Sona Patel

Ever since I attended the Knight Digital Media Center’s Multimedia Training for Journalists I’ve only been able to produce 2 Flash applications for The Tribune. I’m trying to get into the habit of creating at least one a month. This week I’m making one on recreational bycycling in SLO County. Anyway, here is a list of some great, easy-to-use Flash applications that will come in handy for any journalist. I encourage you to visit these Web sites and play around with the different tools each has to offer. By the way, the first Flash project I produced at The Tribune was based on a staff photographer’s journey through India. Check out Faces of India.

1) Knight Digital Media Center’s training pages

Check out their tutorial pages on Flash, audio, video, photography and web design. They even provide downloadable templates which you can use to create your Flash projects. Best of all — it’s FREE!

2) Flash Den

FlasDen isn’t really tailored toward the average journalist, but it’s a great site to check out what you can do in Flash. I’ve come up with quite a few ideas for multimedia projects based off the components I’ve seen on this site.

3) SproutBuilder

SproutBuilder is an excellent program for making customizable widgets for your web page. You can even integrate audio, video, web polls, and other content to your Sprout widget. I’d suggest browsing through the “Recently Built Sprouts” section to get an idea of what you can do with SproutBuilder.

4) UMapper

This program allows you to create embeddable Flash maps for free. If you create a Google map in Flash you’ll have to use Action Script to program the points, dialogue boxes, and the ability to add links, video, and audio. UMapper does that for you and then generates embeddable code. You’ll have to tinker with the KML code and Google API keys (I think) but its doable. Check out some of the maps that have already been created and shared on UMapper. There are a bunch of big newspapers already using this program. I’ve had great success with it. Trust me, you won’t want to program your own map (I once spent five hours writing ActionScript to perfect a small Google map. I’ll never do that again!)

5) Advanced Flash Components

I’ve only used once component off this site, but it seems to have great little video players and cool components for interactive maps (I used the component GMap which is free.) Their customer service will also help you figure out how to work with KML code. They’re great at responding to e-mails.

I spent quite a bit of time last night perusing through some very cool easy-to-use Flash applications. Like many other news organizations, The Tribune is trying to get into more multimedia. I plan to use a couple of these applications for a project this weekend on recreational bicycling in SLO County. I’ll post the applications that I’ve used (and plan to use in the near future) in a separate post tonight.

Here’s hopin’ that M.I.A, aka Maya Arulpragasam, snags a Grammy on Sunday. Her song “O … Saaya” was featured in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire and was nominated for an Oscar. She is up for two awards on Sunday including best album Paper Planes and best rap song “Swagga Like Us.” The 31-year-old Tamil artist was born in the UK and was brought up in Chennai.