August 2002

My rant about the poor way Macromedia is treating the speakers at their 1000 dollar DevCon conference received a lot of attention. Especially the call to boycott the event, and my complaints about Jakob charging extra for his session. Well, as you may all have seen, I didn’t have all the facts straight. Jakob is having his own mini-conference before the event. I should have checked my facts a little better before ranting – and for that I apologize. I feel the focus was shifted from what I felt was […]

Macromedia has started their signup for the Flash 6 player beta for Linux. Mike writes that they are looking for people that are going to bang on the player and find any issues. If you are a Linux person interested in Flash, send them an e-mail to let them know you are interested. No date for the release of the beta of final version of the player, but it seems like it should be just around the corner. [Via: Mike Chambers]

I am blown away by the great program at Macromedia DevCon this year. The conference isn’t cheap, and is held at a rather expensive area in Florida – but I was still seriously working on getting there. Now I have changed my mind and will boycott the event, and I think you should too. Why? Because Macromedia is treating their speakers for the event bad. And they are treating the Flash developer community equally bad in letting some of the speakers actually charge extra for attending their speech. Jakob Nielsen

Interesting to see Sorenson (Squeeze) and Wildform (Flix) release their new Flash MX video tools at the same time. Sorenson’s big news is the stitching feature that will allow you to use Flash to do really big video files. As many of you might know, Flash relies on all of its content having to be loaded into RAM, which has made it rather uniftted for large video files – until now. The new version/revision of Squeeze also includes AVI file support. Wildform’s Flix 3 has as its biggest news the

Lisa Delgado, Wired’s dedicated Flash writer, has taken the time to write about ESPNs use of Flash MX to make available videos with multiple angles on their EXPN.com site, as well as a lot of other uses for video in Flash. ESPN has really made good use of Flash MX on their site. And the session they had about it at FlashForward 2002 San Francisco really blew me away.

Its not long since Flash 6/MX was released, but Macromedia is probably already hard at work on projecting the next version of Flash. Although probably not directly related, Mike Chambers used a slow day to ask the question: “What do you want to see in the next version of Flash?” – Not too surprising that it sparked a lot of suggestions and discussion.