SimpleViewer and Lightbox JS are two great resources that can help take your portfolio to the next level by improving the way your work is showcased.

SimpleViewer

SimpleViewer is a free, customizable Flash photo gallery application that is great for displaying your portfolio pieces. its high customizable and can can be changed to fit your design tastes perfectly. its easy to install, easy to use and can really give your portfolio a nice touch.

Download SimpleViewer

Lightbox JS

Lightbox JS is a simple script used to overlay images on the current page. Its very easy to set up and is compatible with most modern browsers. Although it is not a full flash gallery like SimpleViewer, it is sitll a great way to display your work once a thumbnail has been clicked. When you click an image it opens up the full image with a grayed out background and neutral image border. You can also add a caption to the image to provide viewers with detailed project info.

Download Lightbox JS

Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash is the creative software I used most of the time, and they helped me to illustrate out many ideas. Gradient tool is the tool that I frequently used on them. Although they are from the same company (Flash originated from Macromedia anyway), each of their gradient tool is differently presented. So, in this post I want to compare them, which has better system and which one needs improvement. The “best” I mentioned here combines user friendliness, customization options and adjusting flexibility.

Actually this post is inspired by Bittbox’s “Illustrator Quick Tip: Faster Gradient-Color Adjustments” post. I have the same feeling as him, to be honest I also want to complain about the Illustrator’s gradient tool. But before that, please take a look on Photoshop’s Gradient Tool first.

Adobe Photoshop

I am very familiar with the Photoshop’s gradient tool, maybe is the most friendly among them. To use gradient, there is to option which is using the Gradient Tool or Gradient Overlay in layer blending. When gradient tool is selected, the gradient toolbar appeared like the picture above. The arrangement is clean and easy to understand. Many options to customize your gradient outcome.

Plus, to pick the color stops, you can either use eyedropper, or double click the color stops to toggle the color picker to choose. To add more stops, just click on the below of the gradient bar, and drag it away to remove it. Plus the gradient supports alpha channel and the midpoint of between two stops can be adjust too. You can do a gradient by dragging a line on the canvas. But the gradient applied cannot be adjusted anymore. But you can always undo and re-apply again.

While in Gradient Overlay, gradient can be adjusted easily, with a list of option showed. Actually you can drag the gradient to reposition the gradient too. The tool is almost perfect but not the Scale option, because it allow to scale no more than 150%. This is particularly no good when applying radial gradient on long rectangular shape. Why don’t just make it 1000%? Plus, I do hope that a gradient reset tool to restore to the original version if I screw up to gradient option .

The Good:

• Easy to understand interface.
• A variety of options available.
• You can either use eyedropper or toggle the color picker to make your color.
• Supports transparency.

The Bad:

• Scale option can go up to 150% only. 1000% would be good
• No restore to default button if gradient customization screw up.

Yes, I have a lot of things to talk about the Adobe Illustrator’s gradient tool, basically I listed it up on the picture above. Do you have the same feeling as me? The tools has not changed since version 9, or 10, even though new features is regularly added to the newer version. But after working on Illustrator’s gradient tool for some time, actually the gradient color can be applied in a variety of method shown on the picture below.

There is three method, first by selecting the color stop, second is to drag and drop, and the third is to use eyedropper tool. I write this up just to inform anyone who doesn’t aware of this. But the no good thing is, the color stops can’t be double clicked to toggle the color pickle tool. And another thing, what’s is reason of separating the gradient tool from color tool so far away?

The Good:

• Gradient is adjustable after applying it.
• 3 of ways to apply and customize the gradient bar.

The Bad:

• Always start with greyscale.
• Color stops can’t be double clicked to toggle the color picker tool.
• Color palette and gradient palette separated too far.
• Transparency not supported. But you can use “Opacity Masking” option to achieve it.
• Sometimes may lead people to frustration.
• Not easy to master in short time.

Macromedia Flash

I really like how the they put color and gradient tool together in one palette (it should be like this). Basically to work with it is almost similar to Illustrator but easier and convenient, maybe because Flash is made for web and not print. Illustrator should really learn from this. I remember the gradient tool in previous Flash is badly done but they improved a lot.

Another big thing I like about Flash is the Gradient Transform Tool, the best among these three program. Basically, you can customize your gradient by, reposition it, resize, rotate and alter the shape (if you are using radial gradient). How cool!

The Good:

• Smarter than Illustrator.
• Gradient Transform Tool rules.
• Transparency is supported too.
• Color stops can be double clicked to toggle color picker tool.
• Able to preview gradient.

The Bad:

• Can’t think of any right now.

Conclusion

In my conclusion, if you want me to choose which has the best gradient tool, I will say Flash is the best, and Photoshop’s is the most friendly while Illustrator’s need some improvement. In the end, all of them serves their purposes which is good!

But this is all my opinion, you can have your own perspective which is different than mine. Perhaps you can state your comment below, whether is your point of view or tips that I did not mentioned above. Your comment is welcomed and needed!

Just wanted to share my joy with you. Have just found that Flashmint.com - a leader in flash templates industry - has released a new product line Flash CMS v.2 Templates. For those who have never dealt with this company I’ll clarify. Flashmint has been in the market since 2004 and is well-known for its innovative technologies and keeping pace with the time. And if there is a new trend in design, Flashmint is always at the cutting edge.

As for Flash CMS Templates, I stayed delighted when launched my first online gallery. But comparing with the previous one, version 2 is just a bomb. With its admin panel I can easily edit almost everything - titles, images, descriptions, copyright, background, etc. By the way, personally I bought one of flash cms2 templates and used it for my new website - http://natatalia.com/. And you know what? I paid $199 and got free hosting and domain name along with it. Just $199 and perfectly ready website. Do you know any other web templates provider which offers anything similar?

As someone who has worked with Flash for many years I have witnessed the love / hate dichotomy that circumvents the web. There’s one thing that stands out to me - Flash is the most misunderstood software platform around.

So I decided to contact three of the biggest Flash Gurus around and get some answers from them. We’ll meet our three Flash masters and then look at their answers to these questions: “What do you see as Flash’s key asset(s)?”, “What do you think is Flash’s biggest weakness?”, “If you could change one thing about Flash what would it be?”, “Has Flash’s popularity peaked?” and “What will Flash look like in 3 years?”

And now our three Flash masters:

1. What do you see as Flash’s key asset(s)?

The main asset of Flash is how easy it is to go from launching the IDE, creating the content, and publishing the content to the web for others to access. As long as the user has the Flash plug-in installed, the content displays consistently with little variation across browsers, platforms, etc. If the user does not have the Flash plug-in, downloading and installing it is very straightforward.

It is this, usually hassle-free, experience that makes Flash unique when compared to a host of other development platforms. This focus on simplicity on the deployment side help it to gain a lot of trust both with regular users and designers/developers who want an easy way to create and distribute interactive content.

Certainly the nicest thing about Flash is that it allows you to create almost any kind of interactivity, starting from simple buttons and ending with complex widgets or drag & drop systems. Thanks to this, the interface can be much richer than that of a classic HTML page.

The accessibility of Flash plugin is also a strong point. Almost every user has the plugin nowadays, and if he does not, the process of downloading it and installing in the browser is seamless.

That it can be used by designers for simple things like animation, up to hard core programmers for enterprise applications. When I talk about Flash, it’s more about the whole Flash platform, which includes the Flash IDE (Flash CS3) and Flex Builder, which is used to program Flash applications, as well as the Flash player, which is used to view Flash content on the web, and the Apollo (soon to be renamed) runtime, which will be used to execute specially built Flash applications on the desktop.

2. What do you think is Flash’s biggest weakness?

Macromedia (and now Adobe) spent and continue to spend a great deal of effort trying to make the lives of designers easier. With each subsequent release, the integration between Flash and other applications such as Fireworks, Photoshop, etc. sees marked improvements. Beyond integration with other designer applications, features centering round drawing become much better also.

Despite the improvements made for designers, I feel that Flash could offer a lot more for developers. The introduction of ActionScript 3 is great, but the tools for writing and debugging the code are very rudimentary. Even with Flash CS3, the code editor provides very limited functionality for developers who are accustomed to features found in other popular IDEs.

It is slow, especially when one uses new features like blur/shadows etc. Also the way that Flash deals with text is one of its major weaknesses – the support for HTML/CSS should be better, and especially there should be a way to deal with links, more advanced CSS features and complex formatting.

The poor integration between the Flash IDE and Flex Builder. More on this below…

3. If you could change one thing about Flash what would it be?

The one thing I would change is how the components are loaded in Flash. Right now, using components greatly increases the file size of an animation. A blank Flash SWF file is around 40 bytes, and adding, for example, a simple Button component inflates the file size to 15kb. Creating your own simple button from scratch with Up, Over, and Down states takes up less than 300 bytes. The Button component isn’t alone, for you experience similar file size increases when using the other components also.

Part of the reason is that large parts of these components are defined and stored within the SWF itself. My solution to this problem would be to store the component parts in the Flash Player instead with the SWF, storing only the component parts the user modifies. With this change, adding components will no longer increase the SWF file size as rapidly as it does now.

While the SWF size will decrease, this solution will increase the Flash Player’s file size. In the end, I think the benefit of having smaller SWF files sizes when using components offsets the gain in file size found in the one-time download of the Flash Player.

Lots of small stuff Maybe one of the interesting changes would be to make the snap-to-pixel option as default in all cases. It is an old solution from the vector animation times that an object can be placed on a position that is a tenth of a pixel. Because of this it is very hard to create a page in Flash that does not have elements with blurry edges. Of course ultimately it is up to the designer & developer to create pixel perfect pages, but the IDE should help them to achieve this, not be an obstacle.

More integration between the tools used to create Flash content. If you look at MS’s Visual Studio and Expression Suite, they are built with integration in mind from the ground up. With Adobe, integration seems like an afterthought. There are extensions and special work flows required to make the two work together, rather than just working. You can extend this to integration with other Adobe tools, such as PhotoShop. It’s great that you now can import a PSD into Flash, but compare that to Expression Suite, where you can create an illustration in one program, and simply open it up in another program and add some code to it, and then open it up in another program and publish it to the web.

4. Has Flash’s popularity peaked?

No, I do not think the popularity of Flash for end-users has peaked. A few years ago, nobody outside of a few individuals would have guessed how extensively Flash would be used to deliver videos on the web. As you are reading this right now, I am sure somebody out there is working on something else (maybe using Flex or Apollo) that will push Flash in a new direction.

To take a broader view by looking at developers, unlike in the past, the RIA space has gotten more interesting with technologies ranging from Silverlight, JavaFX, OpenLaslo, JavaScript, etc. competing for user and developer attention. Developers now have a choice in picking the right tool for the right job, and the tool chosen may or may not be based on Flash.

I believe this increased competition gets a lot of developers familiar with non-ActionScript languages to target the web. This is not a zero-sum game, so while the percentage of RIA projects using Flash might decrease, the quantity of developers who target Flash will continue to increase at the same rate as it has since Flash was first introduced. To look at it another way, Flashers in the future will have a smaller piece of a much, Much, MUCH larger RIA-flavored pie.

It certainly peaked in the advertising sector – all banners and campaign/product pages are executed in Flash, and by the use of advanced video features, animation and interactivity, those productions are miles ahead of anything that could be done in HTML.
But in the area of the Internet where functionality and content counts more then effects and cool animations, Flash is still not the preferred choice. Video players in Google Video, YouTube and all other sites of this type are done in Flash and this is the first really massive usage of Flash technology in the net so far. There is still a lot of things that can be achieved.

Flash designers and developers need to learn a good deal about functionality before Flash will be able to become a tool for creating portals and other massive-content sites. Many companies now choose classic HTML based solutions because they feel safe about them.

No, the whole area of RIAs is just starting to take off. At this point, its popularity has gone beyond the community’s potential to deliver. There simply aren’t enough Flash/Flex developers out there to handle the work. I’m not sure if this will hurt Flash in the long run, making clients turn to other technologies, or will attract more developers to the platform, fostering its growth and popularity.

5. What will Flash look like in 3 years?

In three years, I think Flash will feature hardware graphics acceleration. Right now, even the lowest-end computers feature graphics cards capable of breezing through fairly complex visuals, but Flash’s lack of hardware acceleration leaves such functionality beyond the reach of developers.

Ideally, Flash will combine some of the best elements of the Shockwave Player. The Shockwave Player features hardware acceleration by default with support for DirectX and OpenGL, and the Xtras extensibility model allowed developers to provide more functionality to users on an as-needed basis.

With ActionScript 3, Flash will have a 100% OOP programming language and will thus become an application building platform for the net, with serious programming involved.

On the other side, more video features are coming, and more bitmap animation tools too, because that is what the advertising industry expects. Flash will be closely integrated with Photoshop. Vector animation, the thing that made Flash’s first success a few years ago, is now becoming obsolete and will probably not be developed anymore.

It is very probable that 3D graphic support will be introduced into the Flash player.

I see the Flash IDE getting more and more expressive features, and Flex Builder becoming more and more a professional development tool. I see the Flash player gaining more speed and sophisticated rendering techniques, hardware acceleration, etc. Also, I didn’t mention video at all, but this is obviously a huge field, and one which Microsoft is taking major aim at with Silverlight.

    More About Flash and Flash designs:

Where Find Worthy Real Estate Designs?
Most Artistic Photo Studio Design Ever