Cool flash intro and photo effects for your website

Posted on October 26th, 2006 in General by Monica

Toufee is a new WYSIWYG online Flash movie builder that aims to make it easy for non technical users to quickly create impressive multimedia items for embedding in web pages. Some of the key features include drag and drop element placement, good control over presentation timing and a text-to-speech engine with six relatively human voices. I think there is a lot of potential here - there’s no shortage of people who would like to make Flash presentations without complicated or expensive desktop software.

Photo site Tabblo made a number of upgrades today to their service that now combines a wiki ethos with a design tool based on general rules of good layout. Tabblo isn’t a traditional photo sharing site; instead of competing with sites you’re probably familiar with, Tabblo makes it easy to import your photos from places like Flickr (and iPhoto or Picasa) and then lets you arrange those photos with text to make large collage-like posters, called Tabblos, to print.

As of today, Tabblo designers can give permission to other users to not just view and comment on a Tabblo, but to make their own changes to it as well. A sports team Tabblo could be customized by each parent, for example, to easily put their child’s picture in the center of the poster but maintain the same design as the whole team’s posters. It’s like a wiki for visual design, with the original templates preserved.

Scrapblog is presenting at DEMO this week and their new software is a great example of just how much can be done by web based applications. It’s a Flash application that lets users drag and drop photos, video, text and audio onto a background image to build scrapbooks that can be printed as a photo-book, burned to DVD, exported as a photoset to Flickr and soon will be exportable to YouTube and other video sites as a narrated slide show.

The amount of smooth control over layout that Scrapblog allows is really impressive. It’s a tool that will appeal beyond the usual scrapbooking demographic and could be of great use in making things like artist portfolios and online graphic presentations. Even scrapbooking, though, is one of the leading folk arts in the US today. Don’t let that dissuade you if you’re an art snob; Scrapbook is lots of fun to use just for its web interface.

 

 

 

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