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.