Hemlock is an open-source Flash framework which offers the richness of Flash & the scalability of XMPP.

It eases the creation of real-time & multi-user applications like games, collaboration and more.

Generally, real-time applications are handled with polling where a database is queried every x seconds to get the latest updates.

With the Hemlock approach, a client registers for a message and is only contacted when a relevant one arrives. This is clearly a better method as it is much real-time & cost-effective (no unnecessary polls).

Last week, a post on WebResourcesDepot had announced the giveaway of free credits ($225 worth) by FlashMint, a very popular flash templates provider, to WRD readers.

Winners are announced at the bottom of the post, but before that, to remember:

FlashMint is offering a variety of products from high quality Flash Intros,  Flash CMS Templates, premium Wordpress Themes to Joomla Layouts & superior osCommerce / Swish Templates.

Besides these templates offered, FlashMint has a wide collection of Flash components that can be easily used to improve any website.

The winners of the giveaway:

Winners are selected randomly from users who tweeted the message: "Want to win $100 credit for Flash Designs from http://www.flashmint.com/ ? Check the details and join the contest at: http://tr.im/nfy8" in Twitter. And here they are:

• @korich - $100 credit
• @elvista- $75 credit
• @ocraig1 - $50 credit

Congratulations to the winners & thanks to everyone for contributing.

Flabell is presenting another handy resource for creating Flash-XML based survey with multiple questions.

An unlimited number of questions & a variable number of answers can be added by simply editing the XML file.

When users select an answer, they can pass to the next question & all answers are stored inside the XML file for visualizing them later (not included within the code).

P.S. Download requires a free membership.

Flabell is presenting a free Flash-XML slideshow which can be customized with ease.

Images presented are displayed with a blur effect & the color of the navigation bar can change on every image (using the colors of that image can be a good idea - set manually in the XML file).

For every image, you can also define:

• URLs, when they are clicked
• target to be _blank or not
• transparency of the navigation bar

The slideshow comes with the source file (.FLA) & in order to download it, a free membership is required.

Audio Player is a tiny yet beautiful free Flash mp3 player that is used on many popular websites like Talkcrunch.

It is originally a Wordpress plugin but with the increasing popularity, the developer of the player, Martin Laine, has created a standalone version as well.

The Wordpress plugin can directly use the Wordpress media library which is great. The standalone version can be configured very easily too & they both have various features like:

• autostart
• loop
• animation
• remaining time
• volume control & more.

For a demo of the player, you can check TalkCrunch.

P.S. Audio Player is open source & source files can be found here.

XML Flash Voting Poll is a free component for creating nice looking Flash-based polls.

It is built with AS3 & supports one active poll with an unlimited number of answers.

Many variables can be controlled in the XML files like:

• the question’s height, text, color, size
• background colors used
• distances between items
• messages displayed after voting & more

The download package includes images (.AI & .PDF) & fonts used.

P.S. Free membership is required for downloading the component.

FancyUpload, the popular Ajaxed file uploader, now has new version with more features.

To remember, FancyUpload is an unobtrusive file-input replacement with multiple-file selection & queued upload with an animated progress bar.

It uses MooTools, works with the help of Swiff (a MooTools class) & as a SWF file is used for uploads, it is server-independent.

Other great features of FancyUpload:

• the look & feel can be totally customized via CSS/XHTML
• uploads can be limited with file count, file type or size
• upload speed can be displayed
• browse-button can be an invisible overlay or an interactive image sprite
• useful file information before the upload starts can be collected & many more.

The API is very flexible, offers lots of options & very well-documented.

This is a very flexible Flash full-text-search component that supports multiple images and texts.

All aspects of it can be customized via XML files, including the images, texts, colors, sizes and more.

The component supports unlimited text / images & it can resize the height depending on the number of items.

For skinning it, no Flash experience is needed as everything is done by updating the XML files (colors, speed of the effects, etc.).

The download package comes with all the source code including FLA files, PSDs & fonts used.

Wrapper is a cross-browser HTML/CSS rendering engine written in ActionScript that sits on top of your standards compliant HTML page.

It simply wraps a HTML/CSS content & displays it within Flash without any need to compile.

A serious advantage Wrapper offers is eliminating cross-browser issues. And any content that is Flashed is available to search engines as the code is still pure HTML.

The engine also has built in methods within CSS to load custom fonts, display elements as any shape, and fill them with linear or radial gradient background colors.

For a standard website demo, click here & for a Wordpress demo, click here (don’t forget to check the sources of both pages).

Simple Flash Mp3 Player is a minimalistic player from Flabell (who also created this advanced Flash mp3 player - see WRD post).

It is built with AS3, offers a play-pause button & a draggable volume bar. Once the player is initiated, it displays the song info to be played.

There is a sound visualizer at the backend which, besides the rhythm of the music, transforms with the level of sound too.

The music to be played is set via FlashVars in the HTML code. And, the player can be customized via XML files easily.