Best Tools For Creating Interactive Flash Maps

Interactive maps have become a significant part of web applications, providing users with real-time visual information about many places in the world. Many web pages use maps to display information about travel routes, tracking information or supply and distributor chains. The usage of maps on the company’s website helps clients find the location of its offices all over the world. Travel sites can’t go without maps if they want to show the potential customers all the attractions and places of interest of tourist destination.

Interactive maps give the possibility to interact with users by simply rolling the mouse over the map. The usual technology for inputting them into the website is Flash. It makes interactive maps highly customizable and user friendly.

Today there are plenty of map tools developed by different companies.

Origramy VividMap – (http://origramy.com/vividmap/).

It is a useful flash-based map view component working with XML-driven data. The component’s standard tools are Navigation, Layers, Distance metering tool, Objects list with a quick jump feature, but they can be customized and expanded. Javascript interface supports object click action handling. The VividMap can read maps in SWF, JPEG, GIF. Has free downloadable version.

AmMap(http://www.ammap.com/)

It is a tool for creating interactive Flash maps. It allows customization of map details - sizes, colors, etc. - controlled with JavaScript. AmMap can be used to create presentations and e-learning tools using photos and images instead of maps. It uses latitude and longitude for saving point position.

AnyMap(http://www.anychart.com/products/anymap/)

It is an extension of AnyChart Flash Charts and it allows effective combining of maps and charts. The tool allows using custom markers, bubbles, lines and connectors on the maps as well as legend, labels and tooltips. It also can display 10 projections of any map.

FusionMaps(http://www.fusioncharts.com/maps/)

It helps you create animated, interactive maps in Flash for dynamic web applications. Using FusionMaps, you can display geographical data distributed by category, regions or entities. The tool can currently plot more than 530 maps, including all continents, major countries and all US states.

What to Get From Flash

Flash is a powerful technology to improve any web design and add useful elements to any website. Being used wisely and appropriately, Flash gives you an opportunity to get utmost of your website without spending much time and efforts. There can be plenty of Flash elements which can be divided into several groups.

Interactive Flash animation and effects
All these flash menus, buttons, headers and other useful snippets and mini-Flash elements catch the attentions of your website visitors, make them set their eyes on particular part of your website you want to highlight. The only problem is to avoid overusage in order not to annoy your visitors. The best tools are:

IncrediFlash XTreme – provides quick help in creating Flash animations without lots of Flash experience.

Mix-FX - simple-to-use Flash tool which allows to create Flash animations and Flash buttons in a minute.

Amara Software - provides affordable animation software solutions to create a wide variety of Flash effects and web animations

Flash picture galleries
Flash gallery is a widely spread technique of web design. It enables user to view a series of images without opening other web pages. Modern Flash gallery tools give the opportunity to improve ordinary set of images with sound, text, animation effects and navigation buttons. Most of the tools are dynamic and use a XML file to load the pictures.

Origramy Gallery – small-size tool for publishing and demonstrating images on the website. It has high level of interface customization, XML support, 2D and 3D solutions.

dfGallery – tool that support Flickr , Picasa , Fotki, Photobucket and custom Images. It’s easily customizable, support full screen mode, both RSS and custom images, liquid layout with multiple language support.

Flash video and audio players
Today Internet is becoming faster and more accessible. Internet users are becoming more and more sophisticated. More and more people want to see something more than static pictures. That is why Flash video is becoming even more popular among the users. Flash technology helps you to embed both video and audio in your website with the help of special Flash media players for the website:

Flowplayer is an Open Source video player for the Web. It supports progressive download and true streaming.

Wimpy streaming media tools - easily present and control the flow of audio and video.

Fun SoundPlayer Maker – fully skinnable Flash sound player for mp3 or radio streaming.

Flash charts and graphs
There have been said plenty of words proving the idea of importance of data visualization. Indeed, the information from charts and graphs is much easier to understand than the plain columns of figures. Flash graphs and charts now support dynamic updates, interactivity and lots of other features.

AmCharts – Flash charting tool that easily exports data from Excel, dynamically generate data file with PHP, ASP, .NET or other programming language. Its Flash-charts also have animation effects and have a possibility to export the chart as an image.

FlyCharts - scalable & flexible tool that can create compact, interactive and good-looking charts on the fly. It doesn't need installation, works with any scripting language, can be used in any browser.

Origramy - Flash graph component for making diagrams and graphs. It has intuitive multilingual interface, several export formats and JavaScript support.

Best Flowchart Software

Nowadays we have dozens of different on-line and downloadable tools for building attractive flowcharts. I will review the 3 best ones.

Origramy Flash Graph Component (http://origramy.com) – flash-based component designed for building, editing and displaying various graphs and diagrams. It is platform independent and doesn't need installation. What is really great about this tool is that is interactive when every flowchart block can be assigned a separate URL. Dynamic data update is useful for easy content editing without changing the layout. Besides the component supports several languages, can be seen in any browser, reduces load on the server and works with any scripting language. Has SWF and SVG XML export formats.

EDraw (http://www.edrawsoft.com) - application that helps the user to create a number of flowcharts, block diagrams and data flow diagrams. EDraw Flowchart Software has abundant flowchart templates, symbols and samples for quickly creating new flow diagrams. The package has a set of tools that make drawing of flowcharts very simple. The tool has wide range of export file formats. The disadvantages are that it works only with Windows.

Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com) – is a Flash-based diagramming and flowcharting tool for your web browser. It is often compared to online MS Visio. It has sharing and collaboration features, revision control and the ability to export to SVG or JPEG.