Whatever the time of day or night you are reading this I imagine you are hard at work, crouched over your system and trying to squash that one persistent AS bug, yet your mind is quietly looking for that spark, your next best seller.
Eureka Moments
Sudden spurts of actual genius tend to happen when you least expect it, Archimedes can vouch for that. So the real question I guess you should be asking yourself is, Should I be looking for inspiration, or should it find me?
When it comes to web design most people tend to view online galleries, artworks, trend sites and so on. But where do the people who are actually giving out these inspirational pieces of work getting their own ideas? Is there some sort of secret council, a code among the “elite”, a hereditary trait, long hard working days and nights or just pure luck? The fact is, no one really knows.
You cannot knock on inspirations door, it knocks on your door. Granted, some people do get lucky and are just in the right place at the right time. Some get run down on their luck and life takes them down a different path, perhaps in preparation for even greater things. Some just work hard at it and reap their rewards. (more…)
Since we’re on the subject of APIs, I thought you might want to know about the Google Maps API built specifically for Flash.
The Google Maps API for Flash provides a new way to add interactive Google Maps to your website, using Adobe’s Flash plugin to display dynamic map content! This API exists as a fully independent alternative to the existing JavaScript Maps API, and provides many of the features of that API while also adding the ability to mix Flash content with Google Maps.
You can build your Flash map application using either the Flex SDK, Flex Builder or Flash development environments. Google has provided some basic “Hello World” tutorials for all of these development environments to get you started, you can find more information about that over here.
There are quite a few demos that you can view here of what others have done with the API using different development platforms. (more…)
If you’ve been around the forums, as I know most of you are, then you probably know about the API that FlashDen is implementing. It will also be available for the rest of the Envato marketplaces.
What’s an API? Good question.
An application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications. An API may be:
- Language-dependent; that is, available only in a particular programming language, using the particular syntax and elements of the programming language to make the API convenient to use in this particular context.
- Language-independent; that is, written in a way that means it can be called from several programming languages (typically an assembly/C-level interface). This is a desired feature for a service-style API that is not bound to a particular process or system and is available as a remote procedure call.
You can read more technical aspects about it here.
Translated it means – You can now plug into all the data that FlashDen makes available via it’s API to build your own applications that can present this data in whatever output method you choose. (more…)
If you want to know what blogging can do for your business just take a look at the Envato network of blogs. I’m sure you are all familiar with PSDTuts, VectorTuts, AudioTuts, NetTuts, AETuts, FreelanceSwitch etc… and who knows how many more in the pipeline. Clearly, there’s a pattern here.
I know there are quite a few of you here that maintain your own website, and even have a blog. But how many of you actually use your blogs to market yourself on the web, and ultimately drive more traffic to your files here on FlashDen?
I’ve been blogging since 2006 and it has done nothing but catapult me from one extreme to the other. In fact, blogging helped me start my own design company. The barrier to getting started today with your own blog is next to nothing. All you need is a hosted domain name and you can begin the process of giving yourself a serious income boost.
Here are 10 tips to help you make more sales with blogging - (more…)
This week I will be doing a series of posts on how you can use the power of social media to leverage your sales.
If you are not using social media to market your files today I suggest you start doing so immediately. If trends hold true, in the next 2 years we will see something completely different takeover from the blogging, facebook and twitter models of interaction we see today. The web is changing and it will never stop changing. So it’s better to play catch up now and capitalize, while the going is fresh.
In the beginning…
..the cool thing to do on the Internet was send emails to family and friends and viewing funny pictures and jokes. It hasn’t changed much from those core uses, but what has changed is the way information is presented and distributed.
In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s forums were all the rage, people would be members of more than one forum at a time. They are still popular today, but becoming a member with repute has become twice as hard. The main reason being that spamming has posed quite a problem, I remember one of my own forums getting vandalized, therefore the barrier to becoming a trusted source of information is wider.
Today…
…you are faced with dozens of choices for web based social interaction. From blogs, “umbrella” social networks {MySpace, Facebook etc…}, “niché” social networks {LinkedIn, Wists, Yelp etc…} to Twitter – which is a whole new way to breed by itself. (more…)
Search engine optimization {SEO} will be taking the front seat for Flash going forward. Adobe recently set up a dedicated center for SEO to talk about the various best practices that you can start using today to make your SWF content more reachable.
Let’s face it, content is still king and it’s not giving up it’s throne any time soon. Search engines are here to stay, even with the recent increase in social media, and they will continue to play a huge role for the web. Especially with all the content that is being added on a daily basis.
A great place to start is the “get started article” Adobe posted called a checklist for RIAs, among other articles as well. Optimizing your files for search can only reap benefits for you in the long term. (more…)
Searchme.com has been around for a while now, but they’ve been picking up steam lately as a viable alternative search engine. Billed as “Visual Search” you can search the web, videos, images, music, news and use it for shopping as well. Your results are displayed using the coverflow technique of presentation, along with regular search results
The really neat feature though happens after you perform a search. Searchme finds content for your query in various categories and presents those choices to you. So for instance, if you search for “Keyboards” you will see the icons appear for Computer Hardware, Music, Electronics, Mobile Phones, Shopping and so on.
Once you right click anywhere on the page you are presented with even more options. (more…)
You learn something new everyday. Today is no different, except for the fact that it comes in 5 parts.
FlashBuilding is a user on YouTube that uploads loads of Flash tutorials, you can subscribe to get video updates by them and other such users on YouTube. Below you will find a 5 part series on how to structure a full site using AS3. The videos run between 5 and 9 minutes each. (more…)
Battlestar Galactica will be airing their season finale, and the last episode of the series EVER, this weekend. In case you experience some withdrawals here are 9 shows centered around what a lot of us use for a living and the tools used to create the content we see on a daily basis, the Internet and Technology.
Most of these shows don’t have set schedules, are not 40 minutes long with 20 minutes of commercials, do not have complex plots and emotional problems {or flashbacks}. Instead, they just give us the information we may be looking for in as short a time span as possible.
9 Hot Web Shows on Design, Technology and the Internet (more…)
I can safely say that almost all of you here have at least 1 social media profile. Be it on Facebook, Flickr, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Twitter etc… and you are connected to at least a handful of people, if not thousands.
Social interaction on the web is as common today as getting a cup of coffee. I remember in the year 2000 I would lose track of my friends if they did not have an email address. Today it has come to the point where you can become famous due to your social profile. This gives rise to a whole new market to tap into, especially if you are a developer.
Sites like digg and twitter have API’s that let developers tap into the immense amount of data that they publish. With tools like Flash and Flex you can create some pretty interesting apps, that can either be desktop based or used as a widget for a blog or website.
Using Flash In Social Media With A Purpose (more…)
