Toast.com offers a Flash based GUI for their free e-mail service. It looks good, and I am sure it will appeal to those that think Hotmail and friends look too damn ugly. But the usability of this e-mail Flash application could have used a real workover.

First of all, why not use some common GUI idioms instead of making up their own GUI? This kind of application is most certianly not going to become the primary application for any of the users (ok, I take that back -- there might be one or two that actually check e-mail all day).

It also seems to me like this application is actually slower in Flash than it would have been in HTML.

Both of these main flaws could be remedied, and I hope they will. In my opinion all that this example of the use of Flash has going for it right now, is that it looks good.

[Via John Dowdell]

Interesting article by Gary Rosenzweig about how to protect your Flash and Shockwave content from thieves, he has some good suggestions, but I think John is right when he says that its probably better to make a theft-protection system that only fails once in a while - that way its harder to catch for the thiefs.

[Via John Dowdell] (Welcome back from the accordion vacation John :-)

The Flash compression tool Optimaze! has been released by Ideaworks3D via Electric Rain in the US. The tool can now be bought at the Electric Rain website for US $129.

The price might seem steep, but concidering the kind of work you would have to put in to even get close to its compression of the SWF files, the program easily pays for itself in reduced headackes and time spent doing manual optimization.

What Optimaze! does is to simplify and compress the vector graphics in the SWF files. And it does a good job. Usualy the file size of the SWFs end up being reduced 30-40% compared to the original. They claim to have seen compressions of up to 70% in certain tests and with no singnificant losses in animation quality.

Optimaze! has a Flash MX user interface, optimizes SWFs from Flash 3,4,5 and MX. In fact, it will optimize any SWF files from any SWF-exporting applications, such as Swift 3D. And it imports the SWFs directly so you don't need the FLA to do the optimization.

Its important to understand that Optimaze! is a vector compression tool, it will not compress/optimize your SWFs if your only content is JPEGs, it does not do any bitmap compression, and it will not compress the sound either.

(I posted another story about Optimaze! the 4th of July)

Macromedia has added the Macromedia Application Development Center for ASP.NET to their list of resources for people wanting to use Macromedia Flash MX and DreamWeaver MX together with ASP.NET technology. So if you are developing solutions based on Microsofts ASP.NET, you now have a lot of useful information available at Macromedia.com.

If, on the other hand, you are a Java developer, you should check out the Macromedia Java Development Center.

[Via Mike Chambers]