ClickTale is an intriguing website statistics and monitoring service which creates movies of users’ individual browsing session. Every mouse movement, click and keystroke is recorded for future playback.

This service will be of great value to many websites, particularly online retailers: seeing how customers browse and interact with their stores will enable them to maximise revenues by making site optimisations based on user behaviour. ClickTale also promises to revolutionise accessibility testing: rather than blindly applying best practise methods and hoping for the best, developers will be able to analyse user sessions to identify usability issues.

Of course, like every good web2.0 service, ClickTale is running a closed beta, but if it does deliver as promised it’s sure to win many admirers.

activeCollab is an impressive open source clone of Basecamp. As you can see from the screenshot, it looks remarkably like Basecamp, even down to the navigation being nearly identical.

This application has a great deal of potential. I’m a huge fan of Basecamp - whilst activeCollab is clearly missing some of Basecamp’s headline features (most notably Writeboards), the fact that it’s free and installable on a third-party server is a real boon. As it’s open source we’re sure to see a host of user-generated add-ons and improvements integrated in the near future.

The release of activeCollab is sure to encourage (force?) 37signals to innovate further to maintain their user base.

The UK website for the PSP game Loco Roco is a real treat, using the open source Flade engine to great effect.

Mochi Media have released MochiBot, an online statistics package for Flash content.

Integration with MochiBot is simple: just cut and paste 4 lines of Actionscript into your FLA, then publish the SWF file. Each time the SWF is viewed, tracking data is passed to MochiBot for processing. You can see a simple example of the MochiBot dashboard here, or for more detail see the MochiBot tour.

It remains to be seen how popular this will be, but it’s a promising offering, and the free, base-level account is certainly worth a try. Combine this with Urchin/Google Analytics and you’ll have a formidable set of tracking tools.

Colin Moock has posted a great article on the recent history of Actionscript and related Adobe/Macromedia swf generation tools. Colin discusses the progression from AS2 to AS3 since the release of Flash Player 7, moving on to the recently released Flex 2. The article concludes with helpful “next steps” for different types of users, from AS2 developers to timeline-based Actionscripters and designers.

You can read the article in full here.

Related links:

• Flash Player 9 - the Flash Platform runtime
• Actionscript 3
• Flex 2 SDK - free swf compiler plus the Flex framework
• Flex Framework 2 - UI classes and components
• Flex Builder 2 - Eclipse-based AS3 and MXML IDE
• Flex Charting - graphing classes and components
• Flash 9 AS3 Preview

Senocular.com have posted a new tutorial, the Beginners Guide to Getting Started with AS3 (Without Learning Flex). Surely learning Flex and MXML is an integral part of AS3? Regardless, it’s an interesting article that’s worth a read.

If you’re new to AS3 you should read the Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3 migration guide and the Flex 2/AS3 language reference.

MDM have released an update to Zinc adding support for Flash 9, Flex 2 and AS3, with the added bonus of Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. (Mac OSX support is via a plugin - the application runs on Windows and generates Mac binaries).

I haven’t looked at Zinc in some time, and I’m genuinely impressed with the feature set it now boasts. In particular, the appearance of database connectivity is a real boon: if it can accommodate large databases (for data-driven CD-ROMs) and the SQL support is comprehensive, then I’ll find it hard to justify using Director with the Valentina Xtra again any time soon.

Freedb.org, the website used by myriad MP3 encoders to download track information when ripping CDs, is to be taken down after two of the main developers resigned to explore alternative possibilities using the same data set.

Michael Kaiser states on Freedb.org:

“I felt it more important to stay free instead of getting fancy web 2.0 features. But unfortunately Joerg and Ari (the main doers behind freedb) disagreed with me and decided that they want to go another direction”

Michael is looking to sell the the soon-to-be-defunct Freedb.org domain name to the highest bidder. Given the amount of traffic the domain generates it should earn him a tidy sum!