The expertise around Flash / Flex based CMS is building up a new area for content management. We haven’t had the pleasure to try out the software but the building of wysiwyg interfaces is a promising business, as long as the HTML and Search engine optimization features of pure text are guaranteed : this is where we’d like to know more about FlashMoto’s HTML publishing features, which uses the HTML version technique; meaning the flash based web site is also available as HTML for search engines and non flash browser. This technique is also used by Silex RIA, another Flash based CMS.

What distinguishes FlashMoto from a range of other flash content management systems is that it is the first Flash CMS based on ActionScript 3 and realized as RIA on Flex.   The websites powered by FlashMoto are controlled just like a standard CMS but with the extras that Flash offers.  FlashMoto provides a set of SEO tools what makes the Flash CMS website completely crawlable and seen by search engines.

Flash CMS from FlashMoto is characterized by a range of other features:
- ability to add unlimited number of pages;
- convenient WYSIWYG page and pop-up editor;
- rich media library;
- infomodule component;
- video and image gallery component;
- video and MP3 players component;
- deep linking and Google Analytics integration;
- comprehensive documentation and tutorials.

The guys behind simpleviewer have had a huge success with the first version of their flash base image  viewer. The new tilt viewer is really a good one as it renders the feeling that the image can be explorer from all sides within the most appropriate angle. Another freebie from the same guys  reproduce the idea of postcards.

Application developpers like to illustrate the process and layout of the work they are planning. Customers like to have a visual sample of what’s coming, and that’s exactly the kind of step that clarifies discussions when negociating work and contracts.  Balsamiq mockups is a basic ilsutration application  that you can use to very quickly build a UI mockup. A lot of softwares do that, wbut this one is rellay simple to use and very light to install, the free version is actually browser based ! Mockup below took approximately… 15 minutes !

A lot of magazine publishers now use online readers to let subscribers read thei publications online, via what is called a PDF book reader. Online services provide such an interface, with functions and prices that vary. We’ve investigated two of these providers : ISSUUE and CAMELEO. More here

Jspresso -http://www.jspresso.org- is a free and opensource framework dedicated to building RIAs that offer a desktop-like user experience. Among many improvements, one of the major features of this release is the native support of Adobe Flex as a deployment option.

All Jspresso-based applications will instantly run on the Flash plugin without a single, hand-written, line of MXML or ActionScript in their code base. Nor is there any GUI code generation involved. Jspresso relies on a generic Flex client engine that dialogs with the Jspresso Java backend through Adobe BlazeDS using a generic set of GUI commands. This approach relieves the developer from the DTO pain you usually find in this type of applications while still leveraging the style and power of a Flex client-side and keeping the development server-centric.
Last but not least, Jspresso applications, bootstrapped by a Maven archetype, build entirely in Maven and can be directly imported in Eclipse with full WTP support. The server stack remains unchanged (servlet / Spring / Hibernate) and all the previous frontend technologies remain fully supported.

using images to display products on e commerce applications can successfully be combined with jabvascript lightbox, itself including a flash zoom and pan application : flashden provides a few examples of commercial applications for a very reasonable price (10$ for this one), among which the XML configuration is an interesting way of configuring various parameters such as position of controls, initial zoom percentage and alignment, Easing value. Equally interesting is the free fla source code provided by  Kirill Edelman on his blog, that will give you a few keys if you want to investigate how everything works from the inside.

What’s nice about internet technologies is that they always get better. But this can also be a problem, and Flash 10 complies to this rule with a new security feature that impacts all CMSes with advanced file upload ability, specifically those using the swfupload component : wordpress and silverstripe customers have reported inability to upload files after upgrading flash from 9 to 10 ! Thank god the bug is fixed with the new version of swfupload : go ahead and start copy and paste operations on your websites.