My Flash Resource - New Ideas and News for Applying Flash to Complex Gaming Apps

One of the most unique, up-and-coming, uses of Flash is within the foreign real estate sector. Real Estate marketers, keen on providing a visually stimulating and comprehensive sales experience for their customers, often call on flash designers to create intricate visual portfolios of real estate offerings. Unlike other verticals, in the condo, hotel, and rental world Flash website intros and intense imagery are acceptable, if not rule of thumb. Text doesn’t sell a nice vacation condo to a buyer. Instead, a clear, inviting, exciting layout
of the property, beach view, and condo floor plans united inside a short Flash .swf file will catch a prospective buyer’s attention, draw them in, and hopefully convert them into a sales lead.

Probably one of the most stunning and sought after vacation spots in the world right now is Costa Rica, a small Latin American nation located in beautiful Central America. Costa Rica has the best of both worlds: sweeping beach scapes of sand and palm trees from both the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean can be found within a short hour flight from the main international airport in capital city San Jose.

The pristine nature of many beach communities has spawned a new tourism based economy that has developers scrambling to build new a Costa Rica hotel on this devine beach property. The Costa Rica vacation rental market is competitive and becoming full of excellent opportunities for savvy buyers.

This is where Flash comes in. Most Costa Rica vacation condos can’t be sold over the phone. Instead, it takes graphics, eye appeal, and excitement to capture a buyer. The same goes with Costa Rica beach condos which need graphical imagery to convince customers of their beauty and value over the internet. A typical Costa Rica vacation rental can range from $500 per week to $1500. On the top end, Costa Rica vacation luxury rentals start at $1500 and run gambit to over $2500. The money spent, however, is well worth it. Costa Rica beach condos go fast and advance reservations are required. So, if you know anyone who is interested in this wonderful, exciting get-away, tell them now!

As a result, traditional Costa Rica vacation rental and Costa Rica vacation hotels have had to create a very strong IT and Web design department, in addition to the standard walk-in real estate office. This fact is soley due to the global nature of the web: customers can’t always visit first, so they chose to take a virtual tour instead. Thus, Costa Rica beach Condo developers count on a strong percentage of their sales being web-generated, in addition to standard brick and mortar operations.

What do these Flash designers use? In addition to stock photography, architectural layouts, and imagery, Flex and Action Script are employed to provide a 3 dimensional, “virtual tour” of these Costa Rica vacation rentals. The action script provides the programmer with the opportunity to fully animate condo tours, such that a prospective customer can feel as if he or she is actually inside the space they want to rent. In turn, because of the strong need of Flash, local web designers in Costa Rica have experienced high job growth and new employment opportunities. As always, foreign tourism teamed with local internet talent produces a dynamic, rich new economy that can literally change a country overnight. All this from Flash!

Microsoft is eager for Flash developers to use its search engine! A fairly recent post in their downloads section contains sample code for integrating Flash and the Live.com search API through a SOAP interface. This is a good development, which teams the speediness and scope of XML and Flash’s rich graphical interface capabilities. In sum total, you can create fairly reliable search apps that query Live.com for results. It might also be possible to parse these results according to the needs of your particular website. Microsoft suggests Macromedia Flash 8 Professional as a development platform. You’ll also need an application ID that will allow you to access the Live.com API. Enjoy! Flash Code Samples for Live Search API