More ways to stay updated in general. Google has been in beta for a while with their new News search service. Now its really starting to cook having added more than 4000 news sources, and is challenging a lot of other news gathering services.

So now it shold be even easier to stay updated on the lastest Macromedia Flash News

Its only a short while ago since Jeremy Allaire launched his own weblog based on Radio (are we seeing an acquisition of Userland, the makers of Radio in the future for Macromedia?).

Now he has really gotten on the blogging bandwagon with his new Audio Blogger web service (documentation for Audio blogger is currently found on Jeremy's weblog). Its in alpha right now, but seems to be working quite well - taking advantages of the Flash Communication server.

Audio Blogger allows anyone with Flash 6, and a microphone to make their own audioblog.

Nice to see another one of my friends get on with the blogging. This time around its Bill Spencer (helped by some of his friends) that have released a new Flash/3D related Flash blog: The 3D Flash blog

Good choice to use MT I think :-)

Its nice to see Fast (Alltheweb.com, Lycos, Scandinavia Online, InfoSpace, T-Online, and Tiscali) start to include information gathered from swfs in their search index. From before Google and Atomz have been indexing SWFs for their search engines. Atomz recently expanded their offer of indexing SWFs to their enterprise search engine, used by many company sites, including Macromedia.com and Hotwired.com. (And not to mention by this weblog ;-D

[Via Flashmagazine.com]

Nice to see new Flash related weblogs popping up. TodayI noticed that Jeremy Allaire has gotten his own weblog. I have been fortunate enough to be allowed to interview Jeremy a few times. Last time we did a video interview for Flashmagazine.com. But we haven't been able to release the video on the net - because we don't have the money to cover the bandwidth. The previous interview I did with Jeremy back in 2001 is still available online. Its scaring how point on I was with many of my questions that time.

Peter Hall of Flashcoders fame (or something like that) a very skilled Flash coder, has released his own weblog. With a lot of interesting content. Well worth a look: Peterjoel blog

Another cool new Flash blog is Macrofun, its filled with interesting tips and news items about Flash.

Nice to see that the fund raising for Chris turned out good. Chris has now more or less received the $1250 he needed to be able to attend the Macromedia DevCon. (Check the initial posting if you are interested in the background for the fund raising)

Chris has promised that he will be making the speech available online. Either as just plain speakers notes, or perhaps published together with audio from the speech. I hope he decides to include audio recording from the speech - I am sure that would be a success.

To Macromedia: Please reconsider your policy for the DevCon conference in the future. It would be nice to feel that Macromedia as a company shows appreciation for the hard work put down by community people such as Chris.

I have received several e-mails from disgruntled Flash community members that either turned down a chance to speak at the DevCon conference or are attending the conference as speakers with less than good feelings about it. Some of the information in these e-mails have really shook me up more than the fact that Macromedia failure to pay the cost for the speakers to attend the conference (we are talking travel and stay here, nothing else). Unfortunately I am sworn to secrecy about who these people are and what they have told me.

But I must say I am amazed at the degree of abuse these speakers are willing to take to be speakers at the event. If anyone should boycott DevCon, I now think it should be the speakers. By allowing Macromedia to short-pay you as a speaker and treat you the way they are doing, you as speakers are really selling yourself short. I just hope that other big Flash conferences won't see what Macromedia is doing as an opportunity to start treating their speakers bad.

Macromedia has released a very interesting kit today, the Macromedia MX Developer Resource Kit (DRK)

The DRK is a CD containing articles, contents,
resources and components for Flash, Dreamweaver and ColdFusion Developers. And it sells for $99 U.S. dollars.

It contains the following Flash Related content:

Datagrid Component
Media Player Components

Flash UI Component Set 3
- Loading Box
- Advanced Messages Box
- Prompt Box
- Tool Tip
- Tool Tip Light

Flash Email Services Library
Flash ActionScript library that uses Flash Remoting to easily send and retrieve email from Flash. Includes a sample email application, ColdFusion Components as well as complete API documentation.

Flash Stock Services Library
Flash ActionScript library that uses
Flash Remoting to easily retrieve historical stock information from Flash. Includes sample stock charting application, ColdFusion Component,as well as complete API documentation.

Component Skinning Article
Article that describes how to skin components

In addition to the original content above, the following content will also be included on the cd:
- Complete Archive of the Designer and Developer Center
- Features Components from the Macromedia Exchange.
- Flash Communication Server Components
- Flash Remoting Components

There are also some application demos included on the CD, as well as content specific to Dreamweaver MX.

Macromedia says that one of the main things they are trying to do with the DRK is create a market for this type of content, especially components.

It should open up for higher quality Flash components, and a more commercial marketplace for the Flash components - and in that way provide a new revenue stream for Flash ActionScript coders.

If you wonder why Macromedia decided to charge for the CD, instead of releasing it for free - there are several reason why they decided to charge for it.

1. They want there to be a market for this kind of content, providing a potential revenue source for Flash developers. If they would have released the components for free, they would probably have taken away that ability for Flash developers.

2. They have invested a lot in the components. The datagrid component alone is reported to have been in development for 3 months.

Personally I think its good that Macromedia has decided to charge. $99 shouldn't be a huge amount for any serious Flash developer, and considering the time it will save most of us coding our own components it will be worth its money many times around on the very first project it is used.

The only thing I would have liked to see happen, is that Macromedia make the DRK available for sale through the community sites, allowing the community to make some money selling the CD.

This is a neat gadget - the SDCam is a camera for Pocket PCs with SD I/O ports. The camera is korean, and the pages are all in Korean, so if someone has a translation of the information posted on the page, I would be very happy to get it :-)

The basic info about the camera is:

It has a CMOS image capture chip (which should make it cheap to produce), and it can take pictures in 800x600, 640x480 and many other lower res modes. It has 2x and 4x digital zoom, video capture with audio, timer and many other neat features. Its on my christmas list already :-) hehe. Available for PocketPC 2000/2002

[Via Pocket PC Thoughts]

[UPDATE]
Thanks to Ronald, I found this very interesting SD Camera at Expansys, with support both for Palm and Pocket PC:
Spectec SD Camera for PPC and Palm. Looks like a must have -- putting it on the top of my birthday/santa list ;-) -- Only problem is that its not shipping. I found a posting on one of the Palm sites from August 2002 stating that it would soon ship.

Could someone please let me know how fast/slow soon is?

Its looking good, Chris MacGregor was having problems finding the money to attend the Macromedia DevCon conference to be held in Florida in October, but now he has already collected half of the $1250 he needs to be able to attend the conference. I would have liked to see Macromedia spend some more money on the speakers and cover the costs for them, but failing that its good to see that the commnity is getting together and helping one of its hard working members.

Even more gratifying is it to see one of the major Flash book publishers, our english friends from Friends of Ed helping out. They have given Chris $300 for him to be able to speak at the DevCon conference. Great to see someone showing more generosity than Macromedia has shown in this case.

But remember, Chris isn't there yet. Lets help him get to DevCon! Its about $600 to go, lets see some other Flash related companies show their gratitued for the great work Chris has done for the community!

Photography is one of my favorite hobbies, and besides from finding my inspiration out in the nature, I sometimes find sites with great photography on the net. Private and Public is one such site, made by a fellow scandinavian, the danish Simon Høgsberg. All of the photographs in his "Private and public" project was taken of unsuspecting londoners.

To quote Simon:

All images are taken over a period of a year - from early summer 2001 to late Spring, 2002 - and apart from the portraits taken during the summer period, all pictures are taken from the same spot - 3 meters from the corner of Edgware Road and Oxford Street. None of the photographs have been set up but are all snapshots of pedestrians who happened to walk into the frame of the camera.

[Via Flazoom via Valyard (Welcome back Valyard!)]