All posts in Macromedia

Word Clock [Screensaver]

by Ades on September 16, 2008 in Flash, Software with 3 Comments

Here is a cool screensaver [play video below] for PC, Mac and iPhone. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence. Word Clock displays time by highlighting appropriate words as each second passes.

There are two display modes; Linear and Rotary which has a nice relationship with traditional analogue clocks.

You can see screenshots of other users who use Word Clock at http://www.flickr.com/groups/wordclock/pool/

URL: http://www.simonheys.com/wordclock/
Direct Download Link: click here

Spectra – visual news reader from MSNBC

by Ades on May 9, 2008 in Flash, Technology with 9 Comments

Do you find reading news boring? How about adding some flare to it? Well, MSNBC is trying exactly that.

MSNBC has launched new visual news reader called Spectra that makes reading news a lot more entertaining.

It’s a flash based reader that shows news in a 3D fashion. You can choose different channels (e.g top news, international, US, Iraq..etc) and add to your reading queue.

Spectra

Flash countdown generator

by Ades on December 22, 2007 in Flash, Online Tools with 6 Comments

This countdown (see left) was generated by this online tool. You can set any date, you can also choose background and text colors. Finally you can give it a descriptive name (eg. new year).

Once you press generate code, it will give you a flash code. You can then paste this code into your website/blog. I have noticed that there is a small advertisement text below the countdown. In my case it was about “payday loans”. I have removed it. Otherwise, I think it’s a great looking countdown.

http://www.justsayhi.com/bb/countdown

Free FeedBurner stats analyzer

by Ades on December 5, 2007 in Flash, Online Tools with No comments

Ray at BlogPerfume.com informed me that he has developed a nice free tool called Feed Analysis v1.0 that can analyze your feedburner stats in a more visually appealing manner (see screenshots below). It will allow you to view number of RSS subscribers, daily hits, views, clicks, stats for the days of the week etc.

In order to use this tool, first you need to export your FeedBurner stats as a CSV file (see screenshot below).

Then go to http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/ and upload your file and press Generate Report button (see below)

After that, you will be displayed your report on the same page with different graphs and charts similar to the ones shown above.

Create cool flash graphs by just plugging in the data

by Ades on August 22, 2007 in Flash, Scripts with 5 Comments

PHP/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful PHP tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data. Graphs that are similar to those of Google Analytics.

To create your own graphs with your own data, all you need to do is, download PHP/SWF Charts and place charts.swf, charts.php, and charts_library anywhere on your web server.

You need to describe your data in the table form in your php file. For example table like this:

	2001	2002	2003	2004
Region A	5	10	30	63
Region B	100	20	65	55
Region C	56	21	5	90

should be described in your php file like this:

< ?php
include "charts.php";

//the chart's data
$chart [ 'chart_data' ] = array ( array ( "", "2001", "2002", "2003", "2004" ),
array ( "Region A", 5, 10, 30, 63 ),
array ( "Region B", 100, 20, 65, 55 ),
array ( "Region C", 56, 21, 5, 90 )
);

//send the new data to charts.swf
SendChartData ( $chart );

?>

which will create a graph like this:

You can also create other types of graphs, such as:

Line, Column, Stacked Column, Floating Column, 3D Column, Stacked 3D Column, Parallel 3D, Column, Pie, 3D Pie, Bar, Stacked Bar, Floating Bar, Area, Stacked Area, Candlestick, Scatter, and Polar. You can see samples for all of these at the PHP/SWF Charts Gallery page.

http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php

Polar Clock is now Screensaver

by Ades on June 5, 2007 in Flash with 8 Comments

Remember the Polar Clock that I blogged here? Now the developer has introduced a screensaver version for Mac and Windows, very smart idea indeed.

I have downloaded and installed on my PC, it’s perfect! You can download it here. See online version here.

Complete Web2.0 sites directory in Flash

by Ades on May 23, 2007 in Flash, Links with No comments

Go2Web2.0 is a Web2.0 sites directory that is done in Flash. It has tons and tons of Web2.0 sites. You can view the sites by tag, name, or keyword. http://www.go2web20.net

Box.net – Nice flash widget for your blog

by Ades on May 23, 2007 in Flash, Online Tools, Scripts with 4 Comments

Box.net has some nice flash widgets where you can upload any file (mp3, pics, pdf…etc) to share with your blog readers. MP3 files can be played directly in the widget, you can also download them if you want to listen offline. Images can also be displayed inside the widget, all the other file types are available for download only, such as pdf or doc.

Polar Clock – Interesting Flash Clock

by Ades on May 17, 2007 in Flash with 6 Comments

Here is a very createive flash clock and a calendar (2 in 1) called Polar Clock.

FlashInsider.com – no more.

by Ades on May 8, 2007 in Flash, Macromedia with 2 Comments

A blog dedicated to Flash has closed down. It was a nice blog, it’s sad that it had to end so soon. This was their last post.

Sadly, Flash Insider is retiring. During the past two years, Weblogs Inc. has made a gradual evolution from producing mostly business/pro content to publishing sites for a broader consumer audience. We are all grateful to David Robinson, Mike Schleifstein, and (recently) Russ Heimlich for their great contributions in sustaining this blog. Each of them will continue to write for Weblogs, Inc. on a variety of subjects.

And, naturally, we’re grateful to our readers! Thank you for your loyalty.

I hope they will not remove the existing content and close down the site completely. The blog has some great content. Back in 2005, they were nice enough to point to my blog as the source for this post.

http://www.flashinsider.com

Adobe Press – Lots of free online tutorials…

by Ades on March 13, 2007 in Adobe, Macromedia with 3 Comments

adobe press

Nobody really checks the Adobe’s official press site for Photoshop Tutorials, rather webmasters prefer sites like Good-Tutorials.com and Tutorialized.com for user submitted tutorials. However I should say that Adobe’s site is worth visiting, it has a large amount of tutorials on their products. They also have total of 76 tutorials on Macromedia products that they have acquired.

Almost all the tutorials are from the books that Adobe Press have published.

Video Tutorials: http://www.totaltraining.com, http://www.lynda.com

Flash Tool – Project Tracker every 15 min

by Ades on March 12, 2007 in Flash, Online Tools with No comments

emergent task planner flash version

It’s a flash version of to-do list or project tracker by David Seah that I have blogged here. You can enter your To-Do list titles and track them by clicking on the bubbles every 15 minutes. Once you are done you can print it. It’s a great tool for freelancers who work on projects on hourly basis.

http://davidseah.com/tools/ett/alpha/