Entries from March 2008 ↓
March 22nd, 2008 — Graphics, How-to, ToolBox
In many situations web designers should avoid Flash and prefer usual text-based presentation. For instance, in most tasks related to pure text presentation Flash is neither necessary nor user-friendly, and it also has some serious accessibility problems: in fact, “pure” text is easier to maintain and easier to copy and paste.
However, if you’d like to present some multimedia-content, particularly images, Flash can often be a feasible solution, with flexible image management for web designers and impressive visual presentation for users. Used moderately, Flash-based galleries can give the presentation a fresh spark and create a rich visual experience you might want to offer your visitors.
Flash-based Galleries: An Overview
Polaroid Gallery offers a quite unusual way of presenting a bunch of photos online. The script loads images and image titles dynamically from an external XML file. Then the script processes the data and creates an interactive flash gallery in which all images are presented as Polaroid-photos.
The images are kind of thrown on the the table randomly and create a beautiful mess — the idea resembles BumpTop, physics-driven 3D-desktop with draggable folders and files. You can move the polaroids around with the mouse, and you can double click a Polaroid picture to zoom in.

To use the gallery you simply need to define your images and your galleries by modifying the XML-file accordingly. You can also define the legend to describe the content of the images. Besides, you can specify your Flickr ID and the gallery will automatically load the latest pictures from your Flickr RSS-feed. The loaded pictures are automatically scaled, centred and smoothed.
The script is free and open-source, and the .zip-package includes a .fla-file you can modify to improve the script. To ensure an optimal presentation your images should have a square format; otherwise the Polaroids don’t look particularly pretty.
Continue reading →
March 22nd, 2008 — How-to, Tips, Tutorials

Here’s a step-by-step guide through the new Web Gallery function in Photoshop CS3.
View the tutorial
March 22nd, 2008 — Inspiration, Tips
Have recently set up my first photography website. Am really excited about that. And I used a web template but not a custom design. But don’t condemn me at once. I was always prejudiced against web templates either till I didn’t try myself. And you know…it is not too bad as it seemed. Well…I got off the point. So I launched my first photo portfolio website after I’d bought a web template. After surfing the Net for a long time, I landed at IceTemplates. Here’s what attracted me at once. Besides standard types like osCommerce, swish, html templates, etc., the company offers something really brand-new which is not provided by others – Flash CMS v.2 templates. I will not describe all features. You can find them here. In a whole, the admin panel is so easy-to-use that it allows adding and editing almost all content: texts, titles, name, images, and descriptions. Agree that IceTemplates has made a revolutionary break-down as you do not have to be a web developer to make any necessary changes.
Besides, it was a pleasant surprise to know that with a template itself I got web hosting and domain name absolutely FREE. It means I didn’t need to pay for anything else. Isn’t it charming to start my own online photo portfolio just for $199? (This was the price of the template I purchased). Also, I find IceTemplates products worthy of mentioning due to original flash effects and nice structure. Just view the screenshots:

Photo gallery CMS v2 flash template - Live Demo

Photo portfolio CMS v2 flash template - Live Demo
If you are a photographer too, at IceTemplates you can find variety of photo portfolio flash templates to choose from. Good luck!
March 21st, 2008 — Flash Effects, Freebies, ToolBox

All-into-One Flash Mixer provides the user basic synthesizing function of SWF. You can merge several SWF into a new SWF by dragging and dropping the mouse. New version is available for you to add text and diversify format of pictures (JPG, dynamic GIF, PNG). It is simple to use, drag the Flash you want to the working area, so that you add a Flash successfully. You can repeat above actions again and again to add more Flash. Select one of the Flash from working area, then you can move, resize, rotate and displace (Change the layer between SWFs).The final output is exactly the same as it displayed in working area. You can set the picture or music as the background, and edit pictures by an embedded editor as well. The special designed Timeline can help you set the proper display time of your Flash. The professional Flash banner, Flash album, Flash animation and Flash slide show can also be created by Flash Mixer. In order to help you to make a wonderful Flash, we provide more than 1000 Flash ClipArts. All you need to do for an amazing Flash is to drag and drop them into working area.
Full features list:
1. Professional Flash effects;
2. Add Flash by dragging and dropping the mouse;
3. Exceed What you see is what you get;
4. Super Compatibility;
5. Modify the inserted Flash;
6. Various ClipArts;
7. Build-in Photo Editor;
8. Add background pictures available;
9. Add background music available;
10. Export Flash file(SWF) and execution file(EXE);
11. Newly added features: add timeline, text and pictures
Include:
Anim FX
Mix FX
Magic Flare
Astro Flash
An FX
3d Flash Anim
Download: 20.3MB
Code:
http://rapidshare.com/files/70256199/AIOFlashEffect_www.softarchive.net.rar
or
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9DDTKQ37
Pass: www.softarchive.net