Puzzles are good fun and a popular way to draw people to your website. The object of this puzzle is to find the listed words within the square of characters. The words can be arranged up, down, left, right and in any diagonal direction, up-right, down-right, up-left and down-left. This type of puzzle can also be very useful for teaching purposes.

The example puzzle below was constructed from the names of planets and various stars.

The puzzle square is animated so that mouse clicks, or dragging over a square with the mouse button down, will cause the square to change color indicating that the letter is included in a word. Once the word has been marked, it can be crossed off the left hand side clue list by clicking on the word.

For the competitive people among us, you can time your progress with the inbuilt stopwatch.

Read on to see how to construct, customize and deploy these puzzles.

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SWiSH Max3 and miniMax3 come with a number of animated banners. To use one of these banners simply go File | New Project and then choose from one of the available Vertical or Horizontal banners. We recently had an inquiry from a user who wanted to add a custom banner size. Although not obvious, this modification is reasonably easy to achieve. Below is the modified banner with a custom size of 220×180 pixels. Read on to find out how to make the modifications.

Note that authoring is not available in miniMax3.

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This new wizard gallery uses an “Image Sphere” to display thumbnail images. Once an image is selected, the slide show starts from the nominated image. Moving the mouse cursor to and from the center of the stage will cause the “Image Sphere” to appear or dissapear. The new gallery is supplied free of charge to SWiSH Max3 and SWiSH miniMax3 users. See below for the download location.

The “Image Sphere” is based on the WordSphere component discussed elsewhere in this blog.

The gallery makes use of the Image Loader component to streamline the loading of the selected images.

Captions and Comments associated with each of the images can optionally be displayed in the Image Sphere and also as a title for the currently displayed image. When the caption / comment is displayed with the image, it is surrounded by a “halo” so that the text will be visible on any colored background.

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Well its time to drag out the old Xmas tree from last year and redecorate it for this year’s festive season. This gallery supports up to 10 photographs and associated captions. The background color, text and all of the photographs can be easily modified via the Wizard panel. To help celebrate the season, why not personalize this gallery with photos of your family, publish and post the link to your friends as a reminder of the festive season. If you don’t have a webspace area, why not make use of SWiSH Space? swishspace.com is a free web hosting area that is available with every SWiSHzone product license. Details on how to create a SWiSH Space account is at the bottom of this article.

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The HiFi project template is one of the more popular free sample templates that is distributed with SWiSH Max3. Although feedback has been positive, we have received a number of requests to increase the number of sections. The discussion below shows how to edit the supplied template to add an additional section. You could repeat this process a number of times to add even more sections.

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SWiSH Max3 users that have used the New Project… feature will realize that Max3 is supplied with number of example projects that can be easily customized using the wizard interface. The projects, galleries, sites and banners available under the New Project dialog are all examples of Max3 Wizards. This tutorial gives an example of how to create a simple wizard to alter the text, shape color and background color of an object. 

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