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Where to get free components
Scott Manning, 2/24/2003 -
Everyone loves components, but not everyone wants to pay for them. Here’s where you can get them for free.
The search for components
Ever since Macromedia hit the scene with components for Flash MX, I’ve been searching and bookmarking any site that has components. For about a week in my life, it was an addiction. Must have more components! I scoured the Internet for any site that was offering information on this new advancement in Flash development. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much out there. There were several sites that offered loads of components from various developers, but the same components could be found on the next site. In less than a year, several of these component sites have come and gone. This is a list of what remains. flashcomponents.net
Flashcomponents.net is an initiative by Rubberduck to "establish a high quality knowledge repository for Macromedia Flash MX Components." And they have done just that. Rubberduck went the extra mile to have an HTML version of the site and a "Rich Internet Application" version, which uses a Flash MX interface with a Cold Fusion MX backend. There are currently 140 free components on the site. The Flash-DB
The Flash-DB offers plenty of resources for Flashers including components. This site has a lot of samples of components in action. While some sites are focusing purely on giving components, The Flash-DB also offers practical information and source files on using existing components. The examples are very specific like a combo Box that populates a List Box - that populates two fields, with 1 text file. Macromedia Exchange
Just because Macromedia sells components doesn’t mean they don’t offer free components. The Flash UI Components Set 2 are some of the best components available. Exchange also offers some components submitted from developers. Components Headquarters
The interface for Component Headquarters is all Flash and a little annoying, but the site has some good components. If you can squint your eyes long enough, you can find some jewels there. Flash Kit
The largest Flash community out there has about 25 decent components and examples. It may be cluttered with advertisements and slow at times, but Flash Kit is still around and growing strong. ACK!
ACK! has three free components: An Event Engine that provides a model for creating custom events and allowing any object in Flash to listen for that particular event, a Priority Queue that allows programmers to create priority queues for any number of uses such as SWF loading, data loading, and event triggering, and a SWF Queue that provides an easy-to-use object that will handle all of the loading of SWFs into your movie in a sequential, prioritized fashion. Josh Dura’s Text Editor
Josh Dura’s Text Editor is, hands down, the best Text Editor component out there (commercial or free). It offers all the basic functions including bolding, italicizing, underlining, color picking, and HTML conversion. The latest version allows users to save, load, and delete. To top it off, the code is very clean and Josh is very open to any comments others have about it. It seems he has no plans to go commercial with it, which should make many developers very happy. Every Flash developer should make this component part of their collection. Ultrashock
Ultrashock has several components, but you have to dig for them amongst their FLAs. Unfortunately, there is no way to sort through their FLAs to only display components only and doing a search for "component" only returns one. But, believe me, they’re there. That covers what I've got in the free component department. As more sites pop up, we'll let you know. Scott
Scottmanning.com
Replies: 5 comments
1) Wow, thanks for the great comments Scott, I really do appreciate them. One site you missed, would be http://www.flashcomponent.com Yes yes, I know it has been down for a while, but expect it to be back up very soon. We lost all of our data due to a bad host, but we will have a new site up within the month to let users reupload their data.
posted by Josh Dura (), 02/24/2003 07:10 PM CST
2) Another site of interest is FlashComponents.com (with an s), which is a subscription service. The infrastructure is supported by the same people that run clipart.com (formerly ArtToday).
posted by emberton (), 02/24/2003 07:23 PM CST
3) www.dmxzone.com
:about 100 commercial and free
www.fourlevel.com
:about 20 commercial and free
www.ultrasuite.com
:150 SB in one package
www.dwteam.com
:about 15 from Macromedians All worth visiting...some more than once.
posted by madcream10 (), 02/24/2003 08:24 PM CST
4) "FlashComponents.com" Has anyone used this service? These are the same folks who offer Flash Foundry which we subscribed to but, in general, have found very little useful stuff there. They seem extremely focused on cartoony stuff!
posted by John (), 02/25/2003 09:50 PM CST
5) Another site
www.flashmxpro.com
posted by gökhan (), 03/01/2003 03:49 AM CST
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