Well it has been a slice as they say. Flash 99% Good has been a labor of love for many years, but alas my love has grown cold for maintaining this blog.  Moving hosts, getting hacked a few times, and general lack of time have brought me to the conclusion that it is time to put the blog to rest as they say. I must thank everyone for their comments and encouragement over the years. Flash 99% Good taught me as much as I hope it has taught the internet community about usability and all things Flash. After I clean out the spam/crude from the comments I am going to switch the site to a flat file HTML site that is read only. I plan to leave it up for historical purposes and maybe the information here can bring use to someone in the future. Once again, thank you everyone for your help. You can still follow our work over at airgid.com

cheers, Kevin Airgid

A new blog (Flash CMS info) is out (details about who is behind it are sketchy as there is no contact info., and they used one of those “whois” privacy controls on the domain, this always makes it suspect in my opinion) But it seems to be a good resource for Flash CMS’s that are out there. Although it may turn into one big ad for a “paid” CMS of choice, these type sites often do that after they get decent traffic. (Not that I’m helping by linking too it!). But never the less a good place to start on your hunt for a CMS for Flash.

Sidebar: Got to love it, a site dedicated to Flash CMS’s … but using WordPress as the CMS. Once again, loads of talk about Flash CMS tools but no one wants to eat their own food! Hmmmmmmm!

A new Flash CMS has appeared on the scene: Flashmoto. Once again it is a Flash CMS that uses “Flash” as the main UI to edit Flash.  The interface of the CMS is very well polished. Dialog boxes are well labeled and it seems to have a easy enough user interface. I signed up for a beta and spent some time playing around. One test that I use for how easy a CMS is to use is the “Famous 5 minute Test” basically if I can’t get new pages created and edited in under 5 minutes the UI is not so good. How does Flashmoto perform in the “Famous 5 minute Test”? well, I could create new objects and edit existing things, but adding new pages seem to allude me. (Maybe it requires a smarter user than me!, and keep in mind this is very beta software!) The developer for the project has some great plans for the software. I’m told it will support deep linking, SEO and the back button may actually

Electric Rain – Swift 3D PS Plug-in for Photoshop looks to do a much better job of 3D than Photoshops own built in 3D interface (which I think sucks BTW). I’m a big fan of eRain products and this one seems to be very easy to use. Sadly it’s only for the PC so Mac users are out of luck. Now the marketing copy from erain.. Swift 3D PS is a fun and easy-to-use Photoshop plug-in that will have you exploring entirely new hemispheres of Photoshop CS4 Extended. It accomplishes simple 3D tasks in seconds with remarkable results and places your 3D text, extrusions or models back into Photoshop as 3D layers. These layers remain fully editable by Swift 3D PS, even after Photoshop’s array of layer styles and filters are applied. Swift 3D PS offers the same powerful capabilities of our standalone product, but works within the confines of the Photoshop environment.

There are many resources online for sharing and buying quality code to help fast track your Flash development projects. Many of these resources offer either free or a small fee to access the source .FLA files or components. I’ve tried to rank each of these resources with strengths and weakness so you can easily wade through the junk.