Flash templates have become very popular and very useful for most individuals looking to get a head start on their next project. Check out this list created by Scott of Activeden which exemplifies the quality and diversity of Flash templates that are available for a small fraction of the cost.

Enjoy!

Fine Art Gallery – Flash Web Template by dxc381

City – Parallax Landing Page by v4

Designer’s Portfolio by Webmarbles

XML Clean White Portfolio Template by damojo

AS2 XML Mirror Portfolio Template by ParkerAndKent

Art Director’s Portfolio by modular

Creative Portfolio Template by BigZ

Slick Full Website Template with CMS by OXYLUS

Creative Template 4 by RubenBristian

Multimask Portfolio Reloaded by attique

Chameleon Template by goTo

Emotional Template by attique

ColourShift XML Website Template by digitalscience

john&jane xml template by Tidamz

One Page Portfolio Pro XML Website Template by iamdok

Deep Linking Photography Template by flashanctuary

Corporate Template by blackandwhite

XML_Creative_Portfolio by dsym

Italian Desktop Template by MaikoStudio

Black Flash Website Template by robwes19

My SlideShow Site Pro v2 by encryptme

Photo Showcase by gogh

Liquid Template By robwes19

NG Photography Template by nogrids

Portfolio Website by bobocel

Wildwise Ultimate Portfolio v2 by wildwise

Full XML Website v3 by triworks

Green Star Template by Br0

Video Template [AS3] [XML] by seifip

Magazine Page Flipper v2 Template by robwes19

Moonlight Template by Charlie78

Wildwise Ultimate Creative Portfolio v1 by wildwise

Get Inspired 2 by monophant

XML Portfolio Template by BigZ

MD Gallery Advanced by dabamol

Design Studio Template 01 XML by digitalscience

Cool Urban/Street template by MaikoStudio

MD Portfolio Site v2 by dabamol

Fullscreen Flash Advanced by Richardson

Retro Style by Br0

Cosmic Template by Charlie78

This tutorial by Flash Farmer covers how to create a dynamic Flash XML navigation menu using Actionscript 2.0 and XML. Each button has a roll over and roll out animation. Control the clickthroughs, button titles and the total number of buttons with the external XML file. Once the Flash file is created you can update the menu just by editing the XML file.

This file consists of a nice structure and code is well commented.  Also, files to be downloaded comes along with full offline documentation.

Example of final product:

This tutorial is great for beginner Flash animators. It covers everything from how to know what sounds go with what mouth movements to animating the mouth movements to fit with an audio clip.  Lip-syncing is huge for successful Flash animations and the technique used within this tutorial is probably the easiest and most effective way known to handle lip-syncing.

In a matter of 10 simple steps, Flash Farmer will get you on your away to becoming a better Flash animator.  Enjoy!

Check out the tutorial: Create A Realistic Flash Animation Lip-Sync

Example of final product:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://flashspeaksactionscript.com/files/FF_LipSync.swf" height="363" width="500" /]

Ever since Flash fullscreen within your browser was introduced, it has been used and abused time and time again but for good reason. There is definitely a time and place for Flash fullscreen.

Here are 31+ different sets of Flash fullscreen backgrounds. These Flash fullscreen backgrounds are resizable and of high quality available. Also, take note that many of fullscreen backgrounds listed are Flash animated backgrounds. These will will definitely give you an edge over others when it comes to your Flash projects. Enjoy!

9 Pixel Trend Background by boee

AS3 Full Screen Video Background by dSKY

Parallax Background Creator by MS-Design

Dynamic Pixelate Background By majakovskij

YouTube Flash Video Background by dSKY

20 Autofill Holiday Backgrounds By Kontramax

Fullscreen Random Background Images With Smoothing By Chuckanucka

XML Particle Background By tsafi

Beautiful Tentacles By Beastly

Abstract Background Pack By theRiviera

Pack 20 Backgrounds Wood By triworks

Cool Fullscreen Backgrounds and Border – 11 styles By modular

Tiled Grey Diagonal Background By triworks

Pack 10 Backgrounds Float Mix By triworks

Pack 5 Backgrounds Carbon By triworks

Fullscreen Float Background V1 By triworks

Fireflys By djankey

Pack 10 Backgrounds Oriental By triworks

Fullscreen Float Background Hearts By triworks

Moving Line Background By MaikoStudio

Tiled Blue Diagonal Background By triworks

ActionScript Snowing By Ondra

Pack 10 Backgrounds Retro By triworks

Pack 12 Backgrounds Bricks By triworks

Adjustable plant animation By digitalplant

City Scape Background By Norppa

Pack 10 Backgrounds Victorian By triworks

Country Scene By mottomoyoi

Tiled Black Dots Background By triworks

Field Particles By CalicoMonkey

Fluffy White Clouds By oz_sprog

Flying Balloons By barisintepe

Growing Swirls and Curves Background By nstas

Spinning Arrows By Yombull

JFX Random Star Field By JFXIW

Sea Shore Animated Background By mottomoyoi

Pink Growing Flowers By BOOJOO

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a timer in Adobe Flash that will count down the time to a given date in days, hours, minutes, and seconds. If you were looking for a great Flash tool for counting down holidays, birthdays, etc, this is the tutorial for you.

Also, this Flash countdown timer tutorial allows you to preset any day of your choice with in AS2 and AS3. Have fun!

[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="9.0.0" movie="http://flashspeaksactionscript.com/files/CountdownAS2/countDownTimer.swf" width="500" height="200" targetclass="flashmovie"]

Create the Flash Countdown Timer in AS2

This tutorial will go over the basics on constructing a Flash countdown timer within Actionscript 2.0.

Step 1: Create a dynamic text field with the string value of “00:00:00:00″. Note:this is simply to get the text field to the size needed for the dynamic content.

Step 2: Delete the string value of text field and name the text field “time_txt”.

Step 3: Create a new layer named “actions” and insert the following code in the first keyframe:

Source File: countDownTimer.fla

[box type="note"]Update: Based on your feedback on this tutorial, I decided to create a hassle free CountdownTimer AS3 class that will assist in creating your very own flash countdown timer. Learn how to create a Flash Countdown in AS3 using this class.[/box]

//onEnterFrame allows for a function to be called every tick
this.onEnterFrame = function()
{
	//Stores the current date
	var today:Date = new Date();
	//Stores the Current Year
	var currentYear = today.getFullYear();
	//Stores the Current Time
	var currentTime = today.getTime();
	//Creates and stores the target date
	var targetDate:Date = new Date(currentYear,11,25);
	var targetTime = targetDate.getTime();
	//Determines how much time is left.  Note: Leaves time in milliseconds
	var timeLeft = targetTime - currentTime;
	var sec = Math.floor(timeLeft/1000);
	var min = Math.floor(sec/60);
	var hours = Math.floor(min/60);
	var days = Math.floor(hours/24);
	//Takes results of var remaining value.  Also converts "sec" into a string
	sec = String(sec % 60);
	//Once a string, you can check the values length and see whether it has been reduced below 2.
	//If so, add a "0" for visual purposes.
	if(sec.length < 2){
		sec = "0" + sec;
	}
	min = String(min % 60);
	if(min.length < 2){
		min = "0" + min;
	}
	hours = String(hours % 24);
	if(hours.length < 2){
		hours = "0" + hours;
	}
	days = String(days);

	if(timeLeft > 0 ){
		//Joins all values into one string value
		var counter:String = days + ":" + hours + ":" + min + ":" + sec;
		time_txt.text = counter;
	}else{
		trace("TIME'S UP");
        var newTime:String = "00:00:00:00";
        time_txt.text = newTime;
        delete (this.onEnterFrame);
	}
}

Here is a nice collection of Flash countdown timers. They range from XML driven to an old film countdown timer. I’ve noticed that there are many individuals looking for a solid Flash countdown timer, so here they are. Enjoy!

Countdown Timer by Flabell

Flip Countdown Timer by Flabell

Valentine’s Day Countdown Timer by handmadesign

Simple Flash Countdown Timer by Angel Romero

Countdown Timer – FIFA World Cup 2010 Final By pedrodonkey

Countdown Timer v2 By flashnos

XML Countdown With Universal Time and Multiple Events By dxc381

Flash Analouge Countdown Clock By biteMedia

XML Countdown Customizable to the Millisecond By dxc381

Countdown Timer to Region-Based Events(XML Driven using GMT) By meerkatlookou

Old Film Countdown By collis

Final countdown By samss100

Game Countdown Timer Component By RobertaD

::Digital wow clock:: By samss100

Grunge Countdown Timer By JackSparrow

Date and Time, Countdown Timer, and Time Elapsed and Remaining By scottexpo

Strong Countdown By Nemo

Countdown before New Year’s day By fab-shamane

Digital Countdown Preloader By designesia

Countdown Clock By zainesarruke

3D Clock by zizther

Bubbles Clock by drfisher

[box type="note"] Further Reading: Create A Flash Countdown Timer in AS3 Using A Class[/box]

A series of helpful Flash tutorials to get you feeling comfortable using Actionscript 3.0.

Getting Started with Understanding Paths Within AS3

As a Actionscript 2.0 programmer, one of the first hurdles to overcome when first using Actionscript 3.0 was _parent and _root. They’ve respectively changed to parent and root and they don’t entirely work as intended.

Currently, using parent the way it was used in Actionscript 2.0 will produce a compiler error as Actionscript 3.0 is a bit pickier about moving up paths. It uses class inheritance instead of the old prototype inheritance. It was designed to dispatch events, use listeners, pass variable that point to objects, all that other good stuff. However, that is not necessarily for everyone especially if you simply use Flash as an animation tool.

Here is a simple fix I learned from Bryan Grezeszak and it doesn’t involve complex event dispatching. Simply create a variable that stores the parent path and use that instead. By doing so, you are compromising the language and avoid getting wrapped up in a complete workaround only to find more bugs and errors.
// declare a variable that is parent
var newParent = parent;
// apply that instead of just using the command parent itself
newParent.gotoAndStop(2);
I tried this and it works like a charm and you can apply the same thing to root.

If you found this post useful, I would love to hear from you. All suggestions are welcomed.

Craig Campbell just created a new Flash/XML music player. The design is loosely based on the old school iPod. The player is very easy to update using the supplied XML file that points directly to all you necessary files. For those of you hoping that this is built in AS3, sorry it is not. However, it is still a nice music player.

Here is the Flash/XML music player created by Craig Campbell.

Original source files:
jukebox.zip

Source: Craig Campbell’s Flash Blog

Have you ever wanted to convert your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into an Adobe Flash presentation? There are many applications available that will convert your .ppt files into .swf files, but what if you’re not really looking to spend any money. Here’s a great article from Actionscript.org, that explains how to manually convert your PowerPoint files into Flash files. I think this is a very smart trick and I believe this will get the job done for most simplistic PowerPoint files.

The process involved with converting your PowerPoint files using this method is a little lengthly, but the article even offers advice on some commercial applications. You can view the complete article at Actionscript.org.

via Actionscript.org

Ever want to rewind your animation that lives on the Flash timeline without creating a whole separate animation. Well, here’s a tutorial from LearnFlash.com that’ll show you how to rewind any animation that has been constructed via the timeline. It’s pretty quick,easy, and effective.

via LearnFlash

Below is an example of the expected results:

The video behind the tutorial: