GlassBox, a JavaScript library using Prototype and script.aculo.us helps creating transparent border, colorful layouts and "Flash-like" effects.
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.
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.
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.
TiltViewer is a free 3D Flash image viewer application with an impressive interface.
The application responds to the mouse movements and creates a full 3D effect with new image sets falling, old ones disappearing, zooming an image and flipping it to see the details.
Images can be added to the gallery from a XML file or a flickr account.
TiltViewer comes with 2 versions. A free version with a "TiltViewer" link and a Pro version which is paid with no links and more customization options.
P.S. This flash gallery is built with Away3D, a realtime 3D engine for Flash.
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:
XML Flash galleries are very easy to use & update. When there is a flickr support too, than it is great as it will be totally automated.
Polaroid Gallery is a free flash gallery with splash effect that can get the image data from an XML file or a flickr account.
Pictures is automatically scaled, centered and smoothed when they are loaded. Splash loading effect is totally random, this makes the look of the gallery different every time it is loaded. Images can be dragged & dropped anywhere in the gallery.
Besides the image gallery SWF file, FLA source can be downloaded too.
Open Flash Chart is a free flash chart library which flash charts can be generated via data from php, perl, python, java, asp, asp.net (any dynamic languge) or a text file.
Using Open Flash Chart is as simple as pointing the data to this free flash chart object. To make it simpler, there are ready to use PHP, Perl, Python, Java classes.
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.
- 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.
As there are very nice flash & ajax image galleries, this flash gallery application is a bit different from the others as the galleries are created from a desktop application and then uploaded to your website.
Slideroll Gallery AV (formerly Picklish), is a flash image & video gallery tool that lets you create your galleries from a simple drag and drop interface. PC users can also record their own narration with their galleries.
Snarf photos feature of Slideroll Gallery AV lets you to download any images from a website or a rss feed directly into your gallery.
Look and feel of the galleries can be customized and after uploading the image & video gallery to your website, html editing is possible for any tweakings needed.
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.
