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.

Why Do Webmasters Need Flowcharting?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Do you believe it? What do you understand being told such a definition: "a massive, luminous ball of plasma that is held together by its own gravity"? And when you see an image of a star? Which is better to understand what is being talking about? The meaning of both definitions is equal but the way it is communicated is completely different.
We better perceive images than mere text and figures. Well done data visualization allows clear understanding, better visibility and an possibility to feel hidden connections in complex data sets.
One of the best ways to visualize data is flowcharting. It transfers words into image without losing the words' sense. Flowcharts help understand complex concepts and find efficient solutions. In describing the tangled relationships with a variety of alternatives and results, they are excellent to keep the main points even in different languages. Also flowcharts deliver you the essence of the flow process at one glance.

There are different reasons for flowcharts usage.

Training Materials
Flowcharts are necessary when you need to display the total range of processes needed to fulfill the task. Text documentation is usually difficult for understanding as bare text fails to give the complete idea. Dealing with newbies and trainees flowcharts are more effective. The reason is that they are easy to understand and visually stimulating.

Workflow Management and Improvement
To ensure the compliance with customers’ needs, you must get control over your business processes and activities. The first step of workflow management is to identify the actual position of your processes by making initial flowchart . That enables you to detect your processes for the loss and inefficiency. After implementation of sectors' analysis for the process improvement, you can build new flowcharts to confirm the coming changes.

Troubleshooting Guides
Most of us have met a troubleshooting flowchart at least once a life. Such kind of flowcharts are often made in the form of Decision Trees which progressively narrow the scope of suitable solutions based on a range of criteria. The more successfully you are able to adjust to the existing set of problems and their solutions into a plain "Yes/No" model the more efficiently flowchart helps in solving the difficulties.

The best software for creating flowcharts on the websites will be reviewed in my next post.

Top 3 Flash Chart Components

Today we could find plenty of flash chart and graph components for appropriate data visualization. We can name some of them.

FlyCharts (http://flycharts.net) – highly functional and easy-to-use flash chart component. It is interactive, scalable and flexible with external JavaScript interface and DHTML Grid integration.

Open Flash Chart (http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart) - is an open source project providing flash charts that can present data in a variety of formats. It has classes written in PHP, Perl, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, and .Net.

FusionCharts (http://www.InfoSoftGlobal.com/FusionCharts) - A Flash based 3D and 2D animated charting component with a number of options including AJAX/JavaScript integration.

In fact, the list is almost endless and for sure can be added with such tools as SWF/XML Charts, AmCharts, AnyCharts, Google Chart API, etc.

The usage of just one of these tools are surely catches the visitor’s attention and make them feel and understand what is hidden behind the figures and not to leave the site thereby.

The Art of Appealing Data Presentation

The art of successful data presentation is not a difficult subject to learn. Nevertheless many people ignore the potential benefits they can gain provided little time, effort and some useful tools. What should be done to increase data efficiency?

One day I was surfing the web in search of new useful, interesting or simply amusing websites. Among others I came across one resource. I will not give its URL in order not to be accused of hidden promotion or counter-advertising. I can only say that the majority of the website content consisted of the variety of statistics about everything on the Earth. Biggest animals, most successful movies, longest buildings, top search terms and so on, and so forth The presented information seemed to be rather structured. It was divided into special categories like Animal world, Human actions. IT facts etc. where every separate record was given in the form of so called TOP 10.
But I got completely lost in the abundance of the information. The reason is simple. There was nothing to catch my eye. Words, words and nothing but the words got me depressed. And I left the site though the information given really was interesting to me.

It is widely known that the majority of the information we receive comes to our mind through images. The speed of visual data perception and adoption is much higher than in the case of mere text. No matter how unique is the content, plain figures enumeration without appropriate image support usually causes irritation and desire to get rid of the annoying factor. At the same time even simple small chart or diagram can make U-turn in the situation. So how this fact can be used to make people come, stay and above all return to your website?

For instance let’s take the websites of numerous banks, investment companies and financial corporations. In the conditions of the developing crisis they are obliged to fight for every existing or potential customer. So why not to represent so essential data of the infinite economic and financial indices, rates and values in the form of bar graph or histogram? They will display the entire picture to the clients as well as give the possibility to better data analysis.

The principal aim of the data visualization is to communicate information but in more effective, clear and obvious way than simple text does. Today we have plenty of tools visualize data on the website. The best way to input the given data to the website content in the attractive and eye-catching manner is to use flash components. Most of them don’t need any installation, work with the majority of scripting languages, run on many browsers and support dynamic data update due to XML-format support. Variety of colors, chart types and interactivity make them great tool for creating completely tunable and scalable animated charts and graphs.

...to be continued...

Top 5 Things Web Developers Miss Without Flash

Flash offers innumerable options for the web design and development. Those who ignore it lose very much.

1. Light Graphics of High Quality

Before Flash appeared the majority of Internet graphic content consisted of bitmap images. They were static, large and heavy to download. Besides attempts to rescale the image leaded to quality loss. As contrasted to it, Flash is based on vector graphics the advantages of which are small file size, no quality reduction on resize and little download time.

2. Attractive Animation

Flash can be used to create animation to enhance visitor’s impression of the website. Separate Flash clips or navigation elements such as buttons or menus are all Flash animation. With proper usage it certainly makes website catchy.

3. Interactivity

Static websites will never be able to offer the level of interactivity Flash has. It can automatically generate dynamic live charts based on the updating information. Numerous dynamic interface elements, interactive menus and buttons capable to react to cursor moves are also made with Flash. All these make it possible for a user to interact with a website.

4. Streaming

Online streaming video playback means that user can watch the file before it is downloaded in full. So beloved YouTube, Google video or MySpace video will be impossible without Flash as all they use Flash technology to play video and audio.

5. Sound

Although not a widely used feature, sound can be embedded into Flash elements either on background or as a synchronized component which matches a separate action or function. Flash can recognize a variety of audio file formats and provide restricted editing options.

Flash Of Hope

What do you think of Flash? I want to say, when you enter the website with striking flash on it, what is your first thought? Do you consider it colorful, sparkling, attracting your attention? Or is it just annoying and useless component of the website? No matter which group you belong to, the facts are obvious. This widespread interactive multimedia technology rules in the modern world of web design and development.

• Nowadays Flash is something more than just animated clip used by webmasters as colorful add-on. It has become multipurpose tool for web masters who could stop bothering about browser or scripting compatibility.
• The considerable set of flash components helps today to develop high function websites when the process of coding and designing are separated. Components allow coders to create functionality that designers can use in applications.
• Once combined with XML Flash gets flexible solution for data storing and exchanging.
• By the way, search engines can now index Flash text content. This was the result of the joint efforts of Adobe and Google.

The future of web development is connected with flash greatly. And everybody connected with web design and development can’t afford the luxury to lose the opportunities given by Flash.

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