Free! - Not Just Another Image Gallery

I feel like I’m treading in somewhat unfamiliar waters, writing for FLzone. My name is Nancy Gill and I’m an author, technical editor and Community Expert for Adobe Dreamweaver. So what am I doing writing an article on Flash? My first thought also when I was asked to write something about FLzone’s fabulous new 3D ImageFlow Gallery for Flash. But hey, I like new things so I started playing with this component.. and playing .. and I’m still playing with 10 hours to get this thing finished. Time to write.

Example 2: Biz Card Catalog

Now for something a little different. This time, I have a stack of business cards from a group of realtors and I would like to display them on my page so the user can "thumb" through them to see who they like. I have scanned each of the business cards and saved it for you in the zip in the bizcards folder. Create the Flash document in the same directory. I made this one a little smaller because the idea is to display the cards and they are going to be nowhere the size of a picture and the purpose here is different. Here, the idea is to display information and move on to the next realtor. For that reason, I have made the document 550 wide and 400 high. Drag the 3D Image Gallery Component to the same directory and make it the same size. Set x and Y to 0 and it covers the Flash document completely. I used cards for the Component Instance name and, as is my norm, I set BackgroundTransparency to true and autoFlip to true so that I can easily see the image placeholders and get a good feel for where they will appear and how they will perform. I have also given my TitleColor and DescriptionColor a color other than white so I can see them against the white background of the Flash document.

Next comes the data so the component knows where the business cards are, how to display them and what description to give each one. I'm using the 3D Image Gallery Component Wizard this time to quickly create xml that will do what I want. Below is a screenshot of my finished wizard information:

I have also applied one of my favorite effects and that is to apply a purple color to the background, but still set it to transparent and then apply a fogStrength of 50 so the background images lined up to show next have a purple hue of them, losing that effect as they take center stage. Export the swf and you have a very effective display to show on your Real Estate Agents' page.

There is more I could show here, but I think you get the idea. FLzone already has a couple of examples that you should take a look at, but I couldn't see repeating them here. Instead, I'll provide the links. The first one links to Flickr and displays the latest uploads to that picture site. One thing to remember when you use a remote data source is that you will have to use a remote site with a crossdomain policy in place and you will have to add some ActionScript to work with the other domain. That restriction is well detailed and is complete with code in the Flickr gallery example found here.

FLzone also has an excellent example that I love using pictures of records and a jukebox and shows how you can also play MP3's to match the images you are showing. It's a fantastic example and I hope you'll download it here and play with it.

I hope this article has helped you to see how easy it is to use the 3D Image Gallery component from FLzone. One note if you purchased this component early is that a couple of issues were discovered with the extension during the writing of this article and those have now been fixed and a free update is provided on FLzone. If you are not currently using Version 1.02, you will want to download and install that version to get around the problems in the earlier version.