Links of the month (April 2009)




The most interesting Flash things I've met this month:




1
. Exposing Flash Application Vulnerabilities with SWFScan - "HP SWFScan is a free Windows-based security tool to help developers find and fix security vulnerabilities in applications developed with the Adobe Flash Platform".

2. Actionscript 3.0 Client for the Facebook Platform API - "the new ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform API, fully supported by Facebook and Adobe, makes it easy to build applications that combine the strengths of the Flash Platform and Facebook Platform".

3. New video tutorial on using SWFAddress - "a new tutorial that shows you how to enable direct and deep linking using the SWFAddress library. Deep linking is just another name for making the back button work".

4. Google Analytics + Flash = Easy Peasy… - "quick simple code for implementing Google Analytics system into flash projects. Using their ga.js code."

5. Free Flash Intros - nice collection of absolutely free downloadable Flash intros. Each Flash intro comes with a simple text file in which you type your own text and URLs to customize intros.

Enjoy!

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What Flash is used for

If you visit my blog, I presume you're interested in Flash :) How and what for do you use Flash? Please answer my poll and we'll discuss the collected statistics in one of the next posts. Thanks for your answers! Your comments with more detailed answers are appreciated too :)


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Best Easter Flash games

Easter is approaching fast and my next holiday selection of flash games is ready for you. Just a few words before the games descriptions: I can never understand what fighting games, games with violence and blood, have to do with Easter. That's why I've selected kind and suitable-for-everyone games only. So, let's play!


Mister Easter

Run and bounce the Easter eggs and grenades into the nests. Don't miss any grenade! Much more interesting than usual catch games. Bouncing eggs reminded me break out games a little.



 


Easter Egg Hop

Use your mouse (without clicking!) to collect eggs and baby chicks, and butterflies to speed up. Avoid the hen. Nice game, rather addictive and even fun (especially when your bunny meets the hen :)). Become a real Easter Bunny!


 


Easter Eggs

The object of this game is to destroy the Easter eggs by forming lines of four eggs of the same color. If you can form lines of larger number of eggs or form combos, extra bonuses will be given. An ageless classic.


 


Eggy Easter

A fun platform game where you control a rabbit and fire weapons such as stars, flowers, and of course, a carrot. And coloring page at the very beginning in case you want to warm up before the game :)


 


Easter Bunny

In this fun and simple Easter game, guide the Easter bunny through various regions, collect all the colorful eggs and try to reach the end. The bunny is cute and the game is rather simple, so you can even offer your child to play it.


 


Easter Egg Catch

Move the bunny to catch the falling eggs. Hurry up, you should not only catch the eggs but also put them to the basket when you catch 5 eggs. Not as easy as it sounds!

Happy Easter to you and your family!

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How to create statistics chart for your blog

Every blog owner, especially beginner blogger, is keen on statistics – "How many people visited my blog today?", "How many visitors reached my last post?", etc. And there comes time when your stats are already good enough and you want to share them with others, for example to promote your blog or just to decorate it. How to publish statistics to your blog so that they look nice and you don't spend much time creating a chart? Use a professional software for creating flash charts. For example, Animated Chart. Why this charting software is handy for me? First, the data can be imported from Microsoft Excel or text file. That means when I want to show a piece of my data from Google Analytics, I don't have to retype data manually. I simply export data from Analytics to CSV file and then import them to Animated Chart. So, entering data for a month takes me less than a minute. Then, the graph can be customized. Everything from color and font to axis scaling is user definable. And the most important setting is chart size. Animated Chart lets me create both full-sized charts like the one you see below and small charts for sidebars.






Also, if your programming skills are above intermediate, you can make dynamic blog visitors chart as well. Animated Chart Professional edition can generate live chart data from an XML file. As Google Analytics allows exporting data to XML, you can create a dynamic XML file data from which will be displayed on your web chart in real time.

Flash chart with your blog visitors stats can be embedded to blog as well as any other flash object. All you need is just to paste an HTML code into your blog post HTML and insert a URL of swf chart. To place chart on a sidebar (for Blogger), add a new gadget (HTML/JavaScript) to your page elements (Dashboard | Layout | Page Elements) and paste the code to the gadget editor. Easy, quick, nice.

P.S. I told about blog visitors statistic only, but you can obviously create flash graphs for whatever data – for instance, the views of your most popular posts, time spent on a page and anything else.

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