Samuel Wan keeps on cooking on great Flash MX projects. This time its a Fisheye Menu in Flash MX that is up for serving.

Sam's implementation of the fisheye menu extends the original Listbox component that is part of the Macromedia components shipped with Flash MX.

I must say I am impressed with the way the whole list menu handles, and with Sam's references to sources for building it. But I am not so sure I like the usability aspect of it (see the demo). I feel the menu hides more of the items than a regular list menu would.

Samuel has made the source code available for download this time around too. Thanks Sam :-)

John comments on RSS as a follow up to my posting about Phil's Flash MX RSS reader.

I wish you had comments on your weblog John, or at least that it was possible to reach you by e-mail. Just wanted to point out that while there is a healthy discussion going on about the RSS format, there is actually an RSS standard (RSS 1.0) being used today that supports categories (in RSS 1.0 called subject). Check out my weblog in RSS 1.0 format for an example.

Vectorkid is a cool site with great tutorials on creating vector art in Flash. With tips on how to greate realistic metal, plastic, wood, cloth and much more. I especially like the vector tomato :-)

[Via Flashblog]

This is the coolest intergraton of an RSS parser in Flash MX I have seen so far. Phil Chung work as Multimedia Instructor at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. He made the RSS reader for his own use, but promise that he probably will make the source for the reader available in the near future.

The scrollbars use the FScrollPane component, not the browser scrollbars, so instead of having the Flash movie appear in a small "box", Phil is letting it take up the entire browser area. It works really well, IMHO.

He has also made a reader for the Macromedia XML feed that really shows the power of Flash MX in showing information feeds. You can filter the feed on type and category.

It would be really cool to see a RSS 1.0 reader with support for filtering the information in the same way that it is filtered in Phil's Macromedia XML News Feed reader.

The Flash Enabled Book site was made by Steve Leone one of the authors of Flash Enabled, and the designer of the book as well as the web site.

BTW: If you want to pick up the book, you can find it here.

[Via SwfNews & Flashenabled.com]

Jon Udell writes about Personal RSS Aggregators for Byte.com

Has RSS run out of steam? Quite the opposite. There's more action than ever, but it's shifted into a decentralized mode. That's just what the RSS network needed to do in order to truly operate at Internet scale.

A good article about RSS and how the publish/subscribe model is slowly changing how the web works, and how information flows. Jon also goes into detail about some of the RSS aggregator tools available today.

Phillip has posted the source for a Pocket PC Phone Dialer (zip download) featured in the Flash Enabled book.

Here is a great example of what you can do with Macromedia Flash MX and the Flash Player 5 for Pocket PC. It's a phone dialer that stores numbers using cookies..

Pocket PC, Mobile Devices, Innovation

Here is a request Phillip, could you get permalinks on your blog soon, pretty please? :-) Its really hard to link to a spesific story at Flashenabled as it is now.

Just a quick note, Frank McPherson is blogging from the Pocket PC Summit. Thanks to Phillip for the link.

David Doull's Urbanev: Thinking in Flash is an interesting site, found it because he has started linking to me (thanks David).

David is a brilliant Flash developer, responsible for such great projects as the award winning - as well as great example of a very useful use of Flash in an application - smallblueprinter

I like Davids writing style, I think he would do good with a weblog - it wouldn't have to be just two words and a link or two you know David :-) For now he is using his site to write longer articles, with a little more meat than the regular weblogs. His latest article is about "Compontents and Conformity", its a good read!

I Hope to see more writing from David in the future.

Mike has a new list of new content about Flash MX now available on the Macromedia.com site.

There is a lot of good content there, including a couple of articles regarding usability, Featured Community site (as reported earlier today), a user survey, and last but not least John Dowdell's "JD Forum". John lets us under the blanket to see what Macromedia is doing to help finding the information you want easier at the Designer & Developer Center.

I have to tip my hat *g* to John for linking back to the Flash blogs, much appreciated John! :-)

Breaking news from Flashenabled.com & Phillip Torrone, reporting directly from the Pocket PC Summit:

Folks, here is some exclusive news from the Pocket PC Summit. Macromedia announced that HP will be putting / distributing the Macromedia Flash Player 5 for Pocket PC soon, so that bascially means the millions of people with iPAQ are / will be FlashEnabled! I'll have more details soon, but here it is. The Macromedia folks here said this was okay for me to post.

[PS: Not sure if Phillip was in a hurry here, or if all the HP Pocket PCs have been renamed iPaq's for the HP / Compaq merger]

Its nice to see another line of PDAs get Flash 5 support, and again I hope that Macromedia help push the Flash MX player development for PDAs so that we don't have to wait another two years to get the mobile devices updated with the current technology on other platforms. After all, aren't we all on agreement that mobile devices is the next big thing?

Oh, and since we are on the subject of mobile devices, and I just pulled the whole news bullitin from Phillip's site, here is a plug for the Flash Enabled book:

Flash enabled the book, build stuff for you Pocket PC.

I think Branden's intro is a good enough reference to his Components Rant:

Time to let off some steam here... I keep seeing folks say that the built in Flash MX components are too complex, bloated, and that it's better to just roll your own. I am even seeing some relatively smart folks spouting this kind of ignorant junk! And that's exactly what it is, junk....

Read the rest of the rant at Branden's blog

This is web developer/consultant humor. If you have ever worked in a Dilbert company, you will have discovered that all to often project tend to end up like this:Tire Swing Cartoon

[Via JD on MX]

Since I just got the statistics for search on weblog.bergersen.net, I thought I would share the numbers with you all. Its interesting reading.

Using Atomz Search, the top phrases searched were:

1. - "fireworks mx"
2. - "fireworks mx crack"
3. - "decompiler"
4. - "fireworks crack"
5. - "crack"

Its kind of sad to see what people are looking for. It gets even worse when we look at the searches people used on various search engines to get to my site:

1. - dreamweaver mx crack matt
2. - fireworks mx crack matt
3. - fireworks mx crack
4. - dreamweaver mx crack
5. - how google works
6. - "dreamweaver mx"
7. - "how google works"
8. - "fireworks mx crack"
9. - fireworks mx cracks
10. - playstation 3

The searches are a little better than when the preview releases of the MX products was released, but its still pretty bad.

Warning: If you are looking for cracks, don't send me requests for them - I will forward them to the legal department of the company that produce the product. That goes for requests sent as comments to this posting too. (Yes, I actually get those kind of requests frequently)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center has chosen to use Flash to make a fun animation about the CBDTPA, but the issue is serious enough.

Big media corporations are trying to take away ownership from the consumers and make you and me pay for every single version of a digital work we consume. Imagine having to pay 4 times to have the same song on a CD, your MP3 player, your own CD-compilation for the car and on your computer. That is what Disney and others in reality is trying to accomplish with the CBDTPA bill.

Senator Ernest Hollings and a powerful group of Hollywood entertainment interests are pushing Congress to pass an anti-consumer bill called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) that may make it impossible to:

-Play your CDs on your desktop computer
-Create legal copies or mp3s of the music that you own to play in your car, or listen to while you exercise
-Create mix-CDs of music you've paid for

This is not the way copyright law is supposed to work. Tell your member of Congress that you value your fair use rights and don't want Hollywood to control technological innovation.

So why am I, a norwegian, even caring about such bills? well, what happens in the USA will also have a strong effect on consumers in Europe and other related markets. We are big consumers of american TV, films, music and general entertainment. In addition, law making in the USA does have a certain degree of influence on law making in Europe.

An amazing package of software was made available on the Macromedia site today (Studio MX press release).

Macromedia Studio MX is a software package that includes includes Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia Flash MX, Macromedia Fireworks MX, Macromedia FreeHand 10, and a developer edition of Macromedia ColdFusion MX Server. The whole package is selling for US $799, pretty impressive concidering that the Flash 5 authoring tool was sold for $399 when it first shipped, and the price for Macromedia Flash MX is US $499.

The package includes everything you need to design and program web based applications and solutions. The developer edition of ColdFusion also gives you the ability to get started on developing web services and play with Flash remoting.

[Via Ericd.net]

Macromedia - Designer & Developer Center : Featured Community Site

This is the first article in a new series that will periodically highlight Macromedia Flash MX community sites. These sites offer some of the top resources on using Macromedia Flash MX anywhere, and they provide information in the form of tutorials, articles, and forums. Most importantly though, they help define and foster the Macromedia communities - which are the single best and most important resource for information on the Macromedia MX tools.

First time around they are spotlighting Ultrashock.com, with an indept look at the history of the site, what is there when it comes to MX resources - and what is to come.

What does the future hold for Ultrashock? Look for Ultrashock v.2.0 to expand the amount and types of resources that it currently offers, such as a new 3D tutorial section with exclusive content from Swift 3D.

28th of may was/is (depending on where on the globe you are when I am posting this) my birthday. I have turned 29 for the third time. (Ok, so I am 32 ;-)

I hope you don't take offence, but I thought I would be a little weasel and suggest that you could send me a dollar or two as a birthday gift. I'll use the money to buy a book or two, and send some more money to other resource sites I appreciate.

You can send the money by Paypal if you feel like it.

I would love to hear from your all about your feelings regarding asking for donations such as this.

Samuel keeps on dishing out cool projects. This time around its an RSS Parser for Flash MX

AUTHOR: Samuel Wan DATE: May 2002 DESCRIPTION: A factory object which parses an XML feed and returns the information as a data object by passing the object as an argument to a callback function in the specified callback target. Only works with RSS 0.91 or earlier. For complete documentation, refer to the Actionscript in the first keyframe of the RSSDataFactory movieclip.

This is going to be very useful, especially if someone adds RSS 0.92 and RSS 1.0 (RDF) support.

Macromedia announced Flash MX support for the Toshiba Genio today.

John Dowdell writes about it on his blog and referes to the list at Macromedia of Supported Devices & Platforms

All this follows the announcement of the Pocket PC 2002 Flash MX player. But there is one thing that I can't understand, the download or a link to the download of the Pocket PC 2002 Flash player can't be found anywhere on Macromedia's site. You would expect it to be found on the Macromedia Flash Player 5 for Pocket PC 2002 - Downloads page, but it is nowhere to be found there. Instead, you have to go to the Pocket PC part of Microsoft's site where a link to the download is located at the right hand side of the page. What is truely amazing is that the link on the Microsoft site actually points back to Macromedia.

Which brings me to my big question: Why isn't there at least a link to the Microsoft Pocket PC site - so that people can find the link to the Flash 5 Pocket PC player? It must be in the best interest for everyone to make the player easily available. Like it stands now, it almost seems like Macromedia is trying to hide the player for some reason.

This is a cool contest for the ActionScript geeks: Write the most interesting Flash program with only 25 lines of code. ActionScript Contest May 2002!

I love the results that I have seen so far of the competition. Putting restictions on what you can do usualy sparks a lot of creativity. Like the 5K competition, or the demo competitions on the Amiga.

[Via Flazoom]

Opera is a browser that I have often mentioned whenever vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer has been published (which happens a lot more often than I comment on it, but thats a digression).

But all was not good in the paradise of the Opera browser I found out today.

The Register writes:

vulnerability in Opera 6.01 and 6.02 for Windows allows a malicious Web site to grab any file off a client's local drive with ease, GreyMagic Software has discovered. That's the bad news. The good news is that affects only Windows, and it's fixed in version 6.03 which is now available for download. Version 6.0 is not affected.

If you are using Opera, it would be wise to go get it updated.

[Via The Register]

Phillip Torrone (Flashenabled.com), the mad Flash gadget inventor, came up with a new product this weekend.

I'll let him tell you about it himself:

i ran out of time this weekend to finish up a new project. basically, i've embedded a gps as well as stand-alone application systems in a hiking stick (uses macromedia flash and windowsmedia). the total cost of the unit is really cheap and at some point i might see about mass producing these. when i get back i'll post screenshots from the application. imagine hiking and getting a video guide of where you are, or see pictures and messages that people left in the spot you were at, getting information about the area your hiking in addition to maps, routes and more....

pictures can be seen here:

http://www.insomedia.com/ptgps/rock.jpg
http://www.insomedia.com/ptgps/stick1.jpg
http://www.insomedia.com/ptgps/stick2.jpg
http://www.insomedia.com/ptgps/stick3.jpg

it's somewhat based on this:
http://www.flashenabled.com/mobile/gps

but better.

Looks like something that could become a very interesting product. I wonder if the target market would be old people with altzheimer, or just the regular inventor mad science type person that walks in his own toughs, and suddenly find himself lost.

Paul Andrews article in The Seattle Times titled Web logging can serve many roles raises the question about the integrity of the Macromedian bloggers, while trying to take the issue a step further, he focuses on the lack of labeling of the Macromedia weblogs.

Macromedia's bloggers want to have it both ways. They don't want to be seen as shills. At the same time, they are loath to bite the hand that feeds them. As one Macromedia manager told me, he would never criticize the company or tout a competitor's products on his blog, "or I'd probably be fired."

It might be easy to jump on the choir of critics and agree that every single resource from someone in a corporation should be labeled and all interest disclosed. In my opinion it is at best misguided. You don't see journalists disclosing their affiliation, stock portfolio or interests regular, do you? And to think that all news that you read is objective and not tainted is at best naive.

I have to agree with Dave Winer in his estimation of the criticism from Paul Andrews

That Macromedia is considered fair game, and somehow the pros are not, shows you how screwed up the system is. We should certainly be circumspect of vendors who turn into journalists, but we should be more circumspect of reporters who accept the conflicts of their employers without disclosing them. The vendor who puts on the journalism hat has a clearly disclosed interest. The reporter who doesn't dare to report on his employer, when it's material, and fails to disclose this, is much less of a journalist, imho, than the amateur with the clearly disclosed interest.

With the most brilliant piece being

If you want to see the faceoff, ask Andrews if he could challenge the integrity of the Seattle Times the way he has challenged the integrity of the reporters at Macromedia.

To the Macromedian Bloggers, and especially John Dowdell that is commenting on this very issue today, I say: Keep up the good work, and don't pay too much notice to the bullshit from Andrews.

[Via Scripting News]

Disclosure: Jarle Dahl Bergersen is a freelance developer, and an avid Flasher. He does not own any stocks in Macromedia, or in any news organization directly competing with The Seattle Times. Bergersen is one of the editors of Flashmagazine.com, an independent news resource for the Flash community. Jarle Dahl Bergersen also owns a considerable share of the Norwegian multimedia hosting company Webhead. Bergersen has attended many of the Flash conferences, and have on several occasions met and socialized with several Macromedia employees. When asked which food he like best and his favorite sexual position, Bergersen refused to answer.

The wireless portal Room 33 has gone bankrupt, and the people behind the portal has released their software as free open source. The name of the software package is Hambo. The platform is based on Java, XML and WML

Hambo is fully GPRS, UMTS, PCS, GSM ready. The Hambo platform includes built-in applications such as e-mail, calendar, ring-tone and icons, my-wap page, news, weather and community.

cresk on Flash Aesthetics could become one of the great Flash blog resources, cresk has already put together an impressive resource in his Thelinkz.com, and I am sure he will be doing an equally good job with his new blog.

Actually found it in my referer logs yesterday, but was too busy to have time to post it. Thanks for the link btw cresk. (And that goes for everyone linking to me, I really appreciate the kudos :-)

I think the links are what makes weblogs truely effective, and seeing how fast the news of new resources spread amongst the Flash weblogs is really great. The Flash community has always been good at supporting eachother. I hope we can keep up the good karma!

Funny to see a project that I was contemplating myself be realized. Samuel Wan is apparently having fun with Lego. Samuel has posted some info on his struggle to connect the wires to get his creation to come alive and talk with ColdFusion and Flash.

Samuel has really been good at blogging his project. From the initial "Phase 3: Hello World...?" to shouting loud and clear "It's ALIVE!!! MUAHAHAHAHA!" and then documenting some of the resources he found on the journey "Resources for designing a LEJOS remote-control protocol"

Its well worth looking through Sam's may archive to get the full overview.

I really enjoyed being able to participate in the project, even if I didn't lift a finger and wasn't involved more than sitting back and cheering on. Now I am looking forward to see the code for it all ;-)

BTW: Branden is also tinkering with his Lego: "Damn, I'm a Lucky Guy..."

Google has made available a virtual play house for those that like to play with search engines - labs.google.com - Google Demos

Quote from The Register:

"These are experiments, we want people to play with them," Google's Nathan Tyler told us. An accompany FAQ stresses that the projects are in rough works-in-progress, suppported only by Google staff in their own time, and may be hauled offline at any moment for repair. "We ask for your indulgence if a demo refuses to run, or even walk quickly," according to the FAQ

In the lab right now is the Google Glossary, Keyboard Shortcuts that makes a whole lot easier to navigate Google search results, Voice Search - dial-up voice search that lets you do searches with voice commands, and Google Sets that you really have to try out to understand.

I did a set where I used Flash, SVG and Shockwave, and got this search set back

The Glossary is also a nice resource, how about the Glossary definition of Flash?

For those unlucky souls trying to find a download from Macromedia.com for the Flash 5 Pocket PC player, this url will not get you anywhere (at the time of this posting): Macromedia - Flash Player for Pocket PC : Download

While going the way via Microsoft.com will allow you to download the Flash 5 player for Pocket PC 2002 (Also works on Pocket PC). You will have to click the url on the right hand side of the page, titled "Macromedia Flash Player for Pocket PC 2002".

The interesting part is that the link on Microsoft.com points to the Macromedia site, but I can't find any links to the download from Macromedia.com. Which brings us the question; why is Macromedia playing hide and seek with this download?

Robert Hall has a post about Web Cams Delivered Via Flash

Interesting links to implementations and information about how do deal with web cams in Flash.

Illogicz.com is Stuart Schoneveld's Flash weblog. I haven't counted all the Flash related blogs lately, but its getting to be a lot of them. Its powered by Blogger, and lacks a RSS feed :-( But it does show some other RSS feeds, among them the feed we have at Flashmagazine.com, which is cool :-)

I discovered this one in a discussion that Mike Chambers has opened to collect information about all the Flash blogs out there, I suspect he will have a the complete list of Flash blogs ready soon.

kartoo uses a Flash interface to show their search results, its especially useful when seeing how sites relate to each other, and easily narrow the search just by point and click.

According to the FAQ at Kartoo.com, they use a number of search engines (in other words, they are a metacrawler/meta search engine). They seem to rely heavily on Google, at least it seems that way from the searches I have tested there.

They have a desktop version of their search in development, I think Kartoo might very well be a very nice search application, right now I feel they still have issues to iron out with their user interface.

A couple of articles about kartoo, if you want to know more:

Web sites identified by a search are placed on a map; the sites are represented by balls, with their size in proportion to how relevant they are. The balls are connected together by dynamic semantic links (e.g. the semantic link between daewoo.com and renault.fr is “car manufacturer”). Clicking on the link allows to add or subtract the theme to your initial request, and Kartoo translates the syntax depending on which search engines are activated

I enter the word "Lockergnome" (what else?) into the search field. What do I see instead of the usual boring list of links? A colorful map littered with those same URLs. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself. There's even a list of categories (on the left) that I can use to narrow my search

[Via Valyard.ru]

Ideas for the evolution of RSS - The X-Document

Interesting article about the proposed extentions of the RSS format for the next version.

Things are moving again in the RSS development field. In the past two weeks we've had both Dave Winer's "Ideas for the Evolution of RSS plus Jon Udell's continuing work, and Steve Yost, David Weinberger et al, plus Mike Krus all talking of introducing new elements and features to the specification. These discussions have, in turn, sparked new ideas and further calls for new elements.

Snewp indexes about 6000 news sources every day, gathering news headlines from around the world. (To quote Snewp).

They are really updated, and have a lot of news available, the coolest part is that you can get results from news searches as RSS, making it possible to hook it directly into Radio, AmphetaDesk or any other RSS reader you might be using.

The only complaint I have is that they are a little too easy on which news sources they are using, IMHO. Just check out a search for Flash on Snewp

Toon Boom Technologies has released a new version of their 2D animation solution for the web. This is a program that before V2 was a great time saver for anyone doing animations for web with Flash, and with Version 2 it has gotten even better.

I quote from some of the new features:

New in V2 3D Sceneplanning:

• New color transform and clipping effects.


• Different appearances for first and last key frame on a motion path so that you
  can easily identify and modify the key frame you want.


• Copy and paste motion point properties.


• Import, organize and synchronize all drawing, image, bitmap, sound and multimedia
  files in the Exposure Sheet.


• Track the timing of each object and maximize reuse of recurring images.


• Use the 3D staging tools to develop storyboards into detailed animatics complete
  with precise timing and camera movements.

New in V2 Drawing:

• Draw with a Polyline tool to create closed, vector shapes of any dimension.


• Paint vector shapes with bitmap textures.


• Auto-gap closing for speed painting.


• Accelerated painting with auto-paint.


• Optimize vector shapes for output to the Web.


• Improved stroke end point identification to easily close zones.

New in V2 Sound:

• Automap lip charts to mouth drawings for fast and efficient lip-syncing of voice tracks.


• Sound scrubbing so you can fine-tune lip assignment.


• Support for sound streaming.

New in V2 Export:

• Export media links as Macromedia Flash movie clips to decrease file size.


• QuickTime export includes all sound modification you add.


• Improved optimization options for SWF output.

A more indepth look at Toon Boom Studio V2 can be found at MacCentral, quote:

With Toon Boom Studio 2 you can still lip-synch and loop your animations in an instinctive way, but this time you can go much further, according to company representatives. By establishing what mouth shapes apply to specific sounds, the software can place them automatically in the right frames. Version 2.0 is also compatible with the recently introduced Macromedia Flash MX thanks to the Toon Boom Studio Importer for Flash MX.

The upgrade from V. 1.x to 2 cost US $99 (electronic) and US $129 (boxed), while a new registration of Toon Boom V2 will set you back from US $349 (for download) to US $374 for the boxed version. V2 is only available for Windows at the moment, the newest version available for Mac is V 1.2. There is a trial version available for download on the site.

Feasible Impossibilities is Robert M. Hall's weblog. Its nice to see yet another Flash community member joing the club of webloggers.

[Via JD on MX] (Just because John is much better than me at keeping updated on his referer log ;-)

Obligatory Nagging: Yet another weblog without an RSS feed. :-(

Chris brought my attention to a discussion about Actionscript Viewer 3.0 on Flazoom

I am not surprised by comments like:

«Im really dissapointed that this new version of this product has come out. The purpose of this produt is to allow people to steal code, if stealing wasnt the motive then there would be a way to prevent decompilation»

Luckily, the discussion is balanced and it seems that people understand that programs such as Actionscript Viewer does exist and deal with it.

BTW: There is another product decompiling SWFs out there, its called Sothink SWF Decompiler MX 2002 Pro - it can take apart Flash 4, 5 and MX SWFs.

O'Reilly Network: SWF Is Not Flash (and Other Vectored Thoughts) by Jacek Artymiak

Interesting article from O'Reilly Network and Jacek Artymiak. He writes about SWF and takes the time to inform people about the openess of the file format, and how it compares to SVG etc.

Many interesting quotes from the article. I thought I would quote a couple:

Quote 1:

True, raw SWF is just as comprehensible as an .EXE file. To understand it, we have to use an SWF parser. But is that a problem? Graphics or animation are very different from text encased in HTML, and being able to view the raw code of an image does not make it any easier to understand, no matter what file format is used.

Quote 2:

And there's a lot to like about Flash: one platform to develop for, no need to worry about the Web-safe color palette, all components can be bundled into a single file, good authoring tools, support for forms, an XML parser, and a powerful programming language.

[Via: swfnews]

Linux for PlayStation 2 Community: Home

The kit constist of a 40 GB Hard disk, 10/100 Mbit/s Network Adaptor, USB Keyboard, USB mouse, Monitor Cable and DVD discs that contain the Linux installation, RTE and hardware manuals.

The kit should be available all over the world by the end of this summer. Some more information over at linuxplay.com

Personally I am looking forward to converting my favorite game machine to a PC running Linux! :-)

Today Microsoft made the Flash 5 player for Pocket PC available for download. With Flash 5 support for mp3 sound, advanced scripting, and XML is added to the Pocket PC 2002 platform, making it easier to deploy advanced applications on mobile devices running Pocket PC.

While its nice that we have finally gotten access to a Flash 5 player for the Pocket PC 2002 platform, its kind of sad that it would take so long for the player to be ported to this fast expanding platform. I hope Macromedia will be able to make available the Flash MX player for Pocket PC faster than the Flash 5 player was made available.

[Via Flashenabled.com]

[Update: The download from Microsoft makes it look like the update is only for Pocket PC 2002, but I have sucsessfully installed and gotten the Flash 5 player to work on my iPaq 3660 running Pocket PC - Please disregard my earlier comments about the player. BTW: Still seems impossible to get the Pocket PC 2002 upgrade anywhere in Europe]

Things my girlfriend and I have argued about

Nothing keeps a relationship on its toes so much as lively debate. Fortunate, then, that my girlfriend and I agree on absolutely nothing. At all.

Combine utter, polar disagreement on everything, ever, with the fact that I am a text book Only Child, and she is a violent psychopath, and we're warming up. Then factor in my being English while she is German, which not only makes each one of us personally and absolutely responsible for the history, and the social and cultural mores of our respective countries, but also opens up a whole field of sub-arguments grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes and, well, just try saying anything and walking away.

I think I will snap Remco's comments about this site, since it pretty much sums it all up:

A friend of mine stumbled across this page a couple of days ago, and instantly collapsed on the floor in hysteric laughing fits after reading a few lines. This is the story of Mil's arguments with Margret, presented with great humour and obviously not intended to be taken too serious. A very good read, recommended for anyone with an hour to spare!

This was fun, it took me a couple of minutes to add a PDA version of jdb cyberspace, and then make an AvantGo channel of it.

Good advice and Moveable Type template provided by Meryl.net

I will probably tinker with the layout of the channel, and change it around a little, but the channels url will be the same, if you want to use it with AvantGo. The direct url is: http://weblog.bergersen.net/pda.html

Mike points out that Macromedia has made available an ActionScript class that will parse the XML feed into a DataProviderClass "which makes it pretty easy to use", quote Mike Chambers.

There is also an example there of how you make sure that you are able to load the XML newsfeed from the Macromedia site, as far as I can tell what he is doing in CFML is a regular redirect from a local domain url to Macromedia's URL.

Since Macromedia isn't showing the code for PHP, ASP or Perl - I thought I would show it..

The workaround to be able to access data from domains outside the security constraints of Flash is to redirect to the source data from your local domain. Here are some examples added to the Macromedia example. First the Macromedia example with ColdFusion:

Make a CF file and then point to this local file, to get access to the remote content on the url shown in the source below:

<cflocation url=" http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml"/>

For PHP:
<?php
header("location: http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml");
?>

ASP:
<%
Response.Redirect ("http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml")
%>

Perl:
print "Location: http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml\n\n";

Adding JSP and Python since Mike commented on them (I am not going near Pascal (can it even be done in Pascal?) and assembly), a little unsure about these two - so please let me know if this is the wrong way of doing it - or if there are better ways:

JSP:
response.sendRedirect("http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml");

Python:
raise 'Redirect','http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml'

And if you want to do it with ActionScript in ColdFusion MX, Mike has the solution for that.

Its important to note that most of these scripts will only work if they are executed before any other output of the pages they are in.

I hope Chris will be celebrating with some sparklies today, even if its only some sparkly water.

Flazoom is Chris MacGregors baby in many ways. And over two years it has accumulated a lot of knowledge about Flash and Usability. Chris was in many ways ahead of his time when he launched Flazoom as a weblog 2 years ago. He and the other co-editors of Flazoom has really been busy the last two years. 1400 reviews and news items translates to approximately 4 postings every single day, and most of the content - if not all, has been of very high quality.

Cheers Chris, and congratulation with 2 great years!

The Flash Enabled book site has been launched. Its all in Flash, and looks great. I miss some sample chapters from the book, but otherwise the site seems to give good insight into what the book covers - giving brief descriptions of each chapter. The site also contains the important extra files to check out while reading the book. You will need the book to get access to the files though.

For more on the Flash Enabled book, check out my previous post.

This is cool, Jon Udell used the W3C's XSLT transformation service to convert the XML newsfeed from Macromedia to an RSS feed with the help of an XSLT stylesheet

In my opinion, Macromedia should make their feeds available as RSS 1.0 and 0.91 or 0.92 - and possibly a number of other formats. Shouldn't be a big deal to do - and would make the feed more available than it is today. I am especially missing a category definition in the feed, being able to filter the newsfeed to only the information I am interested in is pretty important. (And even more so when its a Flash resource site that is going to use it). Macromedia could also fix it by making available channels for each of their products.

[Update: As Mike pointed out, the XML newsfeed from Macromedia does indeed contain categories, I stand corrected].

eat orange :: 100% vitamin c

Is not about oranges, but rather another Flash blog on the horizon. Thanks to my frequently updated referer logs (still trying to figure out if I should make it available), I spotted this new Radio weblog. Seems like it could become an interesting place, especially with Sean Voisen's interests:

I'll be posting links to information and tutorials on whatever "new-fangled" technology interests me most at the given time. Right now, this seems to be Macromedia MX technologies, the Jabber XML protocol, and Cocoa/Obj-C. But, look for this to change at any time.

I think Flash MX and Jabber is an interesting combination, and would love to see Sean tinker with that.. :-)

Scott Andrew is a guy that always has lots of interesting knowledge to share about Flash, XML, JavaScript, DHTML etc. And he is also using Movable Type for his weblog. I just discovered that he has put together a few Movable Type hacks, very nice :-)

I just installed the «Search Link Shortcuts» which adds buttons to easily add links to Google search, dictionary search and Amazon search, so now you all know the reason for those kind of links poping up in the time to come :-)

Buraks has released Action Script Viewer 3. The latest version can decompile Macromedia Flash 4, 5 and MX SWF files.

I know some of the people in the community would want all information about tools such as this to be secret. Personally I think its important to know how easy it is for people to steal your code, and how unsafe information in an SWF file really is.

[Via Flazoom]

Macromedia - Flash Communication Technology

With the introduction of the Macromedia MX product family, Macromedia has announced its intention to provide new server solutions for enabling the creation of next-generation communication applications that leverage the Macromedia Flash client. The new communication server technology will unite communication and applications — providing audio, video and data streaming between Macromedia Flash Player 6 clients.

The new technology will allow developers to easily integrate two-way, live and stored audio/video streams into Macromedia Flash MX web applications, enabling the creation of new types of multi-user collaboration applications such as chat, webcasts, and whiteboards in Macromedia Flash.

No word on a release date, the FAQ simply states that we can expect it to be available in 2002. You can however sign up to the Early Notification list

This is what I call playing with toys! :-) Samuel Wan has connected his Lego Mindstroms robot with ColdFusion

I think the high point of the day was when I sent my browser to http://localhost:8500/webrover/test.cfm , and my robot suddenly smacked into the wall on other side of the room. It scared the heck out of my cat! *sniff* The little webrover is all grown up and running around :)

He will be making available code and instructions so that you can do the same fun stuff with your Lego robot, so stay tuned.

Now I would have loved to see an inexpensive robot like this with Wi-fi and camera. That would have made webcams of a whole new kind.

Another Flash blog, SwfNews: News For Flash Developers. Its Matt Rice that is running it. It seems light - not much information there yet.

Dave Winer is linking to it, I think he should have linked to some of the other more meaty Flash blogs too. (No, I am not talking about mine - I am just meta-blogging most of the time).

FlashGuru is back with a new remake of his site - now titled FlashGuru's MX 101, this time based on Moveable Type (good choice Guy!)

I only discovered that it was back today, not sure how long it has been available. He has already posted a lot of interesting news blurbs. The only thing I am missing is a link to the RSS feed.

Yeah, I know I tend to nag about the XML RSS feed, but for a good reason, it makes keeping updated a lot easier - I don't have to go through a long list of url's everyday - but rather just use Ampethadesk to see what is new on the sites I follow.

[Update] FlashGuru was just having a problem making the RSS feed available, its not linked on his site yet - but you will find it here. *g*

Phillip Torrone has been hyping the release of the book "Flash Enabled" for a good while now on his site, flashenabled.com. Its a book covering Flash design and development for devices. A field that is bound to grow in the time ahead. Especially with Flash now being able to be the frontend of web services.

The book is written by a group of well known Flash community participants. Christian Cantrell, Mike Chambers, Branden Hall, Andreas Heim, Craig Kroeger, Steve Leone, Markus Niedermeier, Bill Perry, Fred Sharples, Glenn Thomas and Phillip Torrone.

A little disapointing that there is no web site and no sample chapters out on its release date. But according to http://www.flashenabled.com/ there will be. So along with waiting for the book to appear in my mailbox, I am also waiting for the web site :-)

[Update: Mike Chambers says the web site for the book should be up by monday - but might be up as early as this afternoon. I am sure I have something to look forward to :-)]

Mike Chambers: New Flash MX Content at Macromedia.com

Mike Chambers has the 411 on all the new Flash MX content released at the Macromedia Designer and Developer Center

Lots of usefull information there, articles by Branden Hall, Robert Reinhardt, and many more. On subjects ranging from objects, components, embedded video, using timelines to maintain application state, to Flash MX and PHP.

Macromedia - Designer & Developer : Logged In : Blogs are HUGE

Ed Krimer, Vice President of Developer Community writes about the Macromedia weblog experiment :

Almost immediately, other bloggers started referring to our blogs in their daily entries. Most bloggers seemed pleasantly surprised that Macromedia was encouraging some of its employees to create and update blogs on a regular basis. When Wired wrote about us, we knew for sure we had done something very different. I don't think though we're quite ready for Barbara Walters - yet.

[Via Mike Chambers]

At the beginning of this month OpenOffice released version 1.0 of their office suite. I haven't had the time to check it out before now. I used to use Sun's StarOffice (which is now out in version 6.0, selling for about 80 dollars).

OpenOffice 1.0 is an impressive package, and is replacing StarOffice 5.2 on my system. Its available for all Linux, Solaris and Windows. For Mac OS X there is a beta available.

OpenOffice 1.0 is noticably faster to start than StarOffice 5.2, and its not trying to pretend it is a desktop (like StarOffice does). All in all it looks very promising.

BTW: If you were wondering, the OpenOffice office suite does support the Microsoft Office formats, and can open and save Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. documents. The native file format is based on XML, and I am going to start investigate if it could be used to hook into SOAP/XML-RPC products. There seem to be some work being done on OpenOffice web service integration already.

Its Norways independence day today Want to learn more about how we celebrate the independence day in Norway? Check out what google finds on the subject: Google: 17th of may

If you are a Windows/Internet Explorer user, please pay attention.

Quote from the Technote:

Impact of vulnerability: Six new vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow code of attacker's choice to run.

Solution?
Get the 2 MB security fix from Microsoft or
Get the fastest browser on earth (Opera). Its also a good browser to try if you are on Linux or Mac.

This is cool, Chris MacGregor took the CSS style from this site and tweaked it to use on his own Flazoom.com - The Cooler: New Skin on Flazoom.com

Admitedly the skin on this site is based on a default Moveable Type skin, which I have tweaked and messed with to get the right fonts settings and colours. Still fun to see it move on in yet another form. :-)

John Dowdell, one of the forum surfers and participators at Macromedia writes:

Thread titles I skipped over today:

"Can this be done?", "Help please", "URGENT - going crazy!!", "Test this?", "This is all absorbing", "Here is a strange one", "printing", "test", "Re: books", "Why doesn't this work?", "Another question!", and pretty much anything with "CSS" or "site check" in the title.

I used to be a pretty active Usenet and web forums participant, and the titles John mentions would have made me jump right over the posts.

If you have had problems finding good answers, it might just be that you need to read Eric Raymond's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. I am not saying that you have to ask exactly the way Eric is saying, but take the time to read it and you will get some a-ha's to how you can make your questions - and ultimately the answers you will get - better..

The only problem is that the problem posters that hasn't even figured out what they are actually asking won't likely read through Eric's long introduction on how to ask smart questions.

Nice to discover yet another Flash MX Blog - ericd.net. Eric Dolecki has a weblog that is a study in information overload, but at the same time the information is still very accessible. I think I would have to spend a day to scratch the surface of all the content he is linking to.

Nice to see Waldo linking back to my blog. He is contemplating moving to Moveable Type, which would make his blog available with RSS.

Good luck with the installation Waldo, its a chore to install - but when its up and working its well worth the sweath, tears and hair loss *g*

CNO (Chris Norman), moderator at Flash Kit is responding to my article: Flash Kit Community - Flashkit is going under?

To make such a broad and sweeping statement to sell your own ideas is somewhat reminicent of the infamous "Flash is 99% bad" soundbite.

The new weblogging trend is great for developers - I make JD and Mike's a daily read. But I really get the impression from "articles" like this that the Wired article has created some inflated egos, and in the same respect, I think the market for Flash-related weblogs is already becoming oversaturated just weeks after the MX studio announcement (sort of like when everybody and their mother had a Flash community site, but only the ones which provided real value survived).

I just thought the community that is hundreds of thousands of members strong might like a chance to respond to a statement which was made on a semi-obscure blog. Is this akin to the "Slashdot is going under" wolf-cries which seem to happen every other month?

Chris, I don't think any of the people covered in the Flash Blog story on Wired had or has gotten inflated egos. I know them to be down to earth people wanting to share their knowledge with the rest of the Flash community. When it comes to my ego, I will leave it to others to judge if its overly inflated or not. The Wired article in question did nothing to inflate my ego, but it did warm to see them paying attention to the great work being done by the Macromedian Bloggers.

When it comes to the lifelyhood of Flash Kit, I am not going to go into e-mail exchanges I have had with people at Flash Kit in the past, but I think its pretty obvious to most people in the community that there are very few resource sites that are making money right now.

28th of may I will be 29 for the third time, and one or more of these wouldn't be bad. *g*.

Apple seem to have produced a killer server with their Xserve server. I will probably be looking into using these boxes for web hosting/streaming later this year.

Trust me, this is cool stuff (although not exactly revolutionary in any way):

Mac OS X Server recognizes Mac, Windows, UNIX and Linux clients right out of the box, providing cross-platform support for key server services, such as Apache web server and WebDAV server, BSD UNIX networking, file and print services, POP and IMAP mail, ftp, QuickTime Streaming Server, DNS and DHCP. Windows, UNIX and Linux clients can share files and printers as easily as Mac users.

CHris (Flazoom) points to my blogging about the Flash community and need for support from the money-makers. Some interesting comments there too.

We are in dire need of some sugar daddies in the Flash community, that much is for sure.

Phillip Torone and John Dowdell are among the people that has joined in on the discussion of how Macromedia (and others) can support the Flash community sites.. Join in on the discussion if you have a suggestion to how the Flash community sites can start making some money, and who can help and how.

Phillip mentions that he is moving towards a pay model for his site. And he aren't alone in contemplating starting to charge for his work. The question is if people in the community will be willing to pay. Phillip mentions that he has gotten reactions when charging for his work, and he is not alone in that area. When Branden Hall wanted a few bucks for a component he made (which would save most people for many hours of work) he got a lot of flack. But I suppose that some people just have to be ready to adjust to start paying for what they get.

I admit I have seen this one before, but haven't had the time to explore it until now.

Waldo's Weblog is Waldo Smeets blog which focuses on all things MX. As Waldo writes himself "Waldo Smeets, Macromedia MX freak". With the new line of products from Macromedia being so indegrated, I am sure I'll have to keep watching what is going on there. (Unfortunatly its another weblog without an RSS feed).

How Microsoft Went After Linux

Kempin recommended that computer makers who were not "friendly" with Microsoft should be hit "harder than in the past with anti-Linux actions."

Somehow I am neither shocked nor surprised.

Dave Winer writes about his first real eureka experience with usability, its a blast from the past - one that will be as true tomorrow as it was yesterday.

DaveNet : A Brief User Interface Manifesto

I remember, as if it were yesterday, my first experience with a user. I had been developing a software product for three years, all the while thinking it was easy to use. A friend who had been listening to me gush about how great it was asked if he could try it. Hesitantly I said yes. I launched the program and we switched seats. I tried to say nothing as he wondered what to do. The software didn't have anything to say. "What should I do?" he asked. I thought to myself "I have some work to do."

Remember, to make good software you have to make good usability! :-)

Wanted to point out a discussion about the "Gonzo marketing related to the Flash community" that has been going on: Gonzo marketing related to the Flash community : comments

Chris - Flazoom:

I hope that Macromedia is learning. I hope that their new blogs will clue them into the demand put on community site owners. Assistance through sponsorships, banner ads or anything else that would help a community site owner would be fantastic to see

Mike Chambers:

We do advertise on community sites (were-here recently had a flash mx countdown ad running), but as jarle noted, online advertising doesn't seem to work for either side.

Aside from outright funding the sites (which is not an option), how can we work to address the concerns your hinted at in your posts?

In general I think we are all looking for a good solution where all parties will gain from the deal. Personally I think that part of the equation is in effect already. People are using their own money and free time to help Macromedia push their products and strengthen the community, Macromedia need to find a way were they can help nurture the community sites with more than just information. At least if they want the community sites to survive.

Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section of the original post.

Partly Flash related, the Java application server JRun has been announced in a new version. Among the news is Flash Remoting. Check out the details on Mike's weblog: Macromedia JRun 4 announced with Flash Remoting support

I think I can understand John's frustrations with being overwhelmed with people searching for MX cracks. Just mentioning his crusade has gotten me a lot of visitors..

Here is the statistics for the last week for searches from Google.com:

1. dreamweaver mx crack - 214 searches
2. fireworks mx crack - 55 searches
3. how google works - 31 searches
4. "dreamweaver mx" crack - 14 searches
5. "fireworks mx" crack - 14 searches
6. crack dreamweaver mx - 13 searches
7. dreamweaver mx cracks - 11 searches
8. crack fireworks mx - 9 searches
9. macromedia dreamweaver mx crack - 9 searches
10. dreamweaver mx+crack - 7 searches

Sad that there were no other searches in the top 10 last week, just searches for cracks..

[edit] As Ben just pointed out.. The 3rd highest search is actually about "how google works". Only goes to show I still need to learn to read.. :-) That brings the total to 9 out of 10 being about MX cracks..

Some interesting thoughts about what the net is doing to marketing.
gonzo marketing

What replaces mass market, broadcast advertising is Locke's "gonzo marketing", which is not really marketing but "market advocacy" through participation, sponsorship and support. The internet replaces the us-and-them relationship (creative people broadcasting to couch potatoes) with a network of conversations, which is all markets are, really.

Photodude has written some interesting commentary on trying to pitch gonzo marketing to the average company.

For me personally it hits home with the relationship I see between the Flash community and the companies making their living with products and services targeted to the community and the regular customers. I miss a more thought-through relationship with the community from the likes of Macromedia, the related software houses, book publishers and the big Flash conference makers.

I think these people should read up on Gonzo marketing and try to figure out how their relationship to the Flash community sites need to be. There is a need to become more aware of the fact that many people are contributing a large amount of their time and money to be able to support these companies and their products, and that the companies need to provide back to the community helping them out. In more ways then what I see today. Its great to see Macromedia providing the community with more information and insight into their products, but at the same time - shouldn't that be expected when someone is delivering a for-pay product?

I have a feeling we will continue to see many good resources go under because of the lack of thought these companies have put into how they support the community. Even the largest Flash resource site today, Flashkit.com, has been struggling for a long time, and is only keeping its hair above the water because of the backing from their owner Internet.com

Will the large Flash resources survive in a climate where banner ads no longer pays the bills, and where the companies that are actually making money aren't backing them up with sponsorship and other important support?

I am not optimistic for the future of the Flash community sites. I hope that some of the big players will start to think about how they can contribute back to the community and help out the community resources, so that we can continue to have access to this broad range of high quality resources.

I would appreciate others insight and suggestions for how the community sites should handle their need to pay the bills, and at the same time be able to provide high quality to the community.

Boy am I ever looking forward to Blogger adding RSS output. According to their web pages RSS generation is going to be added soon. Why is it such a big deal for me? Well, to be able to cover as much info as possible, I like to have it in one place, or to be more exact - I like to read RSS feeds through Amphetadesk. It is a small program that fetches RSS feeds from sites I want to keep updated on, and displays the latest stories from them in one single web page. It really saves me a lot of time. But these days a lot of the people I want to keep updated with, like Branden Hall, John Dowdell and lots of others are using Blogger and not making available any RSS feeds.

So my hope is that Blogger soon will be making RSS feed generation available for all their users. To me it seems like a pretty basic function that should be available to all weblog'ers.

The battle in the courts move on, and this time Macromedia scores.

Yahoo - Macromedia Wins Patent Counterclaims Trial Against Adobe

Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR - News) today announced that a jury ruled in its favor in a counterclaims suit against Adobe Systems. The verdict included a damage award of $4.9 million. Macromedia intends to ask the court to issue an injunction to stop Adobe's infringement, and also intends to appeal the verdict in the initial Adobe case.

...

"The score is now Adobe one, Macromedia one, customers zero," said Rob Burgess, chairman and CEO, Macromedia. "Macromedia is absolutely committed to defending the right to innovate."

I would have to agree with Rob, the customers does not benifit from Adobe and Macromedia waisting time and money in the courts over patent claims.

Software piracy by one of the biggest members of the BSA, that would be unthinkable, wouldn't it? Not according to Newsforge and their discovery of a Microsoft owned company that stole another companys code.

NewsForge: The Online Newspaper of Record for Linux and Open Source

Did you know Microsoft was convicted of software piracy last year by a French court? Not many people do. The Commercial Court of Nanterre fined Microsoft 3 million francs because it illegally included another company's proprietary source code in SoftImage 3D, a top-of-the-line animation package.

Which makes me wonder, how can BSA try to give the regular Joe bad conciousness about using pirated software, when some of their members are involved in piracy on a much higher level?

Not a big surprise that the Wired article about Flash Blogging spawned a lot of comments from the Flash Blog community. Among the more interesting comments were Branden Hall's Wired Up and Blogging, with comments from some other well known Flash bloggers, and Mike Chambers comments about the Flash blogs:

It was John Dowdell who really drove the idea internally at Macromedia. Also, David Burrows' FlashBlog really helped me to realize how useful a tool the weblogs could be.

When it comes to negative feedback, Meg Hourihan aka Megnut has some concerns regarding the Macromedian Flash blogs. Among her concerns are that some of the blogs doesn't flag the writers affiliation. I don't see the problem myself, its not hard to figure out where these guys work if you really want to know. And the weblogs they are running are more personal than professional in my opinion.

John Dowdell has some answers to Megnut's concerns.

I love the Flash weblog community, and the way Macromedia is interacting with the Flash community these days. I hope they won't kill of the experiment they are running right now with the weblogs.

Mike Chambers set up a very interesting interview with the Flash Team Product Managers, or to be exact, with Jeremy Clark and Troy Evans. The most interesting part is that the questions they answered were questions asked on the forums of Were-here.com

Interview with Flash Team Product Managers

This is nice, Farhad Manjoo at Wired has written an article about the Macromedian Bloggers

Flash: Blogging Goes Corporate

Macromedia calls this "the blog strategy," and some see the company's moves as the start of a trend. These days, it's almost unfashionable for a self-respecting Webophile to not have his own blog; if Macromedia's effort is any indication, soon a tech company that doesn't embrace blogs may seem equally dated.

Branden Hall is quoted in the article, saying:

"Rather than try to make it feel like they're astroturfing" -- the practice of cooking up a grassroots campaign where none exists -- "they say we work for Macromedia and this is stuff that we find interesting," said Branden Hall, a programmer at Fig Leaf Software who has become a fan of the Macromedia blogs.

David Burrows's Flash Blog is linked in the article as "others" ;-)

(And no, I am not gonna wine about not being linked in the article, saves me a lot of bandwidth lol).

This is nice to see, Macromedia has the Certified Macromedia Flash MX Designer program running already. I miss the developer certification, but I am sure its just around the corner. Would love to get some more word on the other upcoming certification programs for the rest of the Studio MX products.

[Via Flash Blog]

John writes about the buffer overflow in the Flash 6 player revision 23

Nice to see John coming aboard with comments about the buffer overflow.

from what I see both of these are reading buffers. Even if you could pass bad code to the Flash Player this way, it still can't break out of its sandbox

That'll be US $12.50 a month. The Register writes about McDonald's and Softbank that are set to deliver 4000 hotspots in McDonald's resturants in Japan.

McDonald's serves WLAN broadband in Japan

Now, thats an idea to take global..

I have to admit, I am not sure exactly which day is the birthday of Macromedia, but this year they celebrate their 10th birthday. Mike Chambers has put together a few links to let you in on the History of Macromedia Flash

I'd like to add to the links with an article we published at Flashmagazine.com a good while ago: The Flash History by Rick Waldron

... or how to integrate Flash with any content management system.. Mike Chambers has made a nice tutorial showing how to hook up Flash 6 with dynamic backends. His tutorial shows how to integrate Flash 6 with Radio, a weblog system from Userland, but it applies to almost any system. It is equally easy to integrate Flash 6 with Moveable Type, the weblog system I am using for this blog. In fact, Samuel Wan has already started on a Flash 6 interface for Moveable Type - His implementation takes a slightly different approach, just showing that there is more than two ways to skin a cat with Flash MX.

Made with a fun little Flash toy over at Reasonablyclever.com, just wish there was a way to save it other than the proposed screen capture. It would have been even neater if it was animated and you could save it as stand-alone Flash files.. etc. :-) (Yeah, yeah, I know, I am never satisified).

[Via Flazoom.com]

Jon Udell writes about Macromeida MX / Flash remoting. A good read if you are still wondering what all the new features and bells really entails.

A Flash-forward look

If Macromedia can transform Flash from a multimedia shell into a popular presentation layer for Internet-based business applications, the missing pieces of the Web-services puzzle -- identity management; security context; reliable messaging; and real-time, two-way data communication -- will come into focus more quickly.

[Via Flash Blog]

John has been taking the time to flaunt the people arriving at JD on MX through searches for cracks. I can't help but think he is trying to attract even more attention to his weblog for those kind of searches :-)
2nd of May and 3rd of May:

Of the 100 most recent referrals, 13 are for "macromedia flash mx crack", 7 are for "macromedia fireworks mx crack", 1 each for "macromedia coldfusion mx crack" and a generic "macromedia mx crack", and a whopping 36 for "dreamweaver mx preview release crack" and variants.

John is Google-bombing his visitors to a C|Net article about Code Red. He has a point, installing software on your computer from people you don't trust is never wise. But, as previous events has showed us, even legal software can expose you to security risks through their bugs and vulnerabilities. The story about the security flaws in revision 23 of the Flash 6 player is a recent example.

Illegal copying of software has never been good, and cracking software is not a commendable feat. When that is said, I don't think I am alone in thinking that programs such as Adobe Photoshop have grown in popularity thanks to students and youngsters being able to get hold of illegal copies of the program. That was especially true when Adobe didn't make available trial versions of Adobe Photoshop.

In the case of Macromedia, I think they are justified in their anger towards the illegal copying of their software. For as long as I can remember, Macromedia has made available fully functional time restricted trial-versions of their software. And on top of that, they provide students with the opportunity of buying their software at heavily discounted prices.

However, I don't think trying to scare people away from using illegal software is the way to go. Scare campaings seldom work. Instead I think Macromedia and the other big software companies that really feel the pain of illegal copying and distribution of their software should focus on showing how the crack weasels make the software so much more expensive for honest users. They should put their efforts into making it unfashionable to be a cracker, or a user of cracked software.

The only problem with such a campaing is that there are some evidence to support that illegal copying of software might actually be positive: A Contribution To The Understanding Of Illegal Copying Of Software: Empirical And Analytical Evidence Against Conventional Wisdom:

By studying the evolution of the illegal user base, and its relationship with the previous variables, the evidence shows that illegal copying of software also generates a positive effect on the development of the software market potential due to the network effects generated by illegal users.

I think it is also important to remember that a lot of people outside the western world isn't anywhere close to be able to afford the software made in the western world, and that a large part of the illegal copying is done in these markets. Talking about loss of revenue in a market where your software is financially unoptainable for the users of the illegal copies is the equalliant of talking about funny money.

A search on Google gives some interesting reading material about illegal software and the problems sourrounding it.

I think David picked the worst possible week for his vacation, at least in the context of all the MX announcements that has been made from Macromedia the last week. But now he is back, and I am sure he will be up-to-date in no time with his Flash Blog

David Sifry who runs the very interesting wi-fi company Sputnik that delivers community gateways, and enterprise solutions for 802.11 has his own weblog Sifry's Alerts - continuously updated with links to news about Wi-fi.

Via Flazoom:

ActiveX flaw exposes Flash users to hacks
ZDNet writes about a buffer overflow vulnerability in the previous version of the Flash 6 player (revision 23), the overflow allows for attacks via some HTML e-mail clients and when visiting malicious web sites. The problem only exist for Internet Explorer on the Windows platform.

If you haven't already, its a good idea to update to the latest version of the Flash 6 player - the update fixes the overflow vulnerability, and also fixes some other serious bugs in the Flash 6 player.

Seems it is wise to stay far away from Verisign.

On a related note, we have been moving domains from Verisign for a while at Webhead since Verisign has failed to supply us with anything resembling an ISP tool. We did however consider using them for our own and clients payment systems, but reading horror stories like the one above has made me think twice about doing business with them.

O'Reilly Network: The Sanctity of Elements. Meg Hourihan writes about interface, design and the input of clients. Or how to make sure that your design process isn't hijacked by the customer and end up in catastrophe

Branden has created a new mailinglist for discussing the new Flash <-> Server technologies New Flash Communications Mailing List

I am sure it will become as valuable as the Flashcoders list, not to mention filled with the same high level of technical knowledge.

Webmonkey Joshua Allen has made The Weblog Tool Roundup - its a nice article going through the benifits of using weblog tools, and looking at which tool would be good for you, if you are thinking about setting up a weblog.

Ok, so I am in the 'b' mood ;-D

Branden Hall, ActionScript guru, FigLeaf senior developer, Flashcoder list daddy and general cool Flash guy has his own weblog up and running. (Thanks to Mike for the heads up) You can find Branden's weblog at WaxPraxis

BTW: For more Flash weblogs, check out my earlier posting about Flash blogs:

Flash blogs keep on spreading..
Macromedian bloggers

Check also out the Flash blogs links on the right menu..

There was some serious issues with the previous version of the Flash 6 player:
Macromedia - Flash TechNotes: Updated Macromedia Flash Player Active X control resolves streaming issues

The issues should have been fixed in the new version of the Flash 6 player that is out now.

The fixes include:

• Interrupting of loading media into player does not halt, rather queues and loads entire file.
• LoadSound continues to download even though the object is stopped, unloaded, or deleted
• When an event sound is playing and the sound object gets deleted, the sound still plays even though there are no more references to the sound object.
• Large Media (video, MP3) causes Flash Player to lock up.

Interesting turn of events.

Dave Winer of Userland.com wrote a rant about Macromedia and BigCo's where Dave wrote about Allaire (the company) and Macromedia:

Both companies have BigCo's on the brain

When we've tried to work with either Macromedia or Allaire they tell us about their plans to work with the Bigs. They say it nicely, but it's so frustrating. This bugs me bigtime.

The rebuttal from Jeremy came today, with a guest posting on Mike Chambers weblog.

I was bummed to read Dave Winer's comments about Macromedia's position
vis a vis "BigCo's".

Dave rebuts today and says

My opinion, after reading his piece, he still doesn't get it. Here's the acid test. Does his MX stuff work with my software? I'm glad it works with Axis, but where I live web services does not equate to .NET, emphatically.

Personally I think interoperability is the most important in this whole picture, and that is what Dave is trying to say. It doesn't matter what scripting languages Macromedia support, or what technologies - as long as they make sure to make it possible for other systems to inter-op with theirs.

ActionScript.com has a follow up article about the lawsuit that Apple has filed against Sorenson.

Sorenson Responds to Apple's Lawsuit

"We are greatly surprised by the presumptive filing of this suit without prior discussions or understandings between the parties," said Jim Sorenson, CEO of Sorenson Media. "We are reasonable, and as is usual practice, we are always willing to discuss and work to resolve issues. In the meantime, we remain focused on executing our overall corporate and product strategy and doing what we feel is best for our customers."

ActionScript.com writes: Apple Sues Sorenson to end license with Macromedia

Apple says Sorenson breached a contract that prohibits it from "developing, marketing, or licensing'' any version of the compression software used in QuickTime to competitors such as Macromedia, according to court papers filed Friday in federal court in San Jose, California.

This is bad, Apple seems to think they should be alone in having access to Sorenson's technology, and seems peed off about Macromedia's Flash MX video technology. Maybe they have understood that it will make it much easier for people to make available video content on the web, without the need for their Quicktime player? After all, the download of the Flash 6 player is a lot lighter than the Quicktime download.

Every day I am checking Macromedia for a new version of their Flash 6 player (which should have been out by now). Its worse than waiting for the gifts on christmas eve.

The reason for this eagerness for a new version of their Flash player? When I was in San Francisco earlier this spring (in the beginning of April) I was allowed a video interview with Jeremy Allarie for Flashmagazine.com. Allaire and I sat down and talked about what is going on these days with the release of Macromedia MX. (Of course, only after I had signed an NDA, agreeing not to say a word about what I would get to know before the 29th of April).

Now the news is out, and every day that goes the news worthiness of the interview diminishes. And all because we can not see ourselves making available broadband content based on the Flash MX video streaming capabilities now.

A streaming bug in the current Flash 6 player causes the player not to cut downloads unless the user actually shut down their browser, just leaving the page with the content will not stop the download. The implications when it happens with enough users is easy to see: For the user its an inconvenience that their bandwidth is hogged up without any apparent reason. But for Flashmagazine it would be devastating, many thousands of users starting feeds that they would just continue to run, even without having any interest in seeing the content - would jam the server and run the costs for hosting through the roof. (Actually, more like to outer space, since Flashmagazine.com already have a pretty hefty bandwidth bill).

So Macromedia, please make the new Flash 6 player available soon!

(I wrote about the streaming bug on the 20th of April)

Mike Chambers just noted (see the comments of this post) that the player will be available this week sometime. He referes to the security note about the streaming bug. He is right, it does state that the player will be available by the end of this week. (It states 7-10 business days from the date (19th of april), and that translates to within friday the 3rd of may).

The last days, trying to keep updated on the Macromedia Studio MX releases, its been fun to keep updated with the Google API. The resources at Macromedia instantly showed up at Google almost at the time they were released, and the search result for "Macromedia MX" changes all the time, if not hour by hour so day by day.

(The top 10 search results for "Macromedia MX" is shown on the right side a little further down on this page).

Wired writes today: Grads Want to Study on EMacs, Too

Too bad its not for sale in Norway. A G4 for $1.000 would have been something. If you are a student in the US; congrats!