Claus has launched his own weblog. I miss commenting, permalinks and an RSS feed, not to mention a way to see when the various posting actually was posted (time and date would have been great), aside from the nitpicking this weblog is sure to become an interesting resource. Claus has some interesting projects going, like Deng CSS/XHTML parser and the jpeg2swf converter

[Via FlashGuru]

It seems that the release of the new Flash server will happen soon, the rumor mill is on high gear:

Ericd:

macromedia to announce new technology @ flashforward nyc

July 9, 2002, 6:00pm

AGENDA:

6:00pm - 6:30pm
Check in, cocktails and appetizers

6:30pm - 7:00pm
Macromedia Technology Announcement and Demonstration by Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect, and Jeremy Allaire, Chief Technology Officer

John Dowdell posted the following on the Flashcoders list earlier this week:

There's some seriously cool stuff coming out very soon, and I think it will have a cumulative sledgehammer effect on your clients and potential clients. Much of the momentum we all get will depend on what they can see out of the gate -- how the early projects are custom-fitted to a specific client need. I'm looking forward to see what ya'll do with this! 8).

To try to connect the dots, lets look at the press release from the release of Flash MX:

For communication and collaboration solutions, developers will be able to use a new Macromedia communication server technology that will enable powerful capabilities including two-way audio and video as well as real-time data transfer with Macromedia Flash Player 6.

The "Macromedia communcation server technology" would have to be the Flash communication server, the homepage for the server has been up since may (see my previous posting about it).

So thats for the rumors, it seems that the hard facts will be released at FlashForward 2002 NYC, which in many ways have become one of Macromedia's favorite venues for releasing announcements about new products.

Mario Klingemann is continuing his project with mapping his visitors in Flash MX, now he has added the location of the last 20 visitors, cool to be able to see where the previous visitors came from, and it shows off how powerfull Flash is as a frontend for these kind of applications.

BTW: Mario has promised that once he is done with the mapping system, he will release the source code :-)

(See the previous posting - "Find out where you are" for more details)

This is cool, I'll get it installed on my iPaq as soon as I have the time - PocketPalm from the swedish company Kodeness is out in an early alpha version (don't expect too much), and will let you run Palm OS programs on your Pocket PC device. PocketPalm promises to give me the best of both worlds on my iPaq, I can't wait to try it out :-)

[Via PocketPcHow2]

Software tweaks seems to be the solution to the reported lack of extra speed in Pocket PCs with Intel's newest XSscale processor.

ZDNet reports that "Several vendors, including Microsoft (with Windows Media Player), Macromedia, Real Networks and video decoder maker Packet Video, have said they will optimise for XScale.". Which promises faster multimedia on new XScale powered devices such as Fujitsu-Siemens Loox and Toshiba E740

[Via Greg Burch]

A weblog that has managed to keep below my radar for a while, it even looks like a Macromedian weblog - Greg Burch's Burch Blog is an interesting read. If he keeps up with the kind of postings he has done today - then its going to become a great resouce.

[Via Mike Chambers]

Matt Rice has made a cool Flash MX and VoiceXML based Tic Tac Toe game.

So far my attempts to use the services at 1-800-555-Tell to connect to the game hasn't been successful - but I am sure it will be fixed soon.

BTW: When you do call 1-800-555-Tell (1-800-555-8355). remember to ask for "Extentions". Took me a while to figure out that is where I wanted to go to dial in the number Matt provides on the game page.

Its really cool to see these kind of implementations of technology, now - if we could only get them to work... :-)

[Via SwfNews]

Phillip Torrone sent me an e-mail today telling me about his latest creation: Hobo Phil. Hobo Phil is your Pocket PC guide to reading Warchalking, and also helps you connect to the Wi-Fi networks you might find on your way.

Seems like a useful application for everyone with a Wi-Fi equipped Pocket PC

In case you haven't heard about it. Lets first start with the marketing hype about this new concept from Redmond:

Palladium is intended to become a new platform for a host of yet-unimagined services to enable privacy, commerce and entertainment in the coming decades. “This isn’t just about solving problems, but expanding new realms of possibilities in the way people live and work with computers,” says product manager Mario Juarez.

After reading that article (on MSNBC), I think the two url's Doc Searls provide today are interesting reading.

The Register focus on how Palladium might affect GPL software (in "MS to eradicate GPL, hence Linux"):

So to validate Harry, and to update his Master Data File -- two bits of business integral to the Palladium scheme -- I'll need hardware, an OS and a server compliant with Redmond specs. Now MS says they're going to make the sources to the core of this technology open. But considering Microsoft's white-knuckled terror of Linux and open source products in general, combined with its established penchant for mining its products with hidden little pissers for the competition, I don't think it's paranoid to imagine that I may have to turn to a packaged product from a major MS partner/collaborator or a Linux distributor who's gone to the bother of obtaining certs for the kernel and the apps. But either way we'll have major GPL problems, as we'll see below. Indeed, this is going to be something of a reductio ad absurdum

A little more technical insight into what Palladium is/will be can be found over at Digital Identity World

Doc Searls writes about it at Linux Journal and on his weblog

[Via Doc Searls]

Mario Klingemann has made a cool Flash frontend to show where you are.

Pretty nifty huh - just in case you are somewhere in the world, with your laptop, and don't have a clue where you are located. :-)

Its based on a PHP backend that checks your IP address against the NetGeo database to get your location data, and then plot it on a map. Seems to work fairly well. At least it said that I am in Oslo, Norway - which is right.

I did a little research, and found a cool little PHP script that used GD/CSS to show the same kind of data, not as cool a frontend - but might be something to look at if you are interested in such things: IP-Atlas

Robert Hall writes about W3Cs Speech Recognition Grammar Specification which today advanced to "Candidate Recommendation".

The standard itself is intersting enough, especially if all the vendors that have their own proporitary formats would at least add support for it.

Robert has been working with speech for a while (see previous posting about his speaking blog). I have a strong feeling that speech recognition software coupled with speech synthesis and interesting programming should make for some interesting web experiences in the future. (Wired had an article about the adult aspects of speech recognition earlier this week).

Check out Roberts insight into speech recognition, he seems to know exactly what is going on.

Mark Pilgrim (dive into mark) is writing up a whole month of good tips on how to make your weblog more accessible.

Its really a usability exercise - and most of what he is talking about can easily apply to all other forms of web sites too.

I've already implemented a few of his tips. They are probably not obvious to the regular IE-browser-user but to others its hopefully of help. With weblogs most of us are already using template based systems - so taking the time to implement features that helps just a few procent of your visitors is fast and easy - and if you have a few visitors a year - that will quickly add up to at least a hundred persons that gets better access. I think its worth investing a couple of minutes for those people - don't you?

BTW: I would love feedback to what I can do better here - let me know in the thread to this posting.

[Via Mario Klingemann]

This years Macromedia DevCon has been titled "Architecting A New Internet Experience", and looks to be one eventfull and amazing experience. If I had to choose only one conference to go to this year - Macromedia DevCon would be it. (Not that it looks like I will be able to attend, but one can always dream :-)

For 4 days there is going to be technical sessions, workshops, hands-on training, etc. And its all about Macromedia's products, of course. In total there will be over 100 sessions.

The conference will be held at Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin Lake, in Buena Vista, Florida. The location alone might be enough to sway you to go. But the sessions are the real deal maker for me, here are the topics covered:

• Building for the Browser
• Developing for Devices
• Media, Design, and Communications
• Performance, Process, and Practices
• Rich Internet Applications
• The Server Side
• User Centered Development

What is worth noting is that the technical sessions include 60-minute workshops and 90-minute hands-on training sessions, so it looks like a conference with a high value factor. And it should be, registering for the conference is USD $895 until the 27th of August 2002, and USD $1050 after.

[Via Mike Chambers]

On Monday this week, Ammen Harper of Sorenson Media announced that Sorenson Squeeze will take a heavy price cut from USD $299 and end up at USD $119. The announcement was done in an interview with Scott Manning published at Scottmanning.com.

I think the interview misses some interesting questions, such as if the price cut was done because of the previous lower price and expanding feature set of Wildform Flix - a competing Flash video product retailing for USD $149. And Scott also fails to ask Ammen about the ongoing trouble with Apple, and if that in any way may affect the Squeeze product.

I am not saying I think Ammen Harper would have answered those questions, but they should have been asked.

Another thing I noticed was Ammen's comments on Flix:

As you know Flix has specialized in Vector Video, and has been doing this since 2000 for earlier versions of Flash.

[Via ActionScript.com]

The picture above is an example of how warchalking might look like. Maybe not something that you understand instantly, but if you go over to Everything Burns and look at the proposal there, you might get a better idea of what it means.

Warchalking is the hobo-language for free wireless networking, in short - a way for people to mark where good wireless networking is available.

Sifry explains:

Starting in London, people are marking WiFi spots in chalk on the street, called Warchalking. Just like the hobos of old, these WiBos(Wi-Fi Hobos) are marking places friendly to them. They are using take-offs of the hobo sign system to mark places where bandwidth is available

[Via Sifry's Alerts]

Having created one of the first Flash RSS Readers and won the Macromedia XML News Feed competition, Phil should have some knowledge of how to handle XML in Flash, and he is sharing that knowledge with us all in his tutorial on Flash and XML over at Studiowiz.com

[Via Keran McKenzie]

Sean Voisen (eat orange has posted a few tips for creating a Flash-based chat client.

He writes:

These first few tips deal with the technological aspects of implementing an auto-scrolling text field as a chat window, and the option of pressing the ENTER key to quickly send messages. My techniques involve using the new MX event model and methods of the ever-wonderful TextField object.

Good information for anyone that is making a Flash based chat application, maybe with something like Sean's FlashJabber Conf

The beta of the Macromedia Flash Remoting for .NET has been made available. More information is sure to become available, but for now you are left with having to sign up for the beta to get more than the few lines on the Macromedia site. And there is always the Flash Remoting homepage

Me? I am waiting for Flash Remoting for PHP, but if that will ever happen is uncertain. The hints Macromedia has been dropping up till now has not been enough to know what is going on with that.

[Via Mike Chambers]

Nicolas S.-Roy has released his Flash RSS reader.

It supports RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.9x, lets you view RSS feeds that is not on the list. And also allows you to view several feeds on the same page.

There are still some work to be done here, but its a good start. Nicolas tells me that the source FLA will be made available soon. I hope the same will be true for Phil's Flash RSS reader and Ming's Multiblog Flash RSS Reader, making these projects open source would really make one kick-ass killer RSS reader :-)

Mario Klingemann's weblog has been filled with interesting projects since he started it. And now he is working on Steering Behaviors

He writes about Steering Behaviors:

Basically it is about rules that control the motion of groups or flocks of elements. By applying various rules you get some very interesting motion patterns. Of course this whole issue is very tempting to be transfered to flash

You can follow his project through the steps:

Steering Behaviors - Step 1
Steering Behaviors - Step 2
Steering Behaviors - Step 3

Step 3 was released today, and also includes the source code so you can play with steering behaviors.

This year the 5K contest has gathered 366 contestants, and you are the judge of which one is the best.

This years contest opened the contest for Flash content, and there is a lot of neat Flash contest entries, all of which are 5 KB or less.

I haven't had the time to look through all the contestants, but a couple that seems to get good ratings (out of the Flash content) are:

Animation Box - a drawing and animation tool made in Flash MX
Remote control tank battle - two player game

I got a good example of how DHTML/JavaScript content isn't on par with Flash, when trying to play one of the top rated DHTML entries - Pixel Ninja, when playing the game in Internet Explorer 5.5 I kept getting killed without seeing any Ninjas, seems like a typical DHTML problem to me.

[Via Quasimondo]

Dmitry Skavish and his companions at JZox Inc is getting ready to release a new commercial version of JGenerator, the new Flash MX version of the Flash generator - JGenerator 2.1 MX will not be covered under the Apache Open Source License that JGenerator was covered by, and pricing of the new commercial Flash generator starts at US $125 for the developer edition, and maxes out at US $875 for the enterprise edition. With support agreements available from US $995 to US $1495 per year.

JGenerator MX is due to be released on the 8th of July and will fully support Macromedia Flash MX and it will be the only tool which supports server-side Flash MX components and generates Flash MX dynamic content, according to JZox.

The dynamic chart, list and tickers and XML support are previous strong sells for Macromedia Generator, with Macromedia Generator being phased out by Macromedia, JGenerator 2.1 MX should be an interesting solution for sites needing to be able to produce static Flash files with dynamic content.

NB: The open source and free JGenerator version 1.4 seems to still be available from the old website. So if you are looking for a general Java based Flash generator with support up to Flash 5 - and can live with the lack of chart support - then take a look at the old site.

[Via SwfNews]

Jakob is looking for examples of Flash-Based Applications and tools for user testing.

So if you have a Flash based tool, or you know of good Flash based tools that Jakob should usability test, then you can contact Hoa Loranger at Nielsen Norman Group¨. The following instructions for submission applies:

If possible, please include URL and a few lines about what the application or tool does and why you think it has good (or bad) usability. We are more interested in good examples than bad examples because even the best design will include plenty of usability problems

[Via John Dowdell via ActionScript.com]

This is a funny e-mail exchage. Or more like a funny response to a not so interesting spam-mail from Amazon.com:

[!CrackMonkey!] [evan@prodromou.san-francisco.ca.us: [pigdog] Re: Important test at Amazon.com]

Well worth a read!

[Via Doc Searls]

Shazam is THE killer-app for music lovers with mobile phones

This new mobile service lets you call in and it will listen to the music you are listening to for 20 seconds, and then send you back a SMS text-message telling you what song and artist you were listing to. It also allows you to log in and look at a list of all the tunes you have "tagged".

Kind of reminds me of a Sony product that never took off, where you could tag songs on the radio, only Shazam seems to be a billion times better.

Doc Searls witnessed the amazement of some people who got the service demonstrated last week, while sitting on the pub.

Shazam is powered by "audio fingerprinting" and a database of 500.000 songs, a database they expect to triple by the end of the summer.

Only thing that sucks with this service is that it will only be available in the UK, at least initially. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra to get access to the service from Norway.

Related story: The Independent: Name that tune

[Via Doc Searls]

In the June edition of Macromedia's The Edge, Lauren Gibbons Paul writes about The Future of Multimedia on Devices.

Users are hungry for everything from location-enabled restaurant and movie reviews to games to short messaging services (SMS). Even streaming video and audio applications are making an appearance on the diminutive devices.

As always, content is king. People are looking for content - and preferably on the device of their choice. Something which the publishing houses seem to want to fight, in the same way they were fighting the video tape when it first was introduced, but I digress.

Phillip Torrone made me aware of the article, and he choose to quote the following from the article:

With Macromedia Flash, I think we'll see history repeat itself and a new generation of rich, connected applications are about to hit

He mentions that it would be cool to get The Edge for PDAs, and I am right there with him. Take the time to let them know you want it too:
newedgefeedback@macromedia.com

[Via Phillip Torrone]

Christian Cantrell has written three new tutorials about Flash remoting for Macromedia.com

The tutorials include

• Building a Database Query Application with Server-Side ActionScript
• Building a News Application with ColdFusion Components and XML
• Building a Mail-Enabled Macromedia Flash Application with CFML

[Via Mike Chambers]

Dick Applebaum over at O'Reilly Network has published the first part of a series of three articles where he writes about ColdFusion MX on Mac OS X

[Via John Dowdell]

Sorry for the lack up updates. A bad flue has taken down my "main system", I will hopefully be back on my feet soon.

ExtremeTech has an interesting article about Flat Panel Display Technology. Since the LCD screen is becoming more and more common, its a good idea to have some insight into how they work - at least if you make multimedia presentations.

Besides, the geek in me just plain out want to know how they work.

ExtremeTech has a lot of other interesting articles, among them one titled "Exploiting/Protecting 802.11b Wireless Networks", a good article about how vulnerable and insecure Wi-Fi networks really are -- and what you can do to at least make them a little more secure.

Sean Voisen has released the Flash JabberConf.

Sean writes:

Flash JabberConf (FJC) is an API for Flash MX that I wrote. It should allow anyone familiar with MX and the new event model to quickly create chat and messaging applications in Flash.

FJC was written to allow communication with a Jabber server running the Jabber conferencing component (also known as group chat). It is essentially an "MX-erized," light-weight version of JabberFlash with the necessary extensions that allow it to easily support conferencing and group chat.

FJC is available for download in zip format, and there is good documentation with the download. Sean is looking for feedback and suggestions for improvements. So when you have looked at the code, head on over to Sean's weblog and leave your comments there!

Sean Corfield, director of Architecture at Macromedia has joined the Macromedian bloggers with his An Architect's View.

According to Branden Hall "This man is smart - and I mean really smart - he's the director of architecture at Macromedia! He's about, oh 2 billion steps out of my league" - which should put him somewhere out in the gallaxy compared to me ;-)

Sean has an article up at Macromedia.com about Software design patterns for Macromedia Flash Remoting, which is an interesting article.

He also writes interesting stuff on his blog, most notably he has touched on all the people asking for ColdFusion MX on OSX, sounds like its possible to make it work, and that there are some descriptions on the way of how to do it. Hopefully it will make available all the functionallity of the CFMX server on OS X. Especially now that Apple has made available such a cool server platform. Personally I feel that Macromedia should make OSX one of their standard platforms for the ColdFusion MX server.

[Via Mike Chambers]

On wednesday the 19th of June Tom Harwood of Macromedia Server Products, CFML Language Development posted a Lisence Approval Request for the "Macromedia Open Source License" to the Open Source Initiative

You can follow the discussion/thread at the Opensource.org mailinglist. The reception of the request has been good, although the license in many ways appear as a vanity license, as pointed out in the discussion of the request and by Steve Mallett that picked up the posting to the list.

In my opinion this is a good first step. hopefully Macromedia will go along with using the Common Public License, I tend to agree with David Johnson (Usermode.org) in his worries that the CPL license could end up as several hundred identical CPL's with just the name of the license changed.

SwfNews also picked up on the story, and the following discussion focused on what Macromedia might want to open source. There were suggesions that Macromedia might open source the Flash "remoting server" or maybe the Flash player, but I think the safest bet was that of John Dowdell, that Macromedia is looking into open sourcing extensions to the ColdFusion Markup Language.

Jakob Nielsen has recently become a part of the Flash scene since his company signed a deal with Macromedia to help them make a best practices paper for Flash development. Most recently he wrote a review of Macromedia's blueprint Flash application "Pet Market"

But he is still suffering from the animosity he accumulated after his "Flash 99% bad" article, Keran McKenzie has a list of sites making fun of Jakob, where the funniest one possibly might be a photo-collage of Jakob Nielsen closing the deal with Macromedia.

[Via Flazoom via Pnut's Thoughts]

Scott Hamlin has written an interesting article about animating type in Flash: Better Text in Motion

Creating smooth animations in Flash can be a challenge. One major factor is the speed and power of the viewer's computer. Another is the complexity of the animation itself. Text can increase this complexity, but I'll show you how to make the most — or more accurately, the least — of it!

[Via Flazoom]

I am having serious blog envy!

Robert Hall has been showcasing speech synthesis hooked to Flash for a while on his Flash site, but now he has put together a nice little application for his regular weblog.

You can now hear parts of his weblog entries via Flash.

Still miss some in depth information about how he has done it. Would have been nice to get to look into the gut of the sound beast ;-)

[Update]
Ok, found his presentation of the project at FlashForward 2001 in NYC: Ideas To Realities, Threads To Objects. Found the link thanks to Google and FFNYC Links

"Simplifying Tasks" is a cool poster about ease of use and simplifying tasks, its just too bad that the people that made their web pages obviously haven't understood the concept.

IBM - Ease of Use - Simplifying Tasks

Check out the "easy" ordering "link" they are using :-D

Doc Searls and John Dowdell is two of many that have picked up on the interesting linking policy over at NPR.org

What are organizations thinking when they start to tell people to ask for permission before linking? And what are they doing about various search engines, such as Google? Not to mention, what legal options do they have to enforce their prohibition to link to npr.org?

[Update]
Wired have an article about NPR.org and their deep linking policy as well as the response from the weblog community.

[Update II]
A lot of people have been writing to npr.org to protest their stupid linking policy, their response is possibly even more mind boggeling than the policy.

In a press release today, June 19th - Macromedia writes:

To demonstrate the powerful new features in Macromedia Flash MX, Macromedia executives Kevin Lynch and Jeremy Allaire will provide the keynote address at Flashforward 2002 New York (www.macromedia.com/go/ffny/). The keynote will showcase new technologies for the Macromedia Flash development community as well as some of the amazing customer examples already being created with Macromedia Flash MX, including Eric Dolecki's Flashforward event guide for devices at www.ericd.net/guide/.

I am willing to bet that they will be releasing information and release dates for the Flash Communication Technology they have been talking about so long. This technology will make some of the options in the Flash 6 player make sense :-)

Something else they might announce in NYC is another product that is waiting to be let into the MX family - Macromedia Director..

Oh, I almost forgot. The press release was really about the Flash 6 player that has been downloaded 200 million times already, "making it the fastest adoption of any new version of Macromedia Flash Player." - to quote Macromedia.

Thanks to JD on MX for the link.

This is interesting, Macromedia has put together an online pet store based on Flash MX and ColdFusion MX. And its all documented on all levels. Including preperation, coding and usability. The project has its own "homepage":

Pet Market Blueprint Application Center

The details:

Designing Application Interfaces with Flash MX
Smoothing Web Interaction
Testing the Blueprint application for usability

And then they got some of the industries best Usability experts to look it over and give their opinion:

Chris MacGregor, Flazoom.com Reviews Pet Market
Jacob Nielsen Reviews Pet Market

Then they take the time to compare the performance of the Pet Market against Java Pet Store and .Net Pet Shop:

Petmarket Performance Benchmarks

Mike Chambers has the full rundown of the links to the various parts of the project. Yes, they have really poured work into this one).

Great work Macromedia!

Mike keeps up the good work with another overview of all the great new stuff that you can read at Macromedia.com about Flash MX. Not to mention, a lot of people are putting great effort into trying to make us smarter, those darn fools ;-)

Macromedia is obviously digging into their pockets and using their money to make something REALLY useful. Yes, thats right - I am highly sceptical of marketing talk - I am more interested in "the real deal" - good information, and so far one just have to commend Macromedia for the amount of work they are putting into making good and useful information about their products readily available without charging an arm and a leg for it.

Here's the new stuff this week:

Flash Extreme : Locking Down Flash MX : Branden Hall
Extending components in Macromedia Flash MX : Greg Burch

The O'Reilly Network and Richard Koman writes about Coolin Moock and Flash MX in an article called Colin Moock on Flash MX

Nothing new, but its a good article to get some insight into what Flash MX can do and lots of good information from a great Flash developer.

[Via SwfNews]

You might have heard of ASV (ActionScript Viewer) and Sothink SWF Decompiler MX 2002 Pro. Both are programs that allow you to decompile SWF files and peek into the ActionScript code (and get access to other resources in the SWF file too).

Not everyone thinks is such a nice idea that people can peek into your code. Earlier crafty ActionScript gurus have found code that would crash the viewers, now there is a product that is supposed to take care of the "problem". Anyone else think that this is starting to look like an arms-race?

The new program is called Viewer Screwer (still in beta). For now you can view the announcement of the program

The funniest part of the whole thing is Burak's (Creator of ASV) comments to the news item about the "Viewer Screwer" obfuscator on Mike's weblog:

It's a well known idea, what matters is that it's actually implemented here.
I didn't like the name "screwer" personally though.

And I don't think an online version will survive when offline versions from other developers get released.

ASV will be updated so that it will display more readable names for vars, labels, etc. just like Robin suggests :)

[Via mesh on MX]

Not quite, but Nando Times reports that Australian scientists claim to have 'teleported' a laser beam

Macromedia announces that Opera has licensed Macromedia Flash Player for inclusion in Opera embedded editions for Linux and QNX operating systems.

This will bring Flash to a number of devices via Opera's embedded browser.

I hope the license also includes the ability for Opera to make the Flash MX plug-in available for other platforms they support, like Linux. At the moment the Linux platform is confined to the Flash 5 player.

[Via JD on MX]

I promise that I won't be peddeling politics on my weblog. But this statement on the war on terror from some prominent americans deserves some attention: We won't deny our consciences

This is mighty cool, a Google Weblog. Found it at "Everything burns". On the Google blog I found some interesting information:

The Google Dance

Once a month Google calculates the pagerank of each page and changes the serp (search enigne result pages) for all keywords.

The Google Dance is the time between the start and the end of an update. In that time you get different results on www.google.com, www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Normally the Google Dance takes about 4 days.

I also found a link to a new ODP category for Google with lots of interesting links about Google.

Other interesting information include what Google conciders spam

Version 1.5 of the Flash RSS Reader has been released today. The reader now sports categories as well as a favorites category where you can add the Flash newsfeeds that you want to read. The real news in version 1.5 is the ability to add any newsfeed supporting RSS 0.91, which means that the Flash RSS reader now have become a general RSS reader, very nice. The reader gives you the option to set the Favorites category as the default start up category.

This is great work from Phil Chung. He mentions that he has gotten great help from Robert Penner, Robert Hall, Keran McKenzie, Ming Chan and Cyberfunk. So in many ways its truely been a community effort.

I have been trying to figure out what is going on with Flash remoting and PHP lately. Especially since Mike Chambers keep dropping hints that something might be happening.

For now, the best information (for us developers) that I have found, is a posting by one of the Flash Remoting and JRun developers, that goes into detail of how the Flash remoting actually works. (Thanks to Mike for the link)

Here is the posting from TheServerSide.com - Rich Client Apps are Back with new Macromedia MX Suite Launch

Posted By: Sean Neville on April 30, 2002 in response to this message. Having spent the majority of the past year working on both JRun 4 and Flash Remoting for J2EE and .NET, the relation between Flash and J2EE (beyond ColdFusion) is of great importance to me and to the other engineers who pulled the products together. Although official announcements and docs will continue to flow through marketing and product management, here are some unofficial notes from engineering on the topic.

Flash Remoting -- distinct from the low-level network I/O and XMLSocket available in Flash -- is an asynchronous RPC model that allows Flash to invoke methods directly on web services, EJBs, JavaBeans, JMX MBeans, POJOs, ColdFusion pages, ASP pages, and a number of other resources in the ColdFusion and .NET worlds that are probably less important to you than the Java cases. This model uses a binary message format (called Action Message Format, or AMF) that is delivered over HTTP and is modeled on SOAP, though it is much smaller and faster that standard SOAP and is purely asynchronous and event-driven in order to meet the Flash player requirements. It allows you to send a variety of data types -- RecordSets, full Java objects, primitives such as integers, Strings, XML Documents, references to EJBObjects, Dates, etc. -- across the wire. Passing ValueObjects through existing EJB-based apps to Flash clients is certainly possible. A gateway on the server handles conversion of these various types from their ActionScript (ActionScript is the ECMA script syntax used in authoring Flash) versions to their Java versions and vice versa (the .NET version of Flash Remoting does the same for CLR/CLS types). This gateway is designed as a front controller to server processes, and contains a number of filters to handle issues such as serialization, logging, security, etc. before handling the actual invocation of the targeted service. The .NET version follows a similar architecture, although it was written from the ground-up in C# instead of Java and is packaged and deployed differently.

The client-side scripting model involves setting a connection to the gateway URL -- and due to security sandbox concerns, a client delivered over HTTP is permitted to access a gateway only on the host that delivered the movie, ala Java Applets -- and invoking the getService(...) method from the gateway connection. A "service" can be any server-side resource mentioned above, and the client assumes it exposes "functions" that can be invoked in the movie. If the remote service is an EJBHome, then the service functions are the EJBHome methods; if the service is a web service, the service's functions are the same as the web service's methods; if the service is a web context, then the service functions are ASP or CF pages available in that directory; etc. Through ActionScript, typically in response to client events such as clicks or data input, a service's functions are invoked and the results are asynchronously (everything in Flash is asynchronous) returned to the movie, typically causing the movie to update in some manner. Regardless of whether the remote gateway is hosted in a J2EE, CF, and/or .NET environment, the client-side API is the same. A single Flash client might connect to both .NET and J2EE resources, but it does so with the same API.

There are other elements -- we included a data binding API so that RecordSets and other relational data can be directly bound to Flash UI components, for example, and added a debugger and service browser to aid in development, and numerous new UI components -- but this summarizes the basic approach.

There are two parts of the Flash Remoting product: client ActionScript extensions and a server gateway. The client extensions are free, but the server gateway is implemented as a J2EE application (packaged as an EAR) that currently ships in JRun 4 and ColdFusion, and will soon be available elsewhere through partnerships with IBM and Sun. If you download JRun 4 or CF, you'll get this EAR as part of the install. I'm not yet sure how it will be productized in other application servers, but if not embedded I imagine it will be available for sale (look for official announcements as they occur).

For more information about Flash Remoting, I'd recommend downloading either JRun or ColdFusion (the default ColdFusion standalone version is now a web app that runs on an embedded version of JRun, essentially JRun with a large taglib and different web admin, though it will be released for other app servers as well) and fiddling with the Flash Remoting samples and bundled documentation there. Alternatively, you can grab Flash Remoting for WebSphere or for .NET in a beta program, if you're working with either of those platforms, and fiddle with the samples and docs we include for those versions. There are certainly opportunities for improvement in the future, but the current MX launch in conjunction with the pending release of JRun 4 is a terrific start toward enriching J2EE development with extremely powerful media-rich clients.

PS Neville

[Via Mike Chambers]

Just thought I would point out this short lits of Good use of flash over at the hollocube.com weblog. Its a list of must-sees.

As reported on the 5th of June 2002 in a paper from Eyes On Security (Bypassing JavaScript Filters - the Flash! Attack), Flash SWF content can allow malicious users of web sites that allow users to upload or include SWF content to get access to information (cookies etc) that they aren't supposed to have access to.

Today Macromedia has released a security tech note about the issue: Macromedia: MPSB02-08 - Macromedia Flash Player Cross Server Scripting Security Issue

It describes the problem in detail, and most interestingly offers a solution to the problem. Macromedia is announcing that they will be releasing a new version of the Flash 6 player in July, which will allow for a new PARAM/EMBED tag when including Flash content in an HTML page. The new parameter will be called "AllowScriptAccess" and can be set to "always" or "never". When set to "never" it would disallow outbound scripting (ActionScript getURL() actions that specify a scripting statement).

[Via Mike Chambers]

Matt Rice is ranting about The Flash Message Board Life Cycle over at SwfNews. I think he has formulated the life cycle of a successful message board pretty good, be it a Flash message board or a message board for anything else. I have seen this in news groups, web boards and to some extent in mailing lists.

The problem is in the numbers, and the solution? Probably to make a taxation system of some kind. Personally I am of the opinion that users that just consume should have to pay for their consumption, whilst users that contribute to a message board should be paid for it. It does not necessarily have to be with money, but there should be a cost/benefit to using/providing for a message board. A taxation system would probably keep in check the cricket-pest like conditions that message board experience when Phase 4 (see Matts message board system) kicks in.

Just a heads up, if you have a Flash blog, and would like to be included in the channel list of the Flash RSS Reader soon to be released in a new and improved version, then you should go over to Philter's Blog and let him know you exist. Be aware that his RSS reader currently requires your feed to be in the RSS 0.91 format.

A good example of how Flash effectivly can be used to illustrate a story. MSNBC has made a presentation of the Enron story. What was Enron and how could the scandal unfold.

[Via Robert Hall]

John writes about a usability discussion that is going on at the CHI-WEB mailinglist. Involving, amongst others - Donald A. Norman of Nielsen Norman Group and Chris MacGregor of Flazoom.com.

Check out the postings so far

Donald A. Norman (from Nielsen Norman Group):

That is precisely backwards. The U-Turn, if there was one, was at Macromedia. The Nielsen Norman group has not changed its stance about what makes a good design. We should be applauding companies that listen to criticism and work to remedy the problems.

Chris MacGregor (from Flazoom.com):

I believe that U-turn is certainly an appropriate term to describe Jakob
Nielsen's change of heart about Flash. In 2000 Nielsen commented that Flash was
99% bad, and suggested that in most cases the web would be better off without
Flash. Now that Macromeida has hired your firm, Nielsen's tune has changed. The
change seems so dramatic that Nielsen seems to disregard his stance about what
makes good web design.

Mary Keitelman
Kevin Spruill
Yazdi, Reza
Al Abut
Christopher Fahey
Michael Kay

And while we are on the subject of usability, the web-archive of the CHI-WEB might even have been usable if it was possible to link directly to threads. If you want to keep updated on this discussion, you will have to go here and look for "The Flash turn-around". In fact, you might even have to go there and choose week 3 (when it appears) to continue to follow the discussion - if it extends into next week.

[Via JD on MX via John Rhodes]

Thought I would start collecting original descriptions to how words/terms started out. The first is RFC, by Vint Cerf.

Vint Cerf on the origin of RFCs

Steve Crocker wrote RFC #1 - he knew that we needed to document our design work but was very conscious of the fact that we were just graduate students, not the principal investigators on the ARPANET project. Early in the a.m. he was casting about for some way to describe these documents and came up with "Request for Comments" - a kind of humble way of saying "we're just rank amateurs, can you help us make this design any better".

[Via Scripting News]

Flash Player "is a developers and enthusiast portal for viewer driven content" to quote the guys over at Flash Player. In many ways it seems like they are looking for the same kind of content that Shockwave.com provides, but focused soley on Flash. That means games, animations and music files all in Flash.

They already have some good content, and I am sure that the Flash community will provide them with even more great content to showcase. The site might not be Shockwave.com yet, but if they keep making it easy to provide content and have it showcased, it could become a much more democratic Flash entertainement site that any of the existing ones.

My only problem with the site was that I wasn't allowed to vote for the excellent game I tried - they seem to be having some problems with their MS SQL server.

The site is run by Huw Reddick and Bill Kara.

[Via FlashGuru]

JoshDura.com is (surprise surprise) Josh Dura's weblog, Josh is know as a moderator at FlashKit.com, co-founder of the Flashcomponent.com website, and involved Flash community member.

His blog will probably be filled with good news and projects from the Flash world. He already has some interesting sub-sites to the JoshDura.com domain, with open source Flash projects located at flash.joshdura.com and photos at photos.joshdura.com

Found a new Flash blog today, its called Quasimondo. I haven't gotten this confirmed yet, but the site seems to belong to Collin Croome

[Update]
The Quasimondo blog is actually run by Mario Klingemann of Coma2.com. Thats how it goes when guessing :-)

There are some interesting projects on the site:

Flash Photoshop EPS Parser with the source code for those that want to try it. Its slow, but it works. Take note of how you have to save the EPS file from Photoshop..

And the follow-up project: dot-couture.com which is an interesting image manipulator made in Flash.

There seems to be in the works a project for steering behaviors, I quote:

Basically it is about rules that control the motion of groups or flocks of elements. By applying various rules you get some very interesting motion patterns. Of course this whole issue is very tempting to be transferred to flash. So that is what I'm trying at the moment.

This is a blog that I'll have to keep updated on, it's only been up for a couple of days, and its already filled with interesting projects. Hereby included in my Amphetadesk subscriptions :-)

Andre Michelle and David Rowald over at Extrajet.com has released the XJ Composer, its a Flash music application loosely based on Reason (According to David Burrows). XJ Composer shows off the power of the audio capabilities in Flash MX. The Flash app handles much like a drum computer with a synced synthesizer. It will soon have a community site for saving samples, tracks etc, at the moment there is no way of saving a track or using your own samples.

So go ahead, make some noise - and trust me, that is NOT hard with XJ Composer!

[Via Flash Blog]

Interesting discussions going on. Dave Winer is writing up a document called "What is a News Aggregator?"

A news aggregator is a piece of software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page.

Deus X (0xDECAFBAD) takes things a bit futher, wanting to redefine the News Aggregator:

Aggregators desperately need to grow toward more flexibility and scan-ability. A few things I'd really like to see addressed:

• De-emphasis of seen & older items from sites, but not complete hiding. Context between entries on weblogs is important.
• Optional grouping of items from the same or similar weblogs. Context between entries, and between blogs is important.
• Emphasis of newer items, tracking the time line and signalling attention to changes. Radio does this, but mostly to the exclusion of other concerns.
• Preventing sites with few updates from getting lost in a wash of frequently updating sites. Some of the best sites may update once every few days with something worth reading, but simple reverse-chronological order pushes the quiet sites out in the maelstrom

Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian) also has some comments about the issue, I especially like her reference to her chat with Adam Curry:

[...] as Les Orchard and Adam note, we need other ways to access the items flowing through the faucet. We need to be able to weight those channels we feel are most important, we need subject and keyword access, we need to be able to group channels and posts in whatever arbitrary ways we see fit. We'll also need ways to scale enclosures, audio, video, and otherwise (it will happen someday). Adam throws in ratings, especially by a trusted group, in order to highlight the flotsam from the jetsam.

Of course, then Adam totally blew me away with the idea of throwing away the computer interface altogether and using an aggregator to access everything from email to instant messages. Whoa. I'll take the red pill!

The point, of course, is that the next generation of aggregator software, if done right, has the chance to tip, which would be a Martha Stewart Good Thing.

Online Tonight with David Lawrence had an interview with Phillip Torrone (Flashenabled.com) last night.

The interview touches on the Flash Enabled book, Flash, Pocket PCs, gadgets, and everything else thats cool ;-) The interview is available online now.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4
(WMA format)

[Via Feasible Impossibilities - Robert Hall]

Scott Andrew has made a nice little "tribute" to Netscape
Netscape 4.0 - 1997 - 2002

Lets put Netscape 4.0 to rest. I agree with Scott when he says:

Netscape 4.0 is five years old today. That's like 236 in Web years. Ancient. The Methuselah of browsers, kept alive on an IV drip of tag soup.

BTW: The link at the top is NOT to his weblog posting, but to a very nice and artsy way of getting the point across that Netscape 4.0 now is ancient.

A beta of a CSS2 parser built in Flash MX has been made available by Claus Wahlers, the creator of the jpeg2swf converter.

According to David Emberton at ActionScript.com this parser will become part of a fully standards compliant XHTML display engine. The engine will support XHTML, XForms and XPath. An early prototype has been made available.

Sounds like an ambitious project. Would be interesting to see a full out XHTML browser in Flash MX. But I am skeptical, parsing is CPU-intensive work, and I would be surprised if the parsing of XHTML doesn't turn out to be painfully slow.

[Via ActionScript.com]

What do you get if you make jello with 25 lines of ActionScript? First place in BIT-101s 25 line ActionScript competition.

It eates up your CPU like it was ... thats right.. jello, but it looks great and was made with just 25 lines of ActionScript code. You can check out the winner and the 100+ entries over at BIT-101

[Via SwfNews]

Eyes on security has released a warning about Cross-site scripting attacks made possible on sites that allow uploadable files - Bypassing JavaScript Filters - the Flash way

Basically, if you have a forum or pages where you allow users to upload files, the user will still be able to execute JavaScript through the SWF file, even if posting of JavaScript is disabled in the forum/on the pages. Allowing JavaScript execution allows malicious users to catch other users cookies from the domain the file is placed.

The solution? Not allowing SWF files to be uploaded and displayed by default.

[Via FlashGuru via ActionScript.com]

This is a cool article: Notes on Parsing SVG Path Tags and Rendering in Flash MX, Helen Triolo shows how you can render complex SVG drawings in the Flash Player using the ActionScript drawing API.

In a slightly related note, John Dowdell has explanied how you can take vectors the other way - from Flash to SVG. Its really quite easy :-)

[Via Mike Chambers]

Dreamweaver is a tool that has been in my toolbox since its 1.0 version. From the start Dreamweaver was a lot better than its competitors. I could easily mention a lot of HTML editors that never have gotten as close to rendering good HTML as Dreamweaver. But the tool was far from perfect.

John made me aware of the work of the Dreamweaver Task Force, which is a project of The Web Standards Project (WaSP).

WaSP worked together with Macromedia on the latest version of their HTML editor, Dreamweaver MX. Although the pages at WaSP does not go into any evalutation of each of the objectives for the Dreamweaver Task Force, it does spesify the primary and secondary objectives that the taskforce had when working with Macromedia and the Dreamweaver developers. And it seems like they are reasonably happy with the results.

To me Dreamweaver MX has become an even better and more important tool, and with the inclusion of Homesite, its going to become on of the most used tools in my toolset in the years to come.

[Via JD on MX]

Macromedia has released an SDK that allows search engines and developers to parse SWF files and extract text and links.

The FAQ states that MM are working with a number of companies but no announcements yet.

Atomz Search and Google are two of the search engines I know that already are harvesting content from SWF files. Google so far has only extracted links from SWF files, but might be tempted to add more search capabilities to their search engine. The question is how easy it is to find and structure to the text in the SWF files.

[Update]:
John Dowdell has some intersting comments about SWF and search engines. Especially to those that might think that this is the solution for all their search engine problems.

Even with plain text content you just don't dump it out there and hope it gets indexed as you wish -- if you care about such things, you optimize the page to be recognized by various engines under the desired searches. With SWF you'd do the same thing with the HTML page holding the SWF.

[Via Flash Blog via Mike Chambers]

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) has published its white paper entitled "Opening the Open Source Debate". A white paper I have commented on before, especially the funding of AdTI is interesting, this to me is obviously a white paper paid for in full by Microsoft.

David Skoll of Roaring Penguin Software has written a very interesting rebutal to the whitepaper, more or less taking the whole white paper apart. Microsoft might want to have their money back for this one..

Roaring Penguin comments on the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's white paper.

Another device with Flash support on the market.

Phillip Torrone wrote me to tell me about a very cool new device from Verizon. Its called Thera, and it supports Flash. Phillip has put up a page with pictures and a little information about the device.

Thera is a PDA with Phone (or vice versa), and as far as I can tell, its only available in the US. I have to admit that the information about the device was kind of scarse on the Verizon pages.

FlashGuru takes up the issue with the buggy Show Streaming feature in Flash MX.

The Show Streaming Option gives you information about loading speed on different bandwidths, with Flash MX you can now export your SWFs using GZLib compression, but the Show Streaming option doesn't take that into concideration when showing you download times.

There are some interesting comments following the article.

Got an e-mail from Phil today, where he told me that he has updated his Flash RSS Reader again. This time around its the very neat code to implement the mouse wheel scroller with Flash that has been added. The only problem with it is that it only works with IE 6.0.

Let me quote from his e-mail where he tells me about his Flash RSS Reader updates:

The most important is the implementation of the mouse scroll wheel control for the scrollbars in IE6. [...] I've also written a quick tutorial on this topic from mucking about in the scrollPane and scrollBar components

FlashGuru has some interesting comments and links to information about the ScrollPane and ScrollBar components.

What I think is really cool here, is that Phil Chung (Flash RSS Reader), and Ming Chan (Multiblog Flash RSS Reader) now are working together with their Flash RSS readers. I am sure the co-operation will bring good fruits. :-)

John Dowdell writes about Flash and "eye-catching" ads. He is talking about those highly animated banners taking all your attention away from your real task.

when I'm reading an article I don't want stuff exploding and shaking and whirring in other parts of the page.

John asks for a good solution. A utility for stopping all SWFs will probably be included in the ad-killers that are available today. I can understand why John don't want to see that happen for Flash. I have to wonder why Macromedia hasn't thought about this problem themselves, and tried to find a solution.

Counting on designers of Flash ads to include stop features seems a bit naive, even if it would be good if everyone making Flash ads included a stop option.

There aren't really any good solutions around to avoid annoying Flash ads today (At least that I know of, if you know about such a product - let me know). If you want a Flash banner to be unstoppable, its a perfectly easy task to achieve. And one that it seems a lot of Flash banner authors use.

This is one of the things happening last week that I managed to not tell you guys about. Don't ask me why.

Branden has released code for SHA1 Secure Hash for Flash MX

So what is SHA1? I'll steal one of Branden's comments:

It is a checksum on steroids, and here's how that's good:

I want to validate against the server, but I don't want to send the actual password accross. So, what I do is contact the server and ask for a random value. The server then records down my IP and associates it with that value. Then, I take the password, combine it with that random value and pass it through a crypto hash. Then, I send the hash and my username to the server. The server then looks up the password for my username and then does the same thing I did and combines that password with the random value and hashes it. If the hash it created matched the one I sent to the server bam! It lets me in. I've just authenticated without the need to actually send the password over the wire.

So basically, what is going on is that we are making a checksum. First on the server, then on the client. The resulting data sent from the client won't be anything that can later be decoded, but it can be checked against the know data and checksum we created on the server. Works great for sending passwords and other data we know, need to validate.

Branden Hall writes about the problems that can arrise when dealing with bitmaps and images in Flash, and has a couple of solutions it might be worth looking into: Tiny Bitmaps - Big Problems

Ok, this is just vanity stuff, I don't have a vanity plate (if I did, it would probably be jdb something or the other), but I can have my fun with a vanity search.

How about my first name on Google? Google Search: jarle

Today I am no. 1 when searching "for pages written in any language", and no.3 when searching in just norwegian pages.

What is more surprising is that I am no.1 when searching for "jdb", no. 9 and 10 too. Mind you. (This may very well change, but thats how it is when I am writing this).

Yes, I know. I am childish :-D And it would probably not have been equally easy if my name was Dave, Mike or John

PixFont 2.0 made by the russian company Kgroup is a small TrueType Font to TrueType Pixel font converter. The application fixes the problem with the default smoothing of fonts in Flash.

Cresk reports that the program says its not a valid Win32 application on his Windows 2000 Professional machine, it seemed to work ok on my W2K machine. But the program seems a little tickelish about how it is run.

A partly disabled version of PixFont 2.0 is available for download from Kgroup, a full version will set you back US $29.

[UPDATE: Kgroup has removed the download because of legal problems. When and if the download will be available again is uncertain]

[Via cresk on Flash Aesthetics]

Its probably safer to link to these Goddesses of Flash, than to try to ignore them *g*. So thats what I decided to do.

Flash Goddess is a new web site dedicated to women working with Flash.

Ann-Marie Cheung wanted to highlight that this is not just a male business and the quest is on to "discover where all the Flash Goddesses are hiding. Of course anyone up on their Flash would have heard of Jessica Spiegel (Webstyles.net, We're-Here Forums) or Irene Chan (Eneri.net), but there must surely be more..."

I am not sure how I feel about gender spesific sites, but I agree that its neat to be able to see that its not just a male-only business. Ann-Marie has done a good job so far, and with your help she is sure to discover even more Flash talents (her e-mail is on the site).

[Via Flashmagazine.com]

In its rumors section, C|Net write that LiveMotion is going through rough times at Adobe.

Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, people are wondering what happened to Adobe's ambition to best Macromedia's Flash animation software with its own LiveMotion software.

Rumors grinding through the mill suggest that ambition has clashed with reality in recent months, resulting in a major reorganization of the LiveMotion group, including deep layoffs.

I must say John Dowdell was gracious enough to just quote Adobe CEO Bruce Chitzen as saying "It's clear Macromedia has done a good job in creating a standard with Flash"

The whole quote from the C|Net article is as follows:

CEO Bruce Chizen admitted that LiveMotion hadn't lived up to expectations, and called it more of an add-on to Flash, rather than a replacement for it.

"It's clear Macromedia has done a good job in creating a standard with Flash," Chizen said in the call. "Am I happy about that? No. But I'm a pragmatist."

Its fairly obvious who has won the first rounds in the vector media war.

[Via JD on MX]

Phil has started to release code for his Flash RSS reader, the code he has gotten the most requests for is his scrollbars, and now he has made the code for the Flash RSS reader scrollbars available. Personally I am looking forward to be allowed to peek into his RSS parser, especially after his latest update.

There are so many great Flash projects going on. Sean Voisen at eat orange is working on integrating Flash with Jabber, his already has a Flash/Jabber Groupchat Client in early beta available for download.

Sean writes:

I've had some early interest (mainly from Jabber developers) in my Flash MX/Jabber Groupchat client. As such I've posted what I have for download here.

Please note that this version is very alpha, and currently serves only as an illustration that chat on Jabber with Flash is very real and very possible.

I think Jabber is becoming a great interface for a lot of different applications being that it is a XML-based protocol for instant messaging and presence. "Jabber-based software is deployed on thousands of servers across the internet and is used by over a million people worldwide. The protocol itself is managed by the Jabber Software Foundation (more info)." to use their own words.

Jabber is already used in web services/weblog types of applications. Seeing an interface and use for Jabber together with Flash makes for an interesting combination with many possibilities.

I am sure this is interesting both for those that were there, and those of us that couldn't attend (so we can google at some of the cool gadgets that were shown, and all the other stuff that went on during the conference).

Robert Hall links to Additional Pocket PC Summit Coverage

Phil's initial work on a Flash RSS reader has spawned another great Flash based RSS reader.

Ming Chan has made a Multiblog Flash RSS Reader, it allows you to read three weblogs at a time, save your three favorite weblogs using the Flash MX shareobject, and refresh the feed to update the newsfeed.

Ming says he will be working on adding automatic refresh of the feeds every x minutes, UI enhancements like rollover effect that shows actual external links, font sizes, colours, font types etc. And the ability to delete your saved settings (reset to default setting).

Ming is also working on a Win32 executable version of the reader. I think he should make a Mac version too, after all - its not much work to make Flash MX projector files.

Another thing I think he should add is the ability to actually add RSS newsfeeds to the RSS reader, that way the user would have access to any RSS feed out there, though the RSS reader. But overall this is great work, I am sure there are many that would love to have this tool as a projector file to run on their own computer.

Sometimes I am so bad at spotting news. :-) I featured Stuart Schoneveld's web site illogicz.com not long ago, and found some of his cool projects there. Amongs them, his Flash Rich Text Editor

But it took Jon Udell, then Dave Winer, then John Dowdell and finally Chris MacGregor to point out how cool it was before I got that its actually news. (Yeah, I am slow).

There are some interesting links to add to this story however. Tim Appnel is adding some thoughs and questions - that I hope Stuart will be able to answer.

This search has lead me to consider the possibility of using Flash. Flash 4 added forms support. Flash 5 added XML support. With MX, the latest version of Flash, Macromedia has added interface components and more robust scripting. With these new features and its widespread deployment across multiple OSes and browsers, I theorized that a replacement component may be possible. Just I recently came across Stuart Schoneveld's promising Rich Text Editor that seems to validate my theory. There is no source or documentation to know to what extent the control could be pushed but I find this encouraging based on my cursory knowledge of Flash

Jon Udell adds to it and John Dowdell answers. Great to see these conversations happening. I hope Stuart will have time to give his 2 cents too.

The ability to use Flash MX as the interface towards CMS systems and weblogs is really interesting. And will in my mind solve a lot of the issues other such solutions have today. The IE ActiveX control is VERY platform dependent, and for that reason I (and many more with me) have stayed far away from using that as a solution, even though it adds a lot of functionallity on the platform that is supported.

I have been involved in a project that Jensa at Flashmagazine has been working on, a very usable Flash based publishing system that is already being used by a number of clients, and will be used for version 2.0 of Flashmagazine.com (due this fall).

I raved to him about the cool Flash MX based UIs for text and graphics when I got back from FlashForward in San Francisco. At FlashForward Branden and Sam showcased a very cool Flash application with drawing, and a text tool. And with a GUI totally like a normal windows application.

So when I saw Stuart's implementation that looked a lot like the ActiveX editor I have seen/used for Internet Explorer (Windows), I immediately sent Jensa an e-mail telling him about it. Something like it will really take that publishing system to the next level.

It never dawned on me that it could be used as plug-in editor to any weblog tool. It should be possible to plug it in as an editor for tools like Radio, MovableType and a whole of others. As well as normal HTML/server based CMS-systems.

I hope Stuart releases some more information about his editor, and keeps working on it. I know I am amongst the people that would pay for a component such as this.

Just thought I would take a minute or two to address the curtesy of link backs. Most of the time I refer to what other people have written or found, and I try my very best to link back to these people. (See the [Via ] links at the bottom of the posts).

I try to make sure that I honour the work other people have put into collecting information, and make sure that those that actually do the hard work get some recognition for it.

Once in a while, not very often mind you, I do a little hard work myself. Digging up a story, finding a new cool resource that others haven't mentioned etc. When I do the "hard work", I also expect others to have the curtesy of linking back to me on the story. Most often this happens, but some weblogs out there seems to mostly ignore linking back to the source. Be it me, or someone else.

My opinion about link backs is that its the decent thing to do. Its about showing appreciation for the work of others. People who help us all find usefull information. And in a way its the "pay" for time these people have put into their weblogs. After all, most of us aren't paid to keep our weblogs updated, so linking back to the originator of the information is the least we all can do.

To the those that have weblogs and don't link back to the source, I would like to say: Start doing it today. Start showing appreciation for the information you get to share with others. Taking credit for other peoples work isn't good karma, and shouldn't happen.

Thats my whining for today. Have a nice day everyone, and link back! :-)

Mozilla 1.0 is finally released after 4 long years of development. The Open Source project produced a good browser, but I have to say that it took some time.

The release party will be held at the DNA lounge in San Francisco on the 12th of June. There will also be satellite parties at other locations around the world

Exploring Weblog Neighbourhoods with Blogdex.

Inspired by Mark, and Dave, I've been doing a bit of neighbourhood exploration hacking of my own.

DJ has made a cool little script that gives you the chance to see which neighborhood you belong to.

Here is the url to check out my neighborhood:
http://www.pipetree.com/~dj/cgi-bin/bdexp?url=http://weblog.bergersen.net/

[Via Jon Udell]

In the paper "Opening the Open Source Debate", scheduled to be released friday by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, there are claims that Open-Source leads to less secure software than with proprietary software. The report warns goverments against relying on Open-Source software for national security. What is interesting is that Microsoft funds the Washington based think-tank.

The Register - Open source invites terrorism - study:

We imagine the argument will have to go something like this: Microsoft software is safer because the company carefully conceals its security flaws; thus evil terrorists will never find them on their own. But with open source products, the Evil Doers will be able to audit the source code and find novel weaknesses they can exploit to bring Christendom to its knees.

We say that because we know they can't possibly try to argue that MS offers inherently more secure products. Although they might; as our friend Richard M. Smith points out, the Institution takes money from Redmond.

Wired - Did MS Pay for Open-Source Scare?

"It is not our policy to comment on supporters; I'm sure you can understand. From this you should not infer that information you have is correct or not correct; we just don't comment," Fossedal wrote in an e-mail.

"These folks really need to be more straight-forward about this," security researcher Richard Smith said. "Not commenting makes it appear as if they have something to hide."

To me it seems like this package of FUD, apparently appearing from Redmond by ways of the Microsoft funded think thank, is going to backfire on Microsoft.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to run this by you all, but if you are a MovableType user, and haven't read the install notes, then shame on you, and please make sure to fix this "security problem".

If you followed the installation manual, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. If you just installed it without making sure to remove some important files after the install (which is very clearly pointed out in the manual), then you are in trouble. Seems like there is quite a lot of people not making sure to remove these files after installation.. But I am sure that doesn't apply to any one of you guys and gals out there :-)

Chris Hileman:

there is a hacker or group of hackers out there who are getting into MT blogs. It is not a problem with MT but it IS a possible problem with installation. If you did not delete you mt-load.cgi or your mt-updrade.cgi DO IT NOW! These hackers are running these files which writes the default user back into the user database. That then allows them to access you blog and reek havoc on it. Again, make sure to delete thoses files ASAP!

[Via PocketBlog]

PS: Which reminds me about a story that Wired was running just a day or so ago: "Read The F***ing Story, Then RTFM"

Nice to see Phil Chung have his own weblog up and running.

He has taken the time to counter some of the comments that has been made about his XML Flash reader and the RSS Flash reader.

Seems like both my RSS news reader and the Macromedia XML reader are getting more exposure than I expected. It's interesting to hear some of the comments coming from a variety of sources...several of which are counting out these readers BECAUSE they are made in Flash.

Read his comments in full.

Every week Megan Stevens picks a site for its design and execution. Website of the Week is a site to check out weekly if you want to get some good inspiration from great design.

Mike Chambers has done it again, today he has put together a very comprehensive list of resources, articles etc. about Flash components. I can't imagine that he has overlooked a single link. If you see any that is missing, let him know - he is sure to add it to the list.

Macromedia has announced the winners of their XML Feed Contest.

I am not surprised that Phil Chung got the "Most Creative" award for his implementation of the XML newsfeed. He has gotten a lot of well deserved attention for his implementation.

The prize for "Best Site Integration" went to Timberfish, their implementation is clean and in Flash. Giving it the same font scaling problem that most other Flash implementations have today. In this case an HTML representation of the feed would probably have been better, or they should have choosen a more dynamic way of showing the content. IMHO.

[Via Mesh]

Doubleyou has made a very cool little soccer game, warning: Its addictive! The objective of the game is to keep the ball in the air, which is not that easy. One of the coolest things about this game is the crazy vocal sounds included.

[Via Flazoom via Valyard]

I am not often blown away anymore by web design. I have been surfing the web since 1993 - been with it since there wasn't a browser with image support, and "seen it all". So, I guess what I am saying is, I am not easily impressed.

But Lauri Mueller's Minnesota Gardener weblog, based on the same weblog system I am using - MovableType (yes, amazingly - its true - it dosen't have to look as bad as this) just blew me away. And she's a Flash designer too, too bad I am happily married, or I would have flown over and proposed to her on the spot. ;-) And I think I would offer my right arm to have this girl redesign my weblog.

Found the link to her site at "What Do I know", which is another impressive implementation of the MovableType blog software.

Oh, PS: Branden Hall has updated his weblog to use MovableType too...

Robert Hall has dug up some information about Forrester Research on Macromedia and MX

All of us developers and users of Flash MX, and other Macromedia products know the value and power that they hold, but the corporate IT weenies and muckity-mucks don't always know and often need a good hand holding and spoon feeding of data to make their pillows soft at night.

Amen to that Robert (yeah, I know - I am one of them obnoxious developers)

Robert found some good links for those of us that don't have enough money to shelf out for Forrester and Gartner research papers all the time, but still want/need the quotes ;-)

Reports about Flash MX at Forrester
Reports about Flash MX at Gartner research

[Via Feasible Impossibilities]

Nice to see that Phil is getting the attention he deserves for the great Flash MX work he has been doing with his Macromedia XML feed reader.

Jon Udell writes about it, so does Dave Winer. I think Dave needs new glasses *g*. At the same time, it does show the problems with traditional implementations with Flash MX, there is usually no way to really scale the text up in a nice way. As far as I can understand, its just an implementation issue.

[Via JD on MX and Dave Winer]

Apple has released the public beta of Quicktime 6. Including support for Flash 5.

[Via SwfNews]

Its the week of User-centered design at the Des/Dev center over at Macromedia.com:

Flash 99% Good - Written by Kevin Airgid and Stephanie Reindel. This is chapter 8 of the Flash99% Good book that has been made available both as HTML and PDF download at Macromedia.com. Chapter 8, "The Future of Flash," covers Flash as a front end to web services, Flash and broadband, and the future of Flash usability.

Ready, Set, Go: Usability Testing - Written by Elizabeth McLachlan and Leanne Waldal at Otivo.com. Goes through the process of setting up a usability study. With a brief look at how you plan for, conduct, recruit users, execute and analyze the results of a usability test.

Start Now: Develop with Users - Written by Jared Braiterman, Ph.D.
jaredresearch.com. Knowing your audience. Creating profiles and scenarios to design a site that meets the needs of your target audience.

[Via Flazoom]

Nice to see Macromedia showcasing how Flash MX can be used to create hightly user-friendly, hard-hitting AND accessible presentations with "Macromedia Executive Presentation"

Its a job well done. We get to see a nice clean user interface, good streaming and video in Flash MX, integrated well with clean Flash content.

I hope Macromedia will make available an article that goes into detail on how the presentation was done, and the work that was put into making it. It is a good showcase of how to make a good presentation with Flash MX.

[Via Flazoom]

Studiowiz has had a major overhaul, and the site is fresher than ever. If Keran McKenzie and the other people over at Studiowiz can keep this up, its going to be a great resource to keep going back to! :-)

[Via Pnut's Thoughts]

Its released, the Flash 5 player for Nokia Communicator 9200 series

[Via JD on MX]

<obligatory rant>
Please don't let it take 2 years to get Flash MX to various cool devices, pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top?
</obligatory rant>

Chris MacGregor has written a very good reply to Jakob's latest addition to his "Flash 99% Bad" paper. You did notice that he has added text to it now, text that I am sure wasn't added because of the job he now has gotten for Macromedia, after all - he is a serious researcher and have more integrity than that, right?

Read Chris's: The Cooler: An Open Letter to Jakob 'MX' Nielsen

Nielsen himself weighs in on the announcement with an addendum to his Flash: 99% Bad column, but unlike the other posts, Nielsen's is filled with factual errors and misplaced back-patting. Let's take a look and correct the errors and offer credit where it is due

Chris knows a whole lot about Flash and usabiltiy. If you are interested in this debate, you should take the time to read what he is saying.

Macromedia announced today that the creator of the "Flash 99% bad" report, Jakob Nielsen will be working with them to develop a "best practices" for rich Internet applications..

The buzz is naturally on in the Flash community. Here are some links to coverage of the announcement:

Flash usability site Flazoom:

This really is not a surprise, if Flash is going to be accepted as a web application tool among the corporate world, Macromedia has to do something to offset Nielsen's "Flash: 99% Bad" column from last year. Buying Nielsen's consulting services is probably the fastest way to achieve this. So now we're getting Jakob MX.

ActionScript.com:

This is no joke, folks. In an announcement that is sure to be the biggest shocker in the Flash community, Nielsen will be coaching Macromedia on usability.

PNut's Thoughts:

This scares me, as much as I admire the guys writings, agree with many of his concepts, I still think he just doesn't 'get' flash. Personally I'd rather see Steve Krug, or Chris McGregor, maybe even Marie Tahir doing this, as these people have more realistic ideas to modern web usability.

JD on MX:

I think this can be helpful reading for developers, but will also help with client communications, and the long-term effect should be to help the viewing audience around the world.

[Update, found another site that had some interesting comments around the Nielsen/Macromedia partnership:

What Do I Know:

Okay, so let me get this straight. Jakob Nielsen, a self-penned usability “expert,” writes an essay that drags Macromedia and the Flash development community through the mud. Macromedia reads the essay, believes he must know something, 'cause he sure sounds pissed, so they form a partnership with the guy

There are some really good comments (on both sides of the discussion) over at "What Do I Know", take the time to read it. ]

I think its good that Macromedia keep setting focus on usability, especially since Flash is more and more becoming a platform for applications. In this regard Jakob should have a lot to contribute. I can also see why Macromedia would choose Jakob, considering his past criticism. Having Nielsen onboard is a good way to take the edge off of his former criticism of Flash.

BUT, I have a hard time seeing that Nielsen is the right choice for the job of creating a best practices paper for Macromedia. There are a number of other usability experts that have done a lot more research on web and multimedia than Nielsen. Notably User Interface Engineering released their "Making the Best with Flash", which in my opinion shows a deeper understanding of Flash and its abilities and constraints than what I have ever seen from Nielsen.

But I guess its a case of choosing celebrity over skills. Sadly.

The RSS Auto-discovery link tag has been changed.

This change comes in response to (valid) criticism that the old way was too general, and could cause confusion if, in the future, there were other XML-based formats that pages wanted to link to. Using a more specific MIME type (the exact type was suggested by Dan Brickley) solves this potential problem, and the more specific title goes along with it.

Here is the link tag as it now stands:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="url/to/rss/file" />

Phillip Torrone has posted videos and pictures from the pocket pc summit

Folks, the Pocket PC Summit was sweet, no foolin'. Tons of smart people, tons of great sessions, tons of fun. Lots of folks are going to post stories about it so I'm going to post 94 photos and 2 videos.

Phillip also points out that Bill Perry of PocketPCFlash.net created one of the best conference guides ever for the conference. (CAB file download)

UserLand has announced support for RSS Auto-Discovery for Radio. This is great, but what is not so great is that they have implemented an extremely simple parser for the RSS link tag.

Here's an example of a link element that Radio's aggregator understands:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml">

In order for it to work it must be formatted in exactly this way. It's totally brutal. If the attributes aren't all present, it fails. If they aren't in the correct order, it fails. If the whitespace isn't exactly as above, it fails. If the attributes aren't quoted, it fails.

Radio is too big of a tool in the weblog community for this to be good enough. Dave and the rest of the guys should really make an effort at doing this RIGHT. Doing it this rigid is going to lessen the effect of the tag.

[Update: Exchanged emails with Dave. Although it seemed to me from what Dave wrote about the RSS Auto-discovery that the way Radio and Manilla handles the RSS auto-discovery tag wouldn't allow for proper XHTML formatting of the link tag, it does indeed work even when adding the mandatory " /" on the end of the link tag. (see the previous posting about RSS auto-discover to see what I mean)]

[Update 2: Nice to see that Dave has updated the description on his support for RSS Auto-Discovery for Radio page. Now he explicitly states that it will work to add the necessary characters to make the link tag validateable XHTML.]

This is worth spreading the word about: Autodiscovered RSS feeds

By adding one line of HTML code in your weblog, you will enable users of Amphetadesk and Radio to subscribe to your RSS feed with the help of a bookmarklet.

HTML Code:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://diveintomark.org/xml/rss.xml" />

Bookmarklet for Radio
Bookmarklet for Amphetadesk

The bookmarklets should work in IE 5.+, Netscape 6+, and Mozilla.

The HTML tag is a standard HTML tag, and will allow various applications/servers/spiders to find your XML feed. It can only be good to add it to your site, IMHO. So lets make the future happen right now, and make it easier for everyone to find what they are looking for.

[Via 0xDECAFBAD]