use categories and tags, but I always end up with some bookmarks completely messed up, while others are nicely ordered. Oh, well… while the Flash component I’ll tell you about next won’t help me solve that issue, it will surely make your site much easier to bookmark by its visitors!

FlashBookmarks is a fully customizable Flash CS3 component (and absolutely free, too!) that allows you to include social bookmarking within your site without breaking a sweat. Social bookmarking sites available with it include Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and Reddit, but these are not all of them, obviously.

Speaking about the looks, FlashBookmarks is customizable from one end to another, allowing you to choose the icons to display, font properties, or the size of the icons. Well… that’s it. If you’re still looking for some social bookmarking goodies for your site, then FlashBookmarks may be exactly what you need!

Compatibility: FlashBookmarks requires Flash CS3 from the designer working with it, and a modern browser with FlashPlayer 9 installed & in working state (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, IE, and so on)

MegaZine

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:11:14 +0000

These days, delivering multimedia content gets more and more interesting with each day. I am not thinking about the low prices of HD cameras and the impressive amount of storage offered by most portable drives available these days, because sometimes you don’t need to get out and grab your own content. For example, think about various school projects…

… and no matter what you need to deliver, as long as we’re talking about multimedia, MegaZine is a great platform to use. Why am I saying this? Well, here are the ingredients used to forge MegaZine: Flash, ActionScript 3, and a lot of skill. What’s let for you?

This is the best part of it all – with MegaZine, all you need to do is add your content and mess with the settings available. The result? Online awesomeness!

MegaZine is easily configured via XML files, and its features list includes a control bar for easier navigation, page caching, GUI tooltips, a very flexible interface, support for audio and video content, excellent image gallery functionality, and many more. Not convinced yet? Well, then I think you should try the demo!

Compatibility: any modern browser that can handle YouTube won’t have any problems with MegaZine, so…