Applications of Flash

Flash is used in making a large variety of applications.Let us investigate in detail.

Flash websites
Most of the Flash animators start with Flash for making flash websites.Flash websites are great compared to the boring HTML websites and offer a lot of interactivity and will be very fun to visit and explore.Flash also allows users to add sound to their animation,which will be great if added to websites.Below are links of few Flash websites you will like.

Newyork
Eco Zoo

Flash Banners
The most popular application that reaches a large audience are flash banners. These banners are mostly used for displaying ads.These ads may also contain small(very small) games. However,banners are also used to display messages.

Flash Games
Online gaming has gained a lot of importance in the recent years and is also a source of revenue for many companies and developers.Most of the online games are made in flash because flash games are less in size and offer a lot of features for the developers.The companies like ivy comptech that offer services for partypoker(an online gambling website famous in countries other than India) also work on Adobe Flash for making games.
If you wish to see the potential of a Flash, Play Governor of Poker by Youda Games
Flash Video
Well,I don't think I have to make a note about Youtube which uses Flash technology for sharing videos world wide.

Glogs
Glogs are similar to blogs.While blogs are popular for text and photo content,glogs are popular for expressive content.A glog is simply a flash application in which you can align images(of your choice),text(many fonts) and also music and videos.If you don't know what a glog is,go and own a glog at Glogster
Apart from glogs,glogster is also a fantastic social networking site.Below is the glog created by some girl.


Flash animation
Flash is also used to create a lot of Fun content on the web.For those who haven't seen the XiaoXiao series,here is an youtube video.



All the animation is created using flash and there is a lot more creation going on.You can also create such matchstick animation on your own if you have Flash.Visit StickPage for more information on match stick animation.

Flash for mobiles
Flash Lite from Adobe, a mobile-optimised version of Flash technology, offers a quick and effective way of building on your existing skills to create mobile content. Flash Lite is supported across all Nokia S60 and most Series 40 devices, and it is widely integrated with Nokia’s mobile WebKit browser.
40 % of the mobile users in the world have access to internet and the number will grow more in future.Mobile applications have a lot of potential to earn revenue.With Flash lite we can create applications that interact with web or Flash games for mobiles.
With Flash lite you can create many mobile applications starting from wallpapers and screensavers to games.If you want to create any mobile application in Flash Lite also have a look at what Nokia says.

A note about Flash:Introduction

Flash is an authoring tool that designers and developers use to create presentations, applications, and other content that enables user interaction. Flash projects can include simple animations, video content, complex presentations, applications, and everything in between. In general, individual pieces of content made with Flash are called applications, even though they might only be a basic animation. You can make media-rich Flash applications by including pictures, sound, video, and special effects.


You can create a large variety of applications in Flash.However,it is mostly used in internet applications.We can create banners for displaying ads or messages with rich media content and very low size.We can also create flash games using the scripting language of Flash called Actionscript.Strictly speaking we use actionscript for controlling the movie clip in banners also.But actonscript is more than that.There are a lot of features in actionscript,some of which we will be covering through out.Apart from banners and games,we can also create some match stick animation for fun.

Flash Lite from Adobe, a mobile-optimised version of Flash technology, offers a quick and effective way of building on your existing skills to create mobile content. Flash Lite is supported across all Nokia S60 and most Series 40 devices, and it is widely integrated with Nokia’s mobile WebKit browser.
Flash also has the Flash Javascript API which allows users to trigger Javascript while the Flash movie is playing.

Flash was a product of macromedia which was later acquired by Adobe.In order to play the Flash content you need to download Adobe Flash player.Always use the latest flash player for improved performance. After generating a flash file using flash software,we emebed it in a page in the same way we embed a jpeg or png.But this content plays and has user interaction.We derive user interaction using actionscript.


Flash always has more to offer than a user can think of.The latest version of Flash is Flash CS4(Creative Suite 4) which supports Actionscript 3.0 and has many more features-like the bone tool,3D tool-than Flash 8 professional.

Learn Terms:API,SDK,GUI

Its time to learn some frequently used terms.

If you are a software developer or a web programmer or a simple blogger getting some widgets or a google user using google maps you come accross many terms which you don't try to know more.Lets learn about some terms here.

GUI-Graphical User Interface:

The graphical user interface,as the name suggests using graphics or images as the user interface rather than text or commands.For example the icons in the browser for Home,Stop or Reload are the examples of GUI.An expressive GUI always helps in the simplification of the interface to the user.For,exapmle,a website with icons is looks better than a website with plain HTML.

API-Application Program Interface

An application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications.

Suppose you want to make use of the Google Maps and display it in your website.You can do it with the help of Google Maps API.They provide you the set of rules you need to display any location of your want.

For Windows applications,you mght develop it with Visual studio,which is an Integrated Development Enviroment that uses the Windows API.The Visual Studio makes the API abstract from the user,i.e.,it provides the user with a set of pre-defined functions that use the API.

API is the set for developers to support and bulid new applications on a platform.

SDK-Software Development Kit

A software development kit (SDK or "devkit") is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform.

It may be something as simple as an application programming interface (API) in the form of some files to interface to a particular programming language or include sophisticated hardware to communicate with a certain embedded system.Many companies provide SDK's for their products to enable people to develop their own applications.

For example,Google provides the Android SDK for its new mobile platform Android.You can develop the application for Google Android.
Similar is the case for Microsoft Windows Mobile.You can download the Windows Mobile SDK and develop windows mobile applications.

Viruses from Pendrives.A way to stop them.

Everyone using the PC will sometime or the other face this situation.While most of the cautious people don't even dare to use a pen drive for data transfer, most of those who don't like to use flash drives will use them for sure.

The Windows Vista was not effected much by the viruses written for Windows XP, but however, The Vista is also now getting effected by many viruses which spread more through the pen drives.

A virus in the pen drive will start eating your PC as soon as it is plugged in because of the Autorun feature in Windows. You always see an autorun window as soon as the pen drive is plugged in. The pen drive has a root folder which contains all the data required for the autorun.The root folder will not be displayed in the files, but will be run as soon as you plug in the device. This is used as a vulnerability in spreading viruses and all the viruses will get into the root folder of pen drive which will be run automatically without any effort.So, disable the autorun using the following method.

Go to start>run (or press Windows button + R)

In the run dialog box type in gpedit.msc

The group policy of windows will open

navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Turn Off Autoplay
as shown in the figure below.

Now double click the Turn Off Auto play in the menu as shown above.

You will see the turn off autoplay properties as shown below.Enable it and select "all drives" for disabling the autoplay on all drives.
Click Apply and you have successfully turned off the autorun feature on all removable drives.

Don't think that your computer is safe from viruses entering from pen drives. Most of the pen drives will have an Autoplay action as the default for a double-click on the drive from My Computer.This is enough for all the viruses to enter your PC.

So,even after disabling the Autorun feature, do not click on the drive directly.Instead, use the Windows explorer which can be opened by pressing "Folders" in the toolbar above in My Computer or press Windows button + E to directly open it. Open the drive by clicking in the pane towards left in My Computer.

Still, you may fall victim to many viruses which have a folder icon,but are potentially good viruses that can duplicate themselves into all the drives.Before opening any file or folder,check its properties first and open it. A little care might save you from losing all your data to malicious viruses.

Owning a Domain

The ICANN(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) controls all the domain names over the internet. However, it does not deal with hosting the webpages or the hosting servers. It deals with the domain names and their IP addresses on which they are hosted. A domain name can be registered with any domain name registrar.

A domain name registrar is a company accredited by ICANN to register internet domain names. While you buy a domain with a registrar, you buy it for a certain period after which you have to renew the domain. If you buy a domain say "alltechnix.com" with a registrar for one year, you have to renew the ownership after one year.If you fail to renew a domain name within the stipulated time, the registrar will have full control over the domain name and may or may not sell it to you again.

There were several cases in which the registrars gained control over the expired domain names and threatened the former owners for more money.Once a famous photographer got calls from his friends after some nude pictures started appearing on his expired domain. In order to regain his already popular domain he had to pay a large sum. That is why most of the top domain registering websites say that they notify you or have an expiry alarm.

So,do not buy a domain unless it is a trusted service.Host monster is one of the trusted services.You can also see the Cpanel for managing domain in the demo login.

Domains and SubDomains

Surprisingly, my blog is a sub-domain in the toplevel domain "blogspot.com". The webpages are also maintained in the servers similar to the way we maintain files in our hard drives.Suppose I have a jpeg file in the following location

"D:\Zerofactor\Pictures\factor.jpg"

You might have understood that the picture is in a folder named Pictures, wgich inturn is in a folder called Zerofactor located in D drive.

Check the following

http://images.google.co.in/intl/en_ALL/images/images_hp.gif


This google image search image with the name images_hp.gif is in a folder called images which inturn is in en_ALL(english all) in intl(international) folder located in images.google.com

Here google.com is the top level domain, where as "images" is the subdomain.Sub domains are also similar to folders,but they are handled differently. A subdomain in a top level domain must again be redirected to a specific folder in that domain.My blog neotracks is a subdomain like any other blog in blogspot.All the information regarding my blog will be in that folder and any one with the id and password details are given access to the blog.

Whenever you type http://www.neotracks.blogspot.com it first resolves the domain name and in the blogspot server it redirects to the neotracks subdomain.Each time a user creates a blog, a sub domain is started and if an unused subdomain is sought, it directs to the registration page.

Domain Name System or DNS

According to mathematics a domain is the set of values in wich a function is defined.In practical use a domain is the range in which one can exist.But a domain in the internet is the name of the website.

For example in http://www.google.com "google" is the name of the domain.All the domains that end with a .com are generally referred to as "dot-com" domains. There are several types of domains like .org(for organizations), .net(for network related) , .us,.sg,.ge,.in(location specific) domains while .com are commercial domains. However it is not compulsary that an organization should have a .org domain and similarly for the other types of domains also. But what happens after you type in the domain name in your browser window?

Resolving Host
You often see this message in the browser while the browser is searching for the website. Soon you see the website in the browser. This webpage might be coming from another continent too. These webpages are stored in webservers which can be physically located in any part of the network-Internet. Each webserver has a specific and unique IP address which is used for identifying it in the netrwork. As soon as you type in the domain name, the Domain Name System or DNS translates it into IP address. For example www.google.com translates to 74.125.19.99. You can directly type in this IP address of any domain to get the website. However, domain names are meaningful and easy to remember and that is what they are meant for.

This can be compared to the phone book in mobile phone. You type the name of your friend and hit the call button, your mobile phone dials the number of your friend and the network connects it. Here DNS(Domain Name System) is the mobile phone and the contact book need not be maintained by us and websites are still our friends.

As soon as the webserver or the host gets a request of webpage it sends the webpage to the client. Hence, a unique domain name will always be directed to the same servers and the job of the provider is to serve the requests of all the clients.

How do websites earn money: Especially Google

The answer for certain websites like amazon.com or ebay.com or playboy.com is very obvious. They provide a service through internet and they charge money for the service done.

But websites like orkut or facebook or google search do not charge for the service they offer, instead they mainatain loads of data (obviously a lot of crap) for free. Do these websites get money from what you pay (The monthly bill you get) to your Internet service provider? The answer is a straight No. Then where do they get money from? The answer is through advertisements.

The actual question is why is google earning more than the remaining advertisement companies.The simple answer is its policies and its eficiency. But, its not as simple as it seems. The clients pay the advertising company(say google adsense) for every landing on their website,i.e., for every click on their ad placed by this company. The number of clicks on the client website increases the publicity of the website. Obviously out of such number of clicks the client may get benifited by few transcations.

The task of the advertising company is to place the ads in such a place where most of the users find it when they want it.Then google started showing ads in the form of sponsored links in the search results.These sponsored results appear at the side bar or at the top of the search in a different colour. However, the remaining result is shown as is. But there are cases where the user is interested in some product only if its shown to him(i.e. he has no need to search for it) , or he is completely unaware that such kind of service exists at all. Then he would not search for it and google wants to display only relavant ads to the user.In other words the user doesn't like to see an ad of shoe polish while searching for toothpaste.

Then came the adsense, in which google pays- a part of what it gets from its clients -a user for displaying ads on his blog, a maximum a user can get for his interests. And here comes the role of efficiency where google has to display the right ad which the user might be interested in. That is adsense words. The ads are displayed according to the content on the blog. Thus the rato of transactions to the number of landings on the webiste of the client raises, giving him a good opportunity to showcase his products to a wide audience and getting returns for the investment he has put on ads.The one displaying ads is also paid(indirectly, google has hired these people) and so he strives a lot to publicize his blog and mainatain it with more interest. Blogging can no more be called a waste of time in any case.

It is the policy of google that makes the client to go for it.The client pays for the number of landings on his website.The user can click on the ads repeatedly and get some bucks.Google is very strict about such people. It also moniters where the clicks are coming from and if more clicks are from the same IP address the user is forbidden from using adsense anymore.

This involves a lot of continuous work by google and they are the leading advertising company with more places to display ads the space is increasing day by day.

The other websites earn money by placing ads on their homepage or other pages.Orkut also displays ads after the user logs in, however it is a service provided by google which might later land you up in using their other service, adsense.

Blogging a Blog

How did a blog start?
And why are we getting a blog for free??

It was decades ago when there was no internet that the post offices had lot of work and had a lot of reputation everywhere in the world. Once the the network of computers started and has grown into the mammoth internet we are using now, the post offices are no more. The outburst of social networking sites made internet more popular than ever and anything in this world.

People who had a long list of friends used to update their friends through letters in the post office days. Later, on the evolution of internet, such kind of people used to buy webspaces and maintain such updates in their own sites.Such websites were called weblogs.they used to hire people with knowledge in html and used to make weblogs which has also become a fashion among such interested people.

Later the social networking sites also provided space for users, where the user only publishes some writing and the html page design work is taken up by the network administrator similar to the weblogs.As Internet became net the weblogs also became blogs, however we were given sub-domians like allmixfruitjuice in my case where the domain is blogspot.

So,you never worry about the page lay out and the formatting in maintaing a blog.You only publish matter along with any pics(or more) you have.

Well,you get it for free because most of us try to monetize the blogs which is also a source of income for the network administrators.You gain only a part of what they get.