Portent

As you can see, compared to previously, things are looking a lot greener. However let’s not get complacent.

In case you’re new, I’m playing in a sort of Flash Sim City where the more visitors improves the city. Currently there are three places you can visit: (I get no reward except satisfaction).

• Increase Population
• Increase industry
• Improve the road network

Of course you can only visit each link, once per day…

Link

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you give a reasonable amount of cash to a Bafta (for Craft) winning company, the result is an excellent and quirky website.

Done completely in Flash, the basic concept reminds me a little of Danny Wallace’s “Join Me”. By doing real favours to others (eg Buy someone a drink, give them your paper, babysit etc), you can create a “favour” a little animated flatulent libidinous ball or join someone else’s flock, in both cases entering what you did. You can also win prizes.

You can also get new ideas by clicking on a favour on the home page. There’s an excellent animated video which is well, just watch it.

Production quality is very high I couldn’t possibly fault it. My only complaint is that it reminds me of Film websites; very high production quality but not built or meant to last. All websites (this one included) need to reinvent themselves, add new features etc. Favourfarm was created as a viral for vinspired.com a Youth volunteering site is such a good idea, it should be continued and grown.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Long before the interwebs existed, historical documents foretold (yeah a Portent!) of Portent Org and today we can reveal a scan of part of one.

No, it’s another generator that lets you create Bayeux Tapestry type illustrations. Implemented in Flash, you select your shapes from the tabbed menu on the left which lets you pick folc, Brave (men), Beasts, King and Misc. Drag them into place, shrinking or expanding them and mirroring them so they go left or right. After that you add text and go onto the next frame. It’s very well done.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

It’s back again! No I don’t have any involvement or stand to get anything from having people click through, except it improves my mini-city. Someday I’ll be able to look at my Metropolis and think why?

It’s currently traffic jammed up; I know the feeling! More visitors paradoxically frees  up the traffic jam. That’s video game logic for you!

I’ll give you a clue, green is good, red is bad.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Provided with Actionscript source code, the Flint Particle System by Richard Lord. I’m not a Flash developer myself (I lean more towards Silverlight) but I recognise impressive work.Each of the examples looks great…

As he says “Flint is an open-source project to create a versatile particle system in Actionscript 3. The aim is to create a system that handles the common functionality for all particle systems, has methods for common particle behaviour, and lets developers extend it easily with their own custom behaviours without needing to touch the core code.” i couldn’t have said it better so I didn’t…

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Popularity: 1% [?]

I’ve never been fond of Flash but there’s no denying that it lets designers do some amazing effects. Where theres a lot of Flash code to load, the better designers usually provide a pre-loader; an animation usually showing a %loaded.

That’s all this site does though they do let you filter by year and provide information about the site that each pre-loader was used in. There are some brilliant animations there…

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Popularity: 2% [?]

This games takes the defence scenario but extends it by giving you the ability to build armies (using mana which is obtained by killing the baddies) and then you can go on the offensive. It’s a simple 2d left right scrolling and can be played with keyboard or mouse.

You have artillery in the shape of a bow and as well as earning mana during the battle, you also gain experience that can be used to upgrade your weapons, give you new types of troops. Great graphics, an ok sound track and just fun. Excellent.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

This is quite tough as my lamentably poor score demonstrates. It’s table tennis (aka ping pong) playing against a touch computer opponent.

Just move the bat left or right with the mouse. Bounce angles seem determined by the point at which you hit- hitting the ball off the table is all too easy! But if you’re looking for a simple (albeit frustrating) game then give this a try.

Link

Popularity: 3% [?]

No, I’m not linking to a very dodgy porn site! (Oh dear, I bet I’ve started a new meme!). Siz|Easy lets you enter the dimensions of common objects and then shows them rendered using Flash with multiple views.

In the example show the objects are mobile phones and a pack of playing cards. The purple is the iPhone, the green a pack of cards and here are three other phones there including two Blackberries. it’s an interesting site and very well implemented though not a site I can see myself using that often!

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Popularity: 5% [?]

This is quite a neat way of showing recent stories about virgin brand businesses whenever they appear on the web. The flash animated radar (with a number of display options) shows each story as a star with older stories moving towards the periphery. Occasionally these fly into the centre so perhaps they’ve been updated or appeared elsewhere.

You can also filter on the various companies, I’d never heard of Blue Holidays or Virgin Comics. Hey this story might appear there in a day or two! Overall it’s quite a neat animation.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

This is a very clever bit of Flash programming. In fact the whole thing is pretty good. Normally when you look for books online you search rather than browse. It’s a way of life- Amazon have a couple of million books so how could you possibly browse them?

Well Canadian Chris Thiessen has worked out how, though at present there are only 21,000 books in his (I’d guess) Amazon affiliate store. The top one of the three screen shots show the whole bookstore at the top, each square is a rack. You can zoom in to see the individual racks (the middle shows one rack zoomed in) and clearly see the book covers. It always amazes me that it is book covers that attract people but it is.

The racks are laid out like in a conventional bookstore, but at least here you don’t have to worry about books in the wrong racks or trying to get to a book with people standing in the way! Just click on a cover and you get the cover plus details (shown in the bottom screenshot) with a link to buy from Amazon. I suspect the 21,000 selected for Zoomii are the top sellers which makes sense.

It’s a fast interface and works very well with a mouse wheel button for quick zoom in and out. I wonder if someone like Amazon would pick up this and use it. Could it be improved? Possibly. How about a pop-up that appears and vanishes (without clicking) giving a summary as you move over the book cover? That might eat up a lot of bandwidth of course! This site is highly recommended for being innovative.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

I think this has been well thought out. Some levels are very easy whereas other take a bit more effort.

You get a set number of bombs on each level and have to propel the main character to the exit door. On some levels there are barrels which explode after a while or tnt which blows immediately. Add in crates and it gets interesting. As you can see I’ve reached level 19 so far. Not easy as on some levels you have only one bomb- eg level 16.

You don’t have to solve all the levels in one go. Once you’ve done a level you can restart anytime at that level. Nicely implemented with great graphics. Recommended.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

When I first saw this I thought it was one I’d covered before and it is a similar concept to that of Qbesq. You get a set of drawing tools, can vary the thickness, colour, intensity etc.

As the first tool you open with is a five mirror image, first efforts sort of resemble a kaleidoscope (well mine do, but I have the artistic soul of a donkey!), artists will find enough to work with. there is some beautiful stuff here. Nicely implemented.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

This is my mini city- not much to look at, but the more visitors it gets the higher the population becomes and then I can add industry, set up proper transport infrastructure, security, business and the environment. I’m not sure if they have to be unique visitors but would guess so or else repeat visits would clock up the numbers.

For once the link goes to my city called Portent999 rather than the site itself but you can set up your own free city and invite visitors. It’s a neat idea so long as people visit so come on everybody- turn my humble patch into a sprawling (but green!) metropolis…

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Popularity: 7% [?]

It looks rather bleak- you have a ball on the end of a piece of string. the other end moves with your mouse cursor so you have to drag it (the ball falls under gravity) and try and click on it.

I found it almost impossible until I learnt a trick. (Warning Spoiler). Drag the string to the left or right edge so the ball is half off the screen. then move the cursor off screen until it’s a few pixels away. Then a quick mouse move and click should hit the ball. What does it do? That would be telling!

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Popularity: 5% [?]