Flash Otaku Blog

Hello everyone, I just want to let you know that we updated our flash components recently. There might be a lot of changes since you've last visited FlashOtaku.com, so take a look at: Carousel, Grid 3D, StackFlow, Thumbnail Grid, Thumbnail Scroller, Slideshow. Some of the recent changes include the possibility to add a gloss effect or a watermark and the option to create rounded corners for… Continue reading

A few days ago, we released a new flash component: Grid 3D. Similar components, inspired by the Cooliris 3D Wall plug-in, have been on the market for some time but we tried to create something better, less CPU-intensive and with more features. I think we've done a pretty good job but we're open for suggestions from you, people interested in our products. You can see the component in action… Continue reading

We have recently released the Carousel PRO and StackFlow PRO flash components. These PRO versions add the capability to play video content, including YouTube videos. Also, we've added zooming capability, so when you zoom over an item, a higher resolution of that item is displayed. This feature is included in the basic versions of the components as well. You can download free trial versions of the components here and… Continue reading

Today I'll begin a series of posts about how you can integrate two or more components together in order to create more complex and interesting flash applications. As you will see, this is very easy to achieve. I'll start with a very basic example in which I will create an image gallery (slideshow + thumbnails). For this example I need to use the Slideshow component and the Thumbnail Scroller

The purpose of this ScrollBar component is to be used together with the FlashOtaku components, but it can be used in other contexts as well. You can skin it the same way you would skin a Flash V3 component and you can also chose to show the left/right arrows or not. In functionality is more like a slider component but I decided to call… Continue reading

If you liked the first Slideshow component you will absolutely love the new one. The new component is AS3 only and comes with significant performance improvement and new features. Now you can add library assets and DisplayObject instances, besides external content like JPG, SWF etc. You can also add content using Actionscript methods, not necessarily using XML. Another new feature is the built-in video player, which can play H.264 encoded… Continue reading

Any of the flash components available at FlashOtaku.com gives you the possibility to create a custom preloader or a temporary clip, to be more precise. The temporary clip will act as a re-placer for the content of the item until the content is completely loaded. By default, a simple temporary clip is created for you with a specified color and transparency and there are also 5 built-in preloaders from… Continue reading

As promised in the previous tutorial, in this tutorial I will show you how to add a tooltip to one of the FlashOtaku components. I will use the StackFlow component as an example but it is applicable to the other flash components as well. Here's how the final result will look like: First we need an XML file that will contain the source and the title of each item… Continue reading

In a previous tutorial, I've described how you can open an URL when a thumbnail is clicked. It was not difficult to do but you would need to parse the XML file again and create some Array instances to store the additional data. With the new components, however, this becomes much easier to do. In this tutorial I will use the Carousel component, but it's the same for each… Continue reading

As you've probably seen the website was updated today and a few new components were added: Thumbnail Grid, Carousel and StackFlow. Also the Thumbnail Scroller component was rewritten based on the new framework that was used with the other components. All the components are written in AS3. Although these new components are not free, they are pretty affordable considering all the available features. On each component's page… Continue reading