My rant about the poor way Macromedia is treating the speakers at their 1000 dollar DevCon conference received a lot of attention. Especially the call to boycott the event, and my complaints about Jakob charging extra for his session. Well, as you may all have seen, I didn't have all the facts straight. Jakob is having his own mini-conference before the event. I should have checked my facts a little better before ranting - and for that I apologize.
I feel the focus was shifted from what I felt was the most important part of the rant. And that is Chris MacGregor's that has to beg for donations to be able to get to the event. Here we have a Flash community member that I feel have done a lot for Macromedia and the Flash community, having to BEG to be able to attend the event. So far his donations have reached $225. Not bad, but still far away from the 1250 dollars he needs for travel and hotel accommodations.
While I think that the only way to make Macromedia understand the error of their ways is to boycott the event, Chris don't want us to stay away. Out of respect for him, I would like to withdraw my call for a boycott of the event.
Let me quote his comment to my original rant:
Please do not boycott the conference. I am working hard and asking for donation so that I can present my talk, which I have been hard at work on. If no one shows up at the conference two things will happen. First, I'll be speaking three time to an empty room, and that is going to suck. Second, I'll probably get 'the evil eye' from other speakers for this boycott thing.I'd like to make it clear that Macromedia is not at fault for my situation. I should have paid more attention to the speaker invite in the first place. I appreciate all the donations that have been coming in (up to $225 in less than 36 hours) but dogging Macromedia is a bit misplaced. They've done a great job bringing this conference together, and I want no part of a boycott (so I'd better see you there Jarle!).
Jarle, I really appreciate your support. More than you know my friend. I can not tell you how thankful I am to the support of the Flash developer community. If I can make it to the conference then it will be a testament to the support of every Flash developer who has ever read a tutorial or downloaded an open source FLA. And frankly, the developers are the people that I publish flazoom.com for. Thanks.
Again, I would like to say that Chris has a big heart for the Flash community. And while I respect Chris a lot, I have to disagree with him about Macromedia. I don't think the way they are treating the speakers at the event is worth any praise. They should be taking better care of the people that spends a lot of their time and energy on helping them make their products better.
Macromedia has started their signup for the Flash 6 player beta for Linux. Mike writes that they are looking for people that are going to bang on the player and find any issues. If you are a Linux person interested in Flash, send them an e-mail to let them know you are interested.
No date for the release of the beta of final version of the player, but it seems like it should be just around the corner.
[Via: Mike Chambers]
I am blown away by the great program at Macromedia DevCon this year. The conference isn't cheap, and is held at a rather expensive area in Florida - but I was still seriously working on getting there. Now I have changed my mind and will boycott the event, and I think you should too.
Why? Because Macromedia is treating their speakers for the event bad. And they are treating the Flash developer community equally bad in letting some of the speakers actually charge extra for attending their speech. Jakob Nielsen who not too long ago asked for the help of the Flash developer community for his research (and most likely got a lot of good help) has decided to charge $500 for the access to "his" research. I would love to know if Macromedia in this way has footed some of the expense of its research over on us. Turns out the research was for his upcoming book, and the $500 is for his own mini conference the day before the Macromedia Devcon (see Mike's comments at the bottom of this post)
I am sure Jakob is paid nicely and gets a free ride and stay at the hotel. (Apperantly he doesn't get any special treatment, could anyone confirm if he gets the same amount for his speech as everyone else? I kind of doubt he does..) And I wouldn't expect anything less for any of the speakers. But for the "regular" speakers it appears that they will have to foot the bill for the travel to and hotel bill for attending the conference themselves. Taking the whole conference from an event for the speakers to make a little bit of money, to something they will actually have to pay to attend. Seems fair to you? Remember, Macromedia charges just over a thousand dollars per head for entrance to the conference. And still they can't afford to compensate their speakers right.
I feel bad for the speakers. And I know that I wouldn't have been interested in that kind of a deal myself. But it seems there are Flash developers with so much love for the Flash community that they will go really far to be able to be there - One such person is Chris MacGregor. Instead of feeling insulted and telling Macromedia to stuff the whole thing, he has decided to try to gather money himself to be able to attend the conference (alas, in reality pay to be a speaker at the conference). He has set up a special donation for this very purpose, and you can check out his plea on his Flazoom.com site: Flazoom.com: Request for assistance...
Chris is the guy that wrote the white paper on Usability for Macromedia, and he has done a lot of great usability work for the Flash community and Macromedia. User Interface Engineering had this to say about him in their latest newsletter:
I'd have to say our interest really piqued last year. We'd been reading a lot about the great work that Chris MacGregor (http://www.flazoom.com) and other Flash developers had been doing to improve the usability of Flash-based implementations. We decided to conduct one of our most extensive research projects ever to examine the strengths of Flash.
I know Macromedia must be grateful for all the great work Chris has put into a field that they feel is important for the future of Flash, but still they are too cheap to be able to do the decent thing and pay for his ticket and hotel.
Macromedia, as a company you really owe it to the community to show more heart in these kind of circumstances. And you owe it to the people working their asses off to make sure that they at least are compensated fairly for their work. Keep this up, and you will loose a lot of the positive vibe that has been a trademark of the whole Flash extravaganza.
A little message to the Macromedia community people: You really need to kick some ass inside of Macromedia and make the company start showing appreciation for the work the people in the Flash community does for you. This latest news about how you treat your speakers at one of the more important community events really shows bad form. And I am sure it affects a lot more people than Chris.
Mike Chambers has given this information:
Actually, i just checked on this, and we are not paying jacob's expenses. JDB, i would appreciate it if you corrected your post.i am not really sure what jacbo nielsen has to do with this issue anyways. He is being treated just like the other speakers.
Also, someone posted on flazoom that you have to pay to go to his devcon session, that is also incorrect. He is holding his own mini one-day conference before devcon, but his devcon session is free to all attendees, just like the other sessions.
Interesting to see Sorenson (Squeeze) and Wildform (Flix) release their new Flash MX video tools at the same time.
Sorenson's big news is the stitching feature that will allow you to use Flash to do really big video files. As many of you might know, Flash relies on all of its content having to be loaded into RAM, which has made it rather uniftted for large video files - until now. The new version/revision of Squeeze also includes AVI file support.
Wildform's Flix 3 has as its biggest news the ability to generate everything necessary to make video play in Flash, including making a custom player automatically.
This might be interesting for those of you writing corporate/company related blogs - such as the Macromedians. Ray Ozzie writes about Groove's corporate weblog policy. Seems like they have thought things through in regards to the troubles the company might get into when employees blog.
Lia Steakley's article Is This One Nation, Under Blog? is about the spur of weblogs, and the bloggers that throw their blogs away, to start up new.
I am glad I didn't purchase a special domain name for my weblog. Right now I think the most appropriate domain would have been too.busy.to.blog.com ;-)
Jeffrey Hill of Flash-db.com is busy making cool Flash front-ends for web services. One of them are the RSS 1.0 Blog Reader
I'll share his very interesting e-mail with you all:
it does add a new twist to other RSS news readers as it's based off of a web service. The service (remotely hosted) returns an array - so there's no need to parse any XML in Flash. The service should also work well with Flash remoting, as you can load the array directly into flash with remoting. However the current client for the service uses php instead.The Client (Click view example for Demo):
The directory contains quite a few web service listings, similar to xMethods.com, with the exception that all of the clients are Flash Based. It's my hope that more companies start using Flash as an interface for web services so I'm trying to promote them as much as possible. The directory is also all set up for people to buy and sell web services and clients/custom components for those services...
The best part of the directory is the Flash WSDL parser which parses and displays any WSDL file in an easy to read Flash interface.
I've got some next level services coming out in the next 2 weeks that I can't mention the details on, but they involve using Ming. And won't be
free.
I know I will check out the Web Services Directory at Flash-db. Lots of interesting projects there. And I can't wait to see the commercial project Jeffrey is working on :-)
But I am in doubt, is Flash MX really a useful front-end for web services, with its rather rigid security? Please share what you know and think with me.
Lisa Delgado, Wired's dedicated Flash writer, has taken the time to write about ESPNs use of Flash MX to make available videos with multiple angles on their EXPN.com site, as well as a lot of other uses for video in Flash.
ESPN has really made good use of Flash MX on their site. And the session they had about it at FlashForward 2002 San Francisco really blew me away.
Nice to see another Flash RSS Viewer come along, this time with the source all available. It looks like a nice job done by the people at Erational.org.
The RSS Viewer is released under the GPL Open Source license, and the PHP source files, as well as the FLA is available for download from the site.
They have also made a Flash RSS banner, which looks pretty nifty.
Check out the info page at Erational.org for more information about the rssViewer, on the info page you will also find the rssBanner.
The only improvement I could think of that they could do, would be to include my newsfeed ;-) As luck would have it, the rssViewer allows you to add your own favorite RSS feeds to the viewer.
[Via SwfNews]
Its not long since Flash 6/MX was released, but Macromedia is probably already hard at work on projecting the next version of Flash. Although probably not directly related, Mike Chambers used a slow day to ask the question: "What do you want to see in the next version of Flash?" - Not too surprising that it sparked a lot of suggestions and discussion.
Its impressive to see Macromedia keep churning out great Flash development and design articles. Mike, as usual, has the list of new content at Macromedia.
I'll let you take the trip to Mike to check out the complete list. What I immediately think are the two most interesting new articles are the new sample application - Blackboard Group Management, and John's article about how not to get help (and how to get help, for that matter)
Mike Chambers followed up a posting on SwfNews about professional bloggers. While the though about people blogging as a profession is interesting, the discussion that it spawned on Mike Chambers weblog is even more interesting to me.
Personally I think Macromedia and other companies will be better of letting the people closes to the topic that is to be discussed handle the writing, rather than hiring professional writers. To me that is what blogging is all about, writing about what you know best and work with (at least for the tech blogs), rather than writing because that is what you know best.
Jason Key (Flash Distracted) has written a nice entry in his blog about Flash Player Bug Releases .. good or bad?
I agree its nice to see Macromedia release new bug-fix versions of the player often. But it also seems to me like they were in too much of a hurry (this time around too). Breaking functionality is never a good thing. The .47 version of the Flash 6 player has broken several features from the previous Flash 6 players. I understand some of them, such as the redirect function being take away. I have a harder time believing that they removed the support for query strings in the embed tag on purpose.
This is a cool RSS reader: flog - the last 72 hours in flash development
As it says, it displays the postings (in chronological order) of the various Flash blogs. And as you can see, I am messing up the feed by all my various other none-Flash related postings.
There is no information up on the site about who made "Flog" yet, but I am pretty sure it is David Humphreys that is behind the cool presentation of the Flash blogs. :-)
Engrish.com has many good examples of the asian Engrish. To quote the site:
It's hard to believe the Engrish masquerading as real English over in Japan. It can be seen on signs, people's jackets, t-shirts and shopping bags, in menus and on TV. But nowhere is it more prevalent than on the various consumer products found in convenience stores and supermarkets.
[Via Terje blog]
Just discovered Bjørn Hansen's blogging from OSCON, the Friday 26th of July notes are really interesting: Open Source in VFX, its a short excerpt of the session held by Milton Ngan, the IT Manager for Peter Jackson's Weta Graphics.
I always liked the flashy machines from SGI (Although they have been falling behind for a long while now, IMHO), but its nice to see Linux taking over as the primary platform for the movie industry.
With the impressive work being put into making the Flash 6 player work better on Windows and Mac, I am still baffled by the fact that there is still no Flash 6 player for Linux.
Granted, the desktop market isn't huge on Linux (although its growing, faster now thanks to Lindows and cheap Linux powered PCs) - but Linux is the chosen system for many embedded systems. I would have thought Macromedia would want to make Flash 6 player available for those as fast as possible.
Would anyone be willing to give an estimate to when we will be seeing the player released for Linux? Mike?
I think the posse was inspired by the "Flash Enabled Posse", and its gaining ground. I'll admit it, I am a Mike fan too! ;-)
BTW: Sean of Eat Orange got me to write this little posting, with his posting about a comment on my blog. Pretty funny huh? :-D
My friend and fellow Flash'er Jens over at Flashmagazine.com has written an indepth Review of Optimaze!
Well worth a read if you want to know Optimaze'es strengths and weaknesses.
This was posted to alt.macromedia.flash by the people at Timberfish.com the other day, thought it might be interesing:
We are hosting a video chat session this Friday where we will discuss the newly released r40 and r47 versions of the Flash 6 player. The chat will be hosted by Robert Reinhardt, author of the Flash 5 and Flash MX Bible. For more information go to www.timberfish.com
A new Flash player was silently released by Macromedia in the beginning of this week. Whilst a silent release of a new player version is kind of new in the FLash 6 line of players - its still more of a back to the way it was with the Flash 5 players.
When I first heard about it, I thought -- OK, bug fixes and a few updates - no big deal and I guess its ok they are not making a lot of noise about it. But the information that Mike Chambers shared today made me think otherwise.
Its the removal of the Flash 6 players ability to accept redirects that makes me think Macromedia really should have made the information better available. I am sure that anyone that has gotten the new Flash 6 player update since the beginning of the week has been scratching their heads over broken sites.
A couple of sites/Flash applications that will not work with the new player includes:
Flash RSS Reader
Multiblog Flash RSS Reader
And I am sure a lot of other sites too. Macromedia claims that the problem is easily fixed with two primary solutions.
1. Proxy Script
2. Shim SWF
With the Proxy script, you will need to have access to the scripting technology. I know of several solutions on air today that will break, and lack the server technology to fix it with a proxy. The shim solution does not require any extra server capabilities, but require that you get the site that makes available the data you want to import to install the SWF for you on the server with the appropriate ActionScript settings.
Seems like an important change to me, or maybe I am just all too aware of the headaches this is going to give developers. I hope there was a good reason behind Macromedias decision to break the redirect capabilities in the player.
Very cool news from Mike - the Flash Remoting server for Java is out in beta 3. One of the cool things about this beta is that it is now possible to install it on any Java Application Sever - thats what I call platform independent.
What does that mean? Well, among other things, you can now use Flash Remoting on OSX using Apache and Tomcat. You can get ColdFusion MX running on OSX, but it is not currently the easiest process in the world.
<regular nagging>
We will see a platform independent version of the Flash Communication Server soon too, right? Right? Please?
</regular nagging>
Oh, and if you want - you can try to sign up for the Flash Remoting Java beta.
[Via Mike Chambers]
Grub is a cool new project that relies on you and me taking part in keeping the search engines updated.
The project is based on open source software, and is in early beta - with clients available for a few of the most common Linux distributions, Windows and as source code ready to be compiled to any *nix system.
So why would you want to waste your cpu and bandwidth on helping someone make a more updated web? Well, when you run a Grub client, you get to have your own websites indexed into the database at each and every scanning you do - which allows you to be certain that your part of the web always stays freshly updated.
They don't have any deals with the major search engines yet - but if everyone comes on-board that will certainly happen. I am also looking forward to being able to really see some cool statistics of when people update their websites :-)
Grub has the clients here, and the FAQ there.
I watched an interesting TV-program today, about the Participative Budget in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Its a project that has been going on since 1989 in Brazil, and has shown such promise that the Brazilian labor party is saying they will expand the program to the whole country.
I am sure I am not alone in thinking that the democracy as it is today is failing. Less people are voting every election in most of the developed countries, in fact I would go as far as saying we are approaching a voter participation so low that we have to say the democracy as it was intended has failed. And why? I think it is because people don't feel like their vote has any influence on the day-to-day running of the country, county and city they live in.
The solution might be in letting people participate to a higher degree in what used to be political processes, where the elected politicians used to rule based on the mandate they got from the voters. That is what is happening in Brazil with the Porto Alegre "Participative Budget" project, where the people are allowed to participate directly in the budgets of their communities. And its going on not only in Porto Alegre - but also in more than 70 other cities all over Brazil.
There has been some very nice effects of the program, in some communities people that used to be living in slums are now able to live in good houses with all the comforts most of the developed world take for granted. And it is being paid for by commercial developers that agreed to develop houses in return for land. Something which would have been much harder before, when people didn't have the same amount of say over what was going on in their local areas. The most profound effect in Brazil has been the development of infrastructure and the citizens being able to feel like they can have an input on how the money is spent on development of their local areas.
This is a great model to use in developing countries, but I also think that it would work to revitalize the democracy in developed countries. It would be a way for people to start feeling like they really could be able to participate in the decisions affecting their communities. Another nice effect of Participative Democracy in Brazil has been that the whole political process has become a lot more transperant, and the before all to common corruption has almost gone away. There are a lot of other countries that could have benifited from a more transperant process, for instance - it would have made it much harder for special interest groups to use money to influence the political process.
Background:
Another interesting article about Flash at O'Reilly's. Jacek Artymiak writes: O'Reilly Network: Flash on Mobile and Embedded Devices
[Via SwfNews]
About a month after her initial article (that was actually written in may 2002), Janis has written an equally interesting article: FALLOUT - a follow up to The Internet Debacle
Its nice to see all the reactions she got, and it seems like most people agree with her. She got over 2000 e-mails, and only 9 disagreed - of which she was able to sway 5.
See my previous posting about her article.
[Via Dave Winer]
This is a cool story, about HighWLAN: A Driving Wireless Network. When Casey West and friends decided to drive from Pittsburgh to St. Louis they first thought about using cell-phones to communicate, but ended up (as true geeks) with the first known mobile Wi-Fi setup for communication. They threw in a cell-phone with an internet hookup, and voilà - they had a internet connected Wi-Fi network.
Very cool and geeky!
I worked in radio for about 10 years here in Norway, and I could write a long rant about how the radio business has changed in Norway, how it used to be a lot more personal and interesting (I think the operative word is Fresh) than it is today. And I might just do that one day, but for now you will have to stick with reading about how radio got boring in the USA, in the San Diego Union-Tribune: Mourning DJs
Nice to see Jon Udell write about the Flash Communication server at O'Reilly: O'Reilly Network: Scripting Collaborative Applications with Flash Communication Server MX
Really nice to see articles of this type about technology. Its just one of the things I really like about O'Reilly's and the articles there; They seem to be able to balance the overview with deeper details and technical writing. Jon takes the time to give the readers the overview of the Flash Communication server, at the same time he takes the time to show some code to show the reader how easy Flash MX intergrates into the Flash Communication server, and what makes it so cool.
Still, I wish he wouldn't have had to write that the Flash Communication Server is coming for Linux and Solaris - and that the RTMP protocol is still proprietary. And by that I don't mean that he shouldn't have - I mean he shouldn't have had to. I know I am inpatient, but I really thing these are things that Macromedia should have had ready by the time they released the Flash Communication Server.
Very cool site for registering and checking out the pedigree of your favorite weblog: BlogTree.com
If you have a weblog you should take the time to register yours with information about your "parent" weblog. That is, the weblog that got you started blogging.
Check out my blog pedigree
[Via Dave Winer]
Interesting to check out the blogging ecosystem. It seems I am better at linking to people than getting them to link to me ;-)
(Here is a direct link to my stats)
Interesting article about Norway in the Independent today. Interesting because it paints , a for me, strange picture of how life is in Norway. Yes, it is expensive here. I just came back from dinner for two with my wife and it set us back about $120 (everything included at what is probably the best chinese restaurant in Europe - but I know.. still utterly expensive).
The english journalist has obviously spent some time in Norway - and he went directly to the most expensive place to go in Oslo (and probably Norway) - Aker Brygge (Like the Docklands in the UK, or any other fancy harbour area anywhere) and claims that the prices for beer and food is about the same anywhere else in Norway.
Still its always fun to read about the country you live in seen with foreign eyes. And its a long article. The journalist is obviously trying to make sense of why Norway is the best place in the world to live (according to UN's Human Development Report)
This week has seen some interesting discussions on some of the Flash blogs.
David Emberton started a discussion with his Opinion: "rich internet applications," hooey article at ActionScript.com (which spanned to a discussion at Flazoom.com), and FlashGuru really stirred the pot by asking if he should charge for his upcoming Flash component.
Its great to see the Flash blogs creating interesting discussions this way! I hope we will continue to see these kind of discussions coming out of the Flash blogs.
