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.