Sandy is an open source & user friendly 3D engine for Flash (AS2 & AS3).

This 3D Flash library is able to render about 2000-5000 polygons correctly on a pretty recent computer with really correct screen resolution.

Some features of Sandy:

• Viewing volume clipping for perfect rendering
• Advanced shading effects.
• Material system to easily change your objects appearance.
• Advanced and easy object management.
• Advanced camera management.
• Complex object loading thanks to the .ASE and .WRL files parser , but also Collada and 3DS files for AS3.
• Flash player 7 to 9 compatibility.
• Both MTASC and Macromedia compilers compliant for AS2 and Flash CS3 and FlexBuilder for AS3 versions.
• Several 3D primitives.

NETTUTS presents a very nice tutorial on "Creating A MooTools Photo Gallery".

All the steps of creating this MooTools gallery is very well described and the source code is ready to download for instant use.

The gallery has a functional interface which enables you to browse between thumbnails and the original-size images easily.

P.S. It is not dynamic & all the thumbnails are loaded when the gallery loads. For this reason it may be suitable for galleries with <30-40 images.

firefly is a totally different chat system which can power your websites.

By adding a line of JavaScript, your visitors can chat with each other in an overlayed screen.

Users can:

• See other users mouse movements,
• Choose avatars,
• See the chat history,
• Howmany people are already in the page.

As a developer, all I can ask for more is an API that enables integrating any userbase to the system for adding auto avatars, names to the users etc. Considering this is a fresh chat service, in the future, why not?

You should definitely give firefly a try & will probably be impressed.

This is a JavaScript time picker with a drag’n drop enabled clock interface.

Usage is very simple, hour and minute hands can be dragged & dropped to the desired value. Clicking to the AM-PM also enables you to switch between them.

This time picker is highly configurable including the "starting hour", sizes & images used.

It requires Mootools and the document to be a XHTML doctype to run. Download package includes all the necessary resources including the PSD files.

Flare is an ActionScript library for visualizing data like creating charts, graphs and complex interactive graphics.

The library supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. It provides a modular design which enables you to create customized techniques easier.

Flare has a tutorial which will help you to start using it and its API is well documented.

To see its power, check the demos.

IDEA (Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement) has conducted a survey about Factors That Improve Online Experiences which you might possibly find interesting & helpful.

The report emphasizes facts like the importance of visual design & ease of use. And also, it points out interesting information like "designers being overly optimistic about visitors’ ability to maintain orientation".

You can download the full report as a PDF file or read the shorter executive summary.

If you want to see the methodology behind the survey, click here

P.S. Thanks to Michael from IDEA for suggesting this resource.

ProtoChart is an open source canvas chart library built with Prototype.

This library is highly inspired from Flot, Flotr and PlotKit & it enables us to create different chart types on the fly.

Features of this chart library:

• Line, bar, pie, curve, mix, and area charts available
• Multiple data series on same graph
• Highly customizable legend support
• Customizable grid, grid border, background
• Customizable axis-tick values (both x and y)
• Supports: IE6/7, FF2/3 and Safari
• Even works on an iPhone!

As IE6 does not support the canvas tag, Excanvas library is used for compatibility.

It is possible to find design resources in many themes. But, when it comes to oriental design resources, they are hard to find out as there are few free ones.

This is a collection of oriental Photoshop brushes & vector images for more mysterious designs : ).

The collection includes Chinese dragons, Japanese, Chinese & Arabic texts, people, houses, mosques & various figures.

You may also like:

• 55 Free Human Brush Sets And Vector Images - Giant Design Pack
  
• 64 Beautiful And Free Nature Brush Sets And Vectors - Giant Design Pack
• Photoshop Heart Brushes Collection
• Free Vector World Maps Collection
  

Important: Some resources are not free for commercial use. Make sure you check the licensing before using them.

Oriental Photoshop Brushes

Dragons & Animals

Here is a GIMP version of the Chinese Dragon brushes below.

Read the rest of this entry »

haXe is an open source & multiplatform programming language.

A code written with haXe can be compiled to JavaScript, Flash (AS2 & AS3), PHP and NekoVM which is all the idea behind the project: "let the developer choose the best platform to do a given job".

haXe has installers for Windows, OSX & Linux and the platform is well-documented.

For writing haXe code, plugins for several popular editors can be found here.

Logdy is a real-time web analytics service that provides all the information you may need about your website.

With an easy to use, plain and Ajaxed interface, Logdy makes it very easy to drill down every detail even to the user level.

For example, you can filter: 

Visitors from x country > who used Google > reached your contact page > using "contact" keyword.

Logdy enables you to reach data (in real-time) like:

• Visitors: daily, weekly, monthly summaries, countries, languages, timezones.
• Sources of visitors: keywords, search engines, referring pages, referring domains and more.
• Visitor navigation: entry pages, exit pages, pages popularity, visit depths, visit duration.
• Outbound links and pages.
• Technical stuff: browsers, browser types, platforms, screen resolutions, screen color depths.

A beautiful feature is "outbound links report". It shows which links your visitors click on your website & even magnify the users who clicked them like every other report.

You can instantly share your analytics with other users with the special "share link" which Logdy creates & also get reports to your e-mail.

With a 1-click "cookie install", you may choose not to track yourself in the analytics for more objective results.

To sum up, Logdy is a very user-friendly service for reaching the deepest parts of your stats in real-time.

The service has a free 1 website plan besides the bigger & paid ones. You can find the pricing for the service here.

P.S. This post is a sponsored site review.