Studio Exploration: Flashloaded

Flashloaded was launched on May 21, 2003. This studio "includes a group of highly talented developers, web designers and programmers." It's based in Vancouver, Canada, and creates and sells components (among other things) that are above and beyond those found in the Components panel in Flash. The novice Flash user can generate very compelling output and interactivity simply by filling in values in the Component Inspector.

The home page http://www.flashloaded.com shows the most recently developed component. As of today, this component is the liquidGallery component. If it's been replaced by a new component in the meantime, liquidGallery can also be viewed at http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/liquidgallery/. You simply roll over the component to begin see it in action. Right off the bat, the scale and bounce effects impressed me, and I wanted to explore the site further.

The gridNavigation component (http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/gridnavigation/) is interesting. It allows you to click a thumbnail to zoom in on its contents while the other thumbnails are pushed aside. Content can be external images, animated SWFs, or movie clips. The ability to adjust some of the settings from Flashloaded's webpage that normally are adjusted in the Component Inspector is convenient. For gridNavigation, these settings are speed, easing, and position. After changing a setting, you can click within the component to see how the new setting affects the component.

Some of the components, while more impressive, are a bit more difficult to use. The 3D Square (http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/3dsquare/example1.html) is an example. It displays images on an interactive 3D rotating square. The interactivity is possible with the mouse wheel, mouse buttons (clicking alone, or clicking and dragging), and the arrow keys.

I like that there's a support forum for each component, and that you can view questions and answers without having to login. Login is necessary only for posting questions.

As mentioned in the first paragraph, Flashloaded offers more than just components. The "static" part of the Web experience they develop includes fonts and web design templates. The more interactive part of the Web experience they develop is both visual (components, video loops) and auditory (sound loops, intro sounds, button sounds, voice sounds). All of these can be viewed in more detail by clicking the links in the navigation bar at the top of any page on the site.