Archive for April, 2010
Want to look for advanced abilities in ActionScript 3? This scripting language will be easily within your power with some useful ActionScript 3 tutorials we’ll add to quickly turn you into the better design. ActionScript, as you know, is a scripting language based on ECMAScript. It is used primarily for the development of websites and software using the Adobe Flash Player platform, but is also used in some database applications, and in basic robotics.
You see, if you have ever looked over the shoulder of someone who really knew how to quickly master ActionScript stuff, you might know that tutorials are the fastest way to learn. So you are welcome to get the most out of these detailed and interesting tutorials we’ve compiled for you. We hope the following ActionScript related articles will help you, especially if you are a Flash beginner. By the way, you may also write to us if you run into any other exciting practical guidance, to let people take advantage of Flash features beyond what they’ll possibly learn here. Now let’s take a look at the nice AS3 bundle we have diligently prepared for our audience:
1. A Wonderwall-Like Effect, with Traer AS3
Using the ActionScript3 port of the Traer physics engine, get something close to THA’s Wonderwall effect. This tutorial uncovers how to push the boundaries emerging from a seemingly simple form focusing on the deformation of the grid when interacting. The underlying grid pattern is not stretched and deformed as in the original. This experiment solely focuses on the use of physics simulation to recreate the effect.
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2. Traer AS3, the Mandatory Cloth Simulation
It is a cloth-like simulation built with Traer.physics port to ActionScript3, using GraphicsTrianglePath. The mesh is only made of a 8×8 particles grid, or 128 triangles when rendered. The source code for this is available at Github.
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It is not a secret that technology revolution makes all gadgets smarter and smaller. Ten years ago we couldn’t even dream of something similar to iPhone and now it is pretty much a common thing for many of us. Of course this is a cell phone but the voice conversation function is no longer the main one in this device. With the development of different third-party software we can claim that iPhone has become much more than just a cool cell phone with a number of useful options.
Because of the variety of different applications this gadget became a universal assisntant that is always ready to make your life much easier. Of course web design sphere is not an exception from this global trend and there are many great and useful applications for designers.
Despite the fact that you can actually live without these applications we’ve decided to put them together in a list of the Most Wanted Applications for web designer’s iPhone. Maybe some of these applications are familiar to you, some may be new. But anyways we hope that this information will be useful and interesting for you.
1. Paper Sizes
This iPhone application is an ideal tool for looking up a variety of paper standards. Extremely useful if you are working with printing, illustration and other design related stuff.
Status: Commercial
Price: $0.99
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2. The Font Game
This fun game has 600 samples of various fonts and you have to know them all if you want to be a winner! Play a game and discover your font knowledge level.
Status: Commercial
Price: $0.99
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Once again, let’s talk about the issue of social media bookmarking and sharing – this time we’ll feature the range of social media sections to see how creative designers are currently building their online social presence.
Apparently, social icons (if skillfully accomplished) add rich interactive elements framing any design work in a way different and personalized. They give an individual tone assembling the infinite perfect surrounding for social media communication. Notice the attention to details in proportions, calculated typographic spacing and size, various color effects – everything is done to positively impact the design of a website. By the way, if you haven’t seen our previous post about 150 Best Social Networks Sections on Designers’ Websites, then you should go and take a look at it.
Thereby, having done a total overhaul of the social media icons designs, we are trying now to break the mold and introduce a unique and fresh range of new 150 megaforced social networks sections which express a true appellation character. Time to kick off, so please buckle up and enjoy the ride – here they go!
Lbsquat.com
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Baneydesign.com
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Core-engine.com
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This time we are happy to present the exciting interview with eCommerce professionals – Nick Weisser and Brian Stanic. We were lucky to know these two awesome guys by their comments on our blog – you can always tell a real pro even after just a couple of words from him.
So anyways, given how awesome these eCommerce professionals are, we knew their opinions about certain things related to eCommerce industry would be really interesting for our blog audience. Below are their answers to the questions we thought are the most trendy ones these days in eCommerce. Enjoy and let us know your opinions in the comments section!
The participants are:
Nick Weisser – web architect and owner of Openstream Internet Solutions in Zürich, Switzerland. He is an osCommerce team member, official Magento community (edition) partner and, as he calls himself, an Open Source evangelist.
Brian Stanic – the founder of The Holt Partnership, a Web Site Design company based in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England. For the last twenty four years (!), he has been heavily involved in both the Accountancy and Business Software industries.
On with the interview…
1. From developer’s point of view, what’s your favorite eCommerce platform to work with and why?
- Nick Weisser Being an osCommerce team member and an official Magento Community Partner in Switzerland I like to work with both of these open source e-commerce platforms.
- Brian Stanic: osCommerce, CRE Loaded or Zen Cart. Low cost of ownership and very good support options via Add-ons and significant amount of people/organizations, able to modify code on request.
2. What eCommerce engine do you most frequently suggest to your clients?
- Nick Weisser: I recommend Magento as an enterprise class e-commerce platform and osCommerce as a solid and flexible e-commerce platform for smaller store owners and startups who have to watch their budget given the fact that Magento as a TCO (total cost of ownership) that is 2-3 times higher than that of osCommerce.
- Brian Stanic: osCommerce. Very good selection of Add-ons, good support via online community and developers, well versed in the osCommerce structure, wide range of Ready-made Templates via TemplateMonster and relatively low cost of on-going ownership.
3. Each platform has certain design restrictions and requirements. So in terms of these design restrictions, what platform do you think allows the most interesting visual solutions?
Wish to learn more about payment processing and merchant accounts? Or are you new to eCommerce and looking for a way to accept payments on your website? We’ll try to offer a good introductory material for getting started in this area.
In fact shopping carts, merchant accounts, payment gateways, credit card processing can get pretty much confusing when you start looking into the various aspects of eCommerce. Any business that needs to accept payments on their website should carefully consider the right merchant system since the proper choice of a payment gateway is a vital element which will contribute to success or failure as an online business.
Generally speaking, a payment gateway is a separate service and acts as an intermediary between the merchants’ shopping cart and all the financial networks involved with the transaction, including the customers’ credit card issuer and your merchant account.
There are numerous different payments service providers systems available for online merchants. So, let’s briefly recap the range of well-known eCommerce merchant systems that allow credit card processing. Our short descriptions include some of the major factors to consider when selecting a service.
1. PayPal
PayPal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet, being the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. With more than 78 million active accounts around the world, PayPal enables global eCommerce.
The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. It sometimes also charges a transaction fee for receiving money.
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2. 2Checkout
2Checkout is an established payment gateways available and is used by hundreds of thousands of merchants worldwide. Being the authorized reseller for thousands of tangible or digital products and services, it helps merchants start selling online without any hassle, providing an integrated payment solution to help them handle the customer payments from start to finish.
2Checkout provides the crucial back-end features you need for a full-service solution. Its proprietary technology supports back-office functions including financial reporting, tracking, fraud prevention, affiliate tracking, customer service and sales tracking. Besides, 2CO provides you with a customizable transaction interface, multi-level customer service interaction and a satisfaction survey system.
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TemplateMonster just can’t get enough of Flash stuff, focusing on extreme Flash designs and Flash interfaces! Thus, keeping the freshness to flow, let’s now open the doors for creative Flash sequel! This time we’ll show off another portion of really awesome Flash-based websites which demonstrate the true power of Flash and some really unique and creative ways it can be used.
So, if you need to start or to pick up fresh inspiration and new ideas for your Flash work, be sure to check out our today’s round-up which actually was as well suggested by TemplateMonster Flash experts. By the way, it’s more advisable if you get to browse through these Flash sites to get a first-hand feel of some really awesome Flash features.
Red-vertex.com
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Dopeawards.com
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In10.nl
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Looks like web world can’t live without various extensions, applications and other useful inventions that make our life easier (according to the developers’ official position). If we will take a look at this aspect as the part of the “browsers war” situation -without a doubt Google Chrome demonstrates awesome results – we can see that its popularity is rising everyday. Of course launching extension support was a smart move and now we can witness all advantages that Chrome users will gain. But web designers community were one of the most whimsical communities in the entire Internet (do’h! and sometimes it seems that we all are getting worse and worse).
So Chrome is apparently going for a pretty aggressive policy in terms of promoting its extensions and perhaps you’ve seen the awesome video ad for Google Chrome extensions by now
Anyways, we thought that it would be interesting to show you a small piece of some useful Chrome extensions for web designers. Of course each of you may already have your own favourite ones and we will be glad to hear your variants and suggestions concerning this topic in our comments section. It is obvious that it is early to compare Chrome and Firefox extensions but who knows what will happen in the future.
This useful Chrome extension generates random “Lorem Ipsum” text. Developers claim that this extension’s advantage is to use the less amount of code (and therefore memory) making this job simple.
2. Pendule
Pendule is a great toolkit of superb functions for web developers. It simplifies your work with Javascripts, HTML, CSS etc. You can easily crop images, use visual ruler and do many other actions with the help of this extension. This is one of the best Chrome extensions for sure.
Read the rest of this entry »
Flash banner, as we know, is a modern digital advertising media with a lot of advantages in comparison to conventional graphic ads. It’s evident that a well designed Flash banner due to its eye-catcher effect can attract a higher click-through rate than a static image that remains still. Especially awesome are the rich-media banner that are also Flash-based and can even be mini-games enclosed into as little real estate as a banner slot.
By using Flash banners site owners let the visitors know about their products, services, and special offers with the attention grabbing Flash. Not only does it enhance the website design, but is also proven to generate much higher interest towards whatever products or services such Flash banners are conveying. This in fact turns out to be a truly effective tool to drive better web traffic to a website. Professional-looking Flash banners are simply great for catching visitors’ attention and keeping them on the page. Such banners allow more complex animations, have high graphic quality, and what’s even more exciting is that they are very lightweight. This surely will create a long lasting impression upon the potential web customers.
Take a look at these 70+ dynamic Flash banners and get the idea about the way web professionals play with Flash flexibility creating any graphics and establishing a new environment for website visitors.
Party
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Telia Soccer
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Grab Your Own
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Ok, quick news for you people here. We know you love Twitter and we also know you love each Template Monster discount code. When those two things are combined (in whatever form you wish) we assume you will worship it. Well, if worshipping is not an option than taking part in it would also be great – after all, this will also be your participation in making TemplateMonster what you want it to be. Sounds interesting? You bet it does!
So this time our new Twitter-powered thingy is about voting for the new templates that are being added to TemplateMonster on a daily basis. On our voting instructions page we show you the selected 5 of those templates and you vote for the one you like most by posting a preset tweet in your Twitter account (that means just pressing the button on our voting instructions page). For this one tiny action you’ll get a 20% Template Monster discount code for any of our orders, we in turn get your priceless opinion about our new designs. Definitely that a lot of fun for both sides.
Oh, and one more thing. The template that you vote to be the best on certain day will then be sold at a random discount (20% at least), so be sure to choose wisely! That’s a lot of discounts – and tons of savings! Just make sure you follow the terms and rules of the voting. Alright now, go ahead and vote for the template you like!
For more information on how to get Template Monster discount code visit our Promocodes Section.
SWiSHmax3 is a trendy issue in today’s Flash-related talks, having become an advanced animations creation tool for the graphic artists and web professionals. In fact being a truly decent alternative to Flash, it provides everything you need to create a dynamic Flash animation and websites with ease (some even say it’s easier than Flash itself).
SWiSH Max3 comes bundled with the options that let you make fantastic animations with your video, text, images, graphics or sound content. Here are some of the truly convenient features that make SWiSH Max3 so powerful (actually there is surely much more than the listing given):
- AS2 class support;
- Google Chrome support;
- extended importing features supported;
- ‘Paste Special’ feature offers a choice of import formats when transferring from other applications;
- project templates – instant results using the wizard panel;
- drawing tools – shape operations, knife tool, component tool;
- improved motion path – editable Bezier Curves, convert a shape to path.
Without a doubt, with SWiSHmax3 you can create animated effects quickly and cost-effectively, but if in addition to it you have the awesome SWiSHmax3 Templates that will surely mean a much easier way for you. TemplateMonster offers professional and trendy SWiSHmax3-driven designs coming complete with a set of high-end quality features:
- volume control;
- smooth easy-to-edit text scrollers;
- ability to download an image from a gallery (if allowed by the website owner);
- fitting dynamic images when scaling and rotating;
- image descriptions in some galleries, and some templates even have a counter of images in project folder.
- Upcoming features:
- fullscreen implementation;
- validating the fields of contact form.
Additionally, SWiSH templates provided by TemplateMonster are known to have a simple, intuitive interface putting all the tools within easy reach. They import loads of text effects, have light-weight SWF files – and all of that for a far less cost comparing to the prices of Flash Templates. Besides, the SWiSH Max3 software is much cheaper than Flash.
With so many efficient benefits, there is no time to waste – browse the collection of SWiSHmax3 Templates to build stunning interactive animations with less costs and efforts!
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