A cool new application from Blue Pacific (The company behind the Flash generator programs ASP Turbine and PHP Turbine) - Flash Printer

Flash Printer gives you the ability to make SWFs the same way you make PDFs with Acrobat. So now you can make your Word documents into lightweight SWF files to later be quickly downloaded, displayed and printed.

Currently the Flash Printer only runs on Windows 2000 and XP. When viewing the SWF file, you can flip and navigate pages, print, drag by a hand and zoom the page up and down.

More information and a short review of the demo over at Flashmagazine.com

[Via Flashmagazine.com]

More information and examples of using Flash MX together with web services, this time from Jeffrey Hill of Flash-db.com. He has put together quite a few examples of code doing it with PHP and Flash MX. To quote him:

Here's my implementation (completed before the MM went up).

Floogle MX

The Download and Documentation

The comparison between CF and PHP
(use's MM's client for both CF and PHP)

Some other web Service's I've put up for download in the past couple weeks/months:
Currency Conversion
Language Translator

By looking over the code - It should be really easy for anyone to implement a Web Service in Flash.

Interesting examples. But it reminds me of how sad it is that Flash MX is reliant on server scripts to perform web services. I understand the security problems with allowing Flash to contact any server, but it would still have been nice to be able to make web-apps that tied directly into various web services.

I really like the Flash presentations Macromedia has made of its own history. Macromedia: The Story. Its even better than the Executive presentation (which is great too) IMHO.

[Via Eric Dolecki]

New Flash related blog - Flash Distracted by Jason Key with a developers look on Flash and associated technologies, including a review of the first hosted Flash Communication Server services from Media Temple.

[Via David Burrows]