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.
I'll choose to belive that Ammen doesn't know his competitor well enough, and would recommend that he read up on the history of Flix. As far as I can remember, the vectorized video features of Flix was first introduced with Flix 2.0 (checking now - OK. Got it confirmed. Vectorized video was first implemented in Flix 2.0). And the program wasn't released until January 2001. (The beta was obviously done before that, but I kind of doubt that is what Ammen was talking about)
[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.
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]
