FlashGuru Blog

What was your favourite website of 2004? Cast your vote for the FWA People’s Choice Award 2004. Over 4 million visitors, 26,850 plus sites nominated, 12 finalists, 1 Site Of The Year, 1 People’s Choice. Cast your vote at Favourite Website Awards.

My book shelf’s are full and i need some room, so im going to get rid of some of the Flash Book’s i dont need or read anymore. There are 14 Flash Books which i want to sell (i dont know how much they are worth, so send offers to my email address). They are all in top notch condition and each one is worth a read. The books are:

• Actionscript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide
• Essential Actionscript 2
• Flash Hacks
• Foundation Flash MX 2004
• Actionscript for Flash MX 2004
• Flash MX Application & Interface Design
• Flash MX 2004 Games Most Wanted
• Macromedia Flash Super Samurai
• New Masters of Flash
• Object Oriented Macromedia Flash
• Illustrating Macromedia Flash MX 2004
• Flash 5 Dynamic Content Studio
• Flash Out of the Box
• Designing Web Usability

I was going to put them on ebay but thought i would offer them to the community first, i would prefer to sell them all in a bundle.

Mike Chambers has developed a free funky firefox extension that sits in your firefox taskbar and when clicked, displays all the latest Macromedia news from MXNA. The extension will also check for new information at a specified interval and blink to alert you that new information is available. If you dont use firefox, then start using it and definetley install this extension.

In-between hopping around the world and coding daily experiments, Keith Peters (BIT-101) has spent many a sleepless night secretly developing a huge set of common interface components to rival Macromedia’s very own component’s that were released with Flash MX 2004. There are 30 components in the set and all of them are lightweight (1/3 of the size of their rivals) and its now easier than ever, to change the look and feel of them. My good friends Beam Jive Consulting (Who also designed my new logo) have bought the rights to the components and they will be selling, marketing and supporting them alongside all the other great component products they sell. Ive placed my order, at 80 euros its a complete bargain. More information and demo’s can be found on the products page.

Fantasy Interactive’s new website has been five years in the making, and they finally got it live late last night. Great work guy’s! I got a sneak preview yesterday afternoon and it is nothing short of amazing. The navigation system is class. You have big bulky buttons that drill you down through the hierarchy, complete with breadcrumb to show you where you are and also a tree breadcrumb to allow you to jump to any other section. The browsers back button also works. So easy to use. Subtle rollovers on the UI Elements improve the experience. Checkout the case studies section, what great use of Flash Video. Each case study has a documentary style video playing in the video player at the top of the page, that tells you all about the project. The video player also looks nice and is easy to use. The sites content is split nicely into bite-size chunks so it can be easily digested. The whole style of the site is nice clean, crisp and bulky. Definetley an award winner! Check it out.