The last week's giveaway, "5 Visifire Single Developer licenses" has ended right now, the winners are selected and announced below.

What is Visifire?

For any developer building apps or websites using the Microsoft platforms, Visifire is very useful resource for creating charming charts.

It is a data visualization controls kit which is compatible with WPF, Silverlight + Windows Phone 7 and can be used with any server-side language or just HTML.

Many chart types are supported with all having attractive animations and zooming. Also, there are linear + vertical gauges as well.

The winners

• Roger Willis (comment #406689)
• Martin Lundberg (comment #404041)
• Carlos (comment #404061)
• Amaiko (comment #405982)
• Jose Miguel (comment #406544)

Thanks very much to everyone on joining the giveaway and congratulations to the winners.

Visifire, a professional set of charting tools that works on WPF, Silverlight & Windows Phone 7, is giving away 5 "Single Developer Licenses with Premium Support" (worth $499 each) to WebResourcesDepot readers.

Please check the details of joining this giveaway at the bottom of this post and here are more details about this exciting resource.

What is Visifire?

It is a multi-targetted kit of data visualization controls which is compatible with WPF, Silverlight & Windows Phone 7 which uses the same API for developing in all these platforms.

Visifire is not dependent on any server-side technology and can be used with almost any language including ASP, ASP.Net, SharePoint, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby or just simple HTML.

It has support for many chart types like bar, column, line, are, pie, stock, radar, stack, doughnut and more. Circular and linear gauges can be created too.

All the visualizations are very good-looking, interactive (responds to mouse-overs and clicks) and have shiny animations.

It is possible to zoom into charts by selecting a part of it to view only the selected portion.

They can be styled/themed easily and edited with Microsoft Expression Blend.

How to join the giveaway?

In order to win one of the licenses given away:

• Share this giveaway with a tweet: "Just joined the @Visifire – Windows Phone Charting Tools giveaway at WebResourcesDepot – http://goo.gl/igJKg" (click to tweet easily)
• Follow @visifire Twitter user
• Share your tweet URL within the comments

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=2494 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5

The winners will be selected with the query below on 6 October 2011 (1 week later) and good luck everyone.

HTML5 video is great as it doesn't require any 3rd party plugins and works in most mobile browsers. However, it is not supported in every browser.. yet.

Also, browsers supporting the <video> – <audio> tags require different codecs and have inconsistent player UIs.

MediaElement.js is a jQuery plugin which enables you to use the <video> tag with one H.264 file (you can also include OGG or WebM, but you don't have to).

If the player doesn't support it, the plugin replaces the player with a Flash or Silverlight-powered one.

There is also MediaElementPlayer.js for building a complete player that looks and functions the same in all browsers.

SilverX is a free software which aims to help Silverlight designers/developers for converting existing Flash content to Silverlight.

It supports most of the Flash’s basic features like: vector primitives, images, texts & animations.

SilverX can be used for other scenarios as many applications has "export to SWF features" which means they can be converted to Silverlight now (ex: exporting CorelDraw vector graphics to SWF file and then convert it to Silverlight XAML).

The software has clipping layers, sounds, buttons & filters/effects in the roadmap.

Descry is a project to demonstrate the power of data and information visualization as a communication tool.

Currently, there are 4 examples provided, all built with Silverlight & come with the source codes.

There are also 2 very nice articles shared on visualization:

• Visualization Trends For The Noosphere
• 5 Tips For Building Effective Infographics

For a demo, click here.

P.S. Descry is not a toolkit. It contains classes and fragments of code or design elements that can be reused.

Open Video Player Initiative is a community project by companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Akamai & for sharing player code and best practices around video player development and monetization

It comes with 2 versions: for Flash & Silverlight.

A ready-to-deploy video player and a configuration tool (for easier configurations) is provided besides the source code.

Video player can be totally customized from colors to buttons & features included.

Demos for the player can found here.

Infragistics Quince, a website with a stunning interface (built with Silverlight), is presenting user experience design patterns in a well-categorized format.

There is a wide list of patterns that vary from breadcumbs to alternating row colors and dashboards to forms.

Patterns can be browsed by:

• user tasks
• tag relationships
• wireframe

Even if the content is not what you are looking for, the usability of the website offers a quality UX inspiration.

OpenZoom is an open source framework for creating zoomable user interfaces.

The framework is similar to Silverlight’s Deep Zoom control (see WRD post), but for Flash.

The power behind OpenZoom is Flex MultiScaleImage component, which is built on top of the OpenZoom framework.

The name is same wih the Silverlight Deep Zoom’s built-in control & the usage is similar too.

The component has built-in support for keyboard / mouse activities & supports Deep Zoom, Zoomify & OpenZoom images.

For now, OpenZoom can sound to specific, but considering its abilities & usage areas, we’ll probably be hearing more about it soon.

P.S. The framework is so fresh & still in development but it can be downloaded (& it is documented).

Seadragon is a technology, by Microsoft, for deeply zooming images of any size. It provides almost perfect transitions independent from the sizes of the images.

Seadragon Ajax is an interface for using/embedding this technology to any website.

Seadragon can be used in 2 ways:

• By uploading images to Photozoom & use Embed Builder
• Compose a deep zoom image with Deep Zoom Composer & upload the images to your website

Developers can customize viewers & controls with the Seadragon Ajax Library. It is also available at the Silverlight platform.

Visifire is a set of open source Microsoft Silverlight chart components.

Visifire lets you create stunning charts with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML in minutes.

In order to use this great Silverlight chart library, you don’t need to know anything about Silverlight. Simple HTML knowledge is enough.

To see how beautiful the results are, check the Chart Gallery or Chart Designer.