Gaia is a front-end Flash framework for AS2 and AS3 and is designed to dramatically reduce development time.

It provides solutions to the challenges and repeated tasks faced with front-end Flash site development, such as navigation, transitions, preloading, asset management, site structure and deep linking.

There is a nice screencast here.

Gaia’s unique event hijacking engine enables you to achieve some really complex behavior with very little code. Additionally, Gaia has scaffolding which generates all the base files for your site, including Flash files, class files, and even exclude.xml files!

It uses SWFObject and SWFAddress and also forces applications to support deep linking (great for SEO purposes).

If you’re developing Flash sites and want to speed up your Flash workflow with rapid development and don’t want to have to learn a complicated framework API, give Gaia a test drive.

Flash toolkit PowerCursor, an amazing idea, helps creating interfaces with the touch feeling. Users can experience touch feelings like roughness, volume, pressure, stickiness or mass in a graphical interface.

The software engine consists of a set of force field objects that can be added to any Flash project: holes, hills, slopes, roughs, walls, whirls, and more. 

How it works?

PowerCursor uses a technique called ‘optically simulated haptic feedback’ to evoke the tactile experience. It simply, using active cursor displacements, guides the user towards preferred positions or communicate properties of the interface to the user. Due to these cursor displacements a hole becomes an easily accessible part of the screen, whereas a bump area is hard to access.

Who can use PowerCursor?

Although skilled programmers might dive deeper into the toolkit’s API to control the PowerCursor objects on a code level, the toolkit can be used by non-programmers with basic Flash skills.

Tweening classes for Flash makes it easier & more stable to create animations based on real time rather than Flash frames.

Tweener is a class used to create tweenings and other transitions via ActionScript code for Flash.

The fluid syntax of Tweener allows it to be used to tween any numeric property of any object of any class, so it is not tied to specific properties of built-in classes such as MovieClips or TextFields.

Once included on SWF movies, Tweener currently takes 8.8kb (AS2 FL2), 9.2kb (AS2) or 10.4kb (AS3) of the total compiled file size. It can be compiled with the Flash IDE, MTASC, or Flex SDK (even with strict rules on).

It’s released and maintained for these versions:

• ActionScript 2.0, for Flash 7+ and Flash Lite 2.0+
• ActionScript 2.0, for Flash 8+
• ActionSctipt 3.0, for Flash 9+

SimpleViewer is a free, customizable Flash image gallery. This flash gallery is only 17kb and can be customized easily to suit your needs.

Customization options from the xml file of the gallery are found here.

Features:

- Intelligent image pre-loading.
- Intuitive image navigation
- Lightweight (17k).
- Customizable interface – Set text color, frame color and width, navigation position.
- Resizable interface – Interface scales to fit browser window.
- Cross platform – Windows/Macintosh/Linux (requires Flash 7 or higher).
- Flash 7 detection. Users without Flash 7 are messaged to upgrade Flash.
- International font support.
- Keyboard Navigation (Cursor keys, Home, End, Page Up/Down)
- Mousewheel navigation
- Optionally right-click to open image in a new window.
- Free!
- flickr support (see bottom)

There is a simple to use enhancement to SimpleViewer which displays a selected flickr photo set from flickr called FlickrViewer.

Macromedia Flash & ajax, by default, has lacking seo features as there is, normally, only 1 url address for all the contents within these web applications.

A seo & deep linking solution for flash and ajax is SWFAddress that is developed by Asual.

SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state. SWFAddress enables a number of important capabilities which are missing in today’s rich web technologies including:

- Bookmarking in a browser or social website
- Sending links via email or instant messenger
- Finding specific content with the major search engines
- Utilizing browser history and reload buttons

Seo & deep linking for Silverlight is on the way. There is already an example for Silverlight.

Papervision3D is a high performance 3D engine for Flash. It features linear texture mapping, optimized for rendering speed and quality. It’s also been designed to be simple and easy to use.

There are many serious projects online that are built using Papervision3D and project is developing more & more as users are contributing with the extensions they have written for the engine.

An attractive example – the shark one- can be found here.

Flash tweening animations can be done easier & with less coding using Movie Clip Tweening Prototypes.

Most features of Movie Clip Tweening Prototypes are from Fuse, which is a powerful Flash animation toolset.

There are also free .fla files of  very nice examples built with the prototype.

Note: This is an ActionScript 2 prototype.

A benchmark test of Movie Clip Tweening Prototypes & some other famous classes can be found here.