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]