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
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. :-(
