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.