Nope, we’re not asking you to do marketing campaigns for Toufee, that’s asking too much :). We wanted to make the best free online flash movie maker and we ended up creating Toufee. Ever since its inception, Toufee has evolved as the preferred online flash movie maker tool. We didn’t do any marketing, we never ran any campaigns and still we’ve grown this far simply because we had the support of our users all over the globe.

So what are we asking you to do? Help us with promoting Toufee as the best online flash movie maker tool? Absolutely not! If not for the support of our users all this while, we couldn’t have made it to where we are today in the business of online flash movie maker tool. We created Toufee alright, but we owe this success to all those people who have spread the word of Toufee, recommending to their friends, to their peers at work and sharing their experiences with Toufee to large community of flash users and enthusiasts. One couldn’t ask for any better visibility than this. And the best part is that, there are thousands of happy Toufee users who continue to help us promote Toufee, not by any campaigns, but by their creative flash movies did using Toufee.

All that we ask you is to enjoy using Toufee, create great flash videos and share them with your friends (you can use the “Share This Movie!” link found at your Toufee movie page to email your flash movie to your friends), create flash banners for your websites, create flash video tutorial for learning or do any flash video that you feel is worth creating with Toufee. Now, did I say you shouldn’t promote Toufee?

Did you notice this Gigya widget? A nifty tool found on every page in Toufee flash movie maker that allows you to quickly upload your Toufee flash movies to your favorite blogs and social networking sites. With Gigya, you can quickly post your flash videos to sites like MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Xanga, LiveJournal, Freewebs, Facebook, Blogger, Tagged, TypePad and BlackPlanet. You not only create your flash movies in seconds using Toufee but you can also post them to your favorite sites with ease.

Now this widget is available when you work in the Toufee Flash Movie Editor (i.e. the main movie editor stage). Once you are done creating a flash movie or a flash presentation, simply scroll down and you’ll find this Gigya widget that will allow your flash movies to be uploaded without any hassles. Toufee’s Gigya widget saves you tremendous amount of time…for example if you have a Blogger page and imagine manually copying the HTML code and pasting in your page - for those of you who are not comfortable with HTML it might be a tedious and frustrating task to handle…Gigya widget takes care of all those so you can concentrate on creating a stunning flash movie and leave all the worries to Toufee Gigya widget.

There are more bands in MySpace than the entire Toufee user base MySpace has been the launch pad for bands like Hawthorne Heights that later went on to do exceptionally well at the Billboard charts. Bands need visibility to get the attention of record executives and MySpace provides exactly that. But hang on, there are so many bands now in MySpace that standing out from the rest becomes crucial. That’s where Toufee flash videos could really help. You need to market your band thoughtfully if you want to be in the limelight. MySpace profile pages are good, but think on what would make it better? What about an interactive flash presentation at your band’s MySpace profile page that briefly tells the history of your band and all the songs that you’ve done till now? Or you could cook up a nice flash video with all those cutting-edge flash effects to promote your latest album.

With Toufee flash movies your band’s MySpace profile page is never the same. You can use Toufee flash movie maker to create flash videos that run promotional campaigns on your latest song, run an interactive flash movie quiz about your band, create teaser flash movie presentations about your upcoming projects, add flash intro effects to your song video and more! Toufee flash movie maker could add that extra advantage that you need to get your band professionally portrayed. Put your band’s MySpace Profile page to better use with Toufee flash movies…with millions of MySpace users having a highly interactive flash movies based profile page would drastically improve your band’s visibility. MySpace users would be tempted to check your band’s profile page every single day to see what new flash video or flash movie that you’ve cooked up!

If you have any suggestions on how bands could use Toufee flash videos to spruce up their MySpace profile, please your feedback as comments to this article.

Now, this is a real biggie! Have you ever wondered that you could use your Toufee flash movies as scrap entries in Orkut? Orkut now allows HTML tags in scraps which means you can paste your Toufee flash movie HTML code directly into your friend’s scrapbook! Toufee flash movie would instantly start playing in the scrapbook…Imagine its your friend’s birthday and you create a special flash movie and post it directly to his scrapbook - isn’t that super cool? You would definitely give your friend a pleasant surprise!

You can do pretty interesting stuff with Toufee flash movies in your Orkut now that it supports HTML tags…you could put your band’s flash video movie into your friend’s scrap…thats one way of releasing your latest song :). There is so much now that you can do with Toufee flash movies and favorite networking site Orkut. Let’s see what Toufee flavor you people can cook at Orkut!

Ganesh

Hi

Its been quite a while since I wrote for the Blog. While Toufee V2.0 is getting ready for launch, there is so much that you can do with v1 (the current Toufee that you see) - so in my next few posts, I’ll showcase Toufee flash video editor’s less known features that can be extended to come up with useful applications.

In this post, I’ll show you how you can use Toufee flash movie maker to create a simple website - yes, a website!.

Before we go into the details of how its done, have a look at the website that I did using Toufee flash movie maker.

http://flash-movies.toufee.com/mov/561187793785

I’ve used this example throughout this post for explaining the process.

1. First, let’ start by creating a new flash movie using Toufee. Login to your account, and select Create A New Movie. This brings up the Add a New Project dialog box. If you notice closely, we’ve updated the options - Movie Size and Background Color. Since we’ve planned a website, I’ll choose 640×480, but you can also go with 800×600 if you want a bigger page. From the Movie Size dropdown list, select Custom and enter the Width and Height values.

2. The Toufee Movie Editor stage opens up with the first frame. In a typical website, we would have the navigation buttons on the left or top. Let’s have them on the left for our flash movie. Now select Add Button button from the top. Open its properties window as shown in the above image. Enter the button text as Home and set the options for the button. Use the On Focus Body Color option if you want the button to change color when the mouse is moved over it (similar to Hover effect that you get in HTML)

3. Position the button so that its in left and towards the upper half. Repeat the same steps to create additional buttons like About Me, Photos, Guestbook, Contact - as such in a real website. Once you have your initial frame would look something like the one shown in the picture below

If you notice the above image, I’ve added the Note control for the paragraph text. I’ve also used the Note control to create the left gray bar and the top banner to mimic a website layout effect. Once you have a layout similar to the one above, you can simply copy the frame and paste it to create new frames for the rest of the pages (About, Photos and Contact).

4. Once the pages (i.e. frames) are ready, you have to link the frames. i.e. When a user clicks on About button, they should be taken to the About frame. For this, you need to do the following. Right click a frame, and from the popup menu select Edit Advanced Frame Properties. Select Advanced options and then select the radio button that says “When user clicks on a button…”. Since we are trying to create a webpage effect, this option ensures our frame unloads only when a users clicks a button to go to a different frame (i.e. page). Repeat this step for all the frames in your flash movie.

5. Now for the actual hype- linking process. In the first frame, select About button and open its Properties. In the Properties window, you’ll find something Move to Frame dropdown under Button Action. From the dropdown list, Select the frame to be loaded when user clicks About button. Click Update to save the changes. Repeat the same process for remaining buttons in the frame. Also repeat this for all the buttons in the remaining frames.

I’ve just taken a basic layout and some simple buttons to create the website effect. You can do more advanced effects and create a whole better website completely using Toufee flash movie editor. Hope this is useful. Let me know should you have any queries.

Ganesh

Our Toufee servers were bit off-color last week and we did receive emails from lots of Toufee users. The fact of the matter is that we are upgrading our existing infrastructure and some goof-up in one of the servers might have rendered the service temporarily unavailable during the past week. Finally, we’ve got it sorted out and the Toufee service is working better now than it ever had!

If you still face any issues working with Toufee please email me at ganesh@toufee.com and I will definitely make sure your problem is fixed.

Btw, we’ve been getting really useful (excellent suggestions actually!) from Toufee users. I have mentioned a couple of them here

1. Option to create duplicates of Toufee flash movies (similar to a
Save As feature).

2. Option to add hyperlink to the entire flash movie (so that clicking
on any frame takes you to the URL)

Let me know what you think on the above options…if you have something to suggest we will be very glad to have it reviewed. Please email your feedbacks and suggestions to ganesh@toufee.com

Thanks
Ganesh
Toufee Support

A phrase that you here sometimes at the Toufee’s development desk. Call it what you may, things like these are part and parcel of programming, as sometimes, you might forget simplest of features in the heat of the moment. The simplest of the things always slips even the sharpest eyes - quite honestly, they are very hard to detect for they have less chances of being noticed. But luckily for us, Toufee users save us the effort and they do a hell of a good job pointing out simple errors that we did!

Maybe, we could run a contest for Toufee users to point out simple things that we might have missed in Toufee. Could you spot something? If yes, then email me what you’ve found at ganesh@toufee.com. I am sure for once my mailbox will be flooded again!

Waiting for your replies…hopefully my next blog post will be an interesting read of those simple things that we SIMPLY missed!

Till next time

Ganesh
Toufee Support