You are probably all aware of Mike Chambers blogging from the Macromedia DevCon, as well as all the other blogs blogging from the conference
Its no big surprise that this is heavily focused on technology, especially with the Macromedian's using the new blogging tool of the season: video blogging.
But even with all the cool technology, I have to admit that what I find most interesting to read out of all the blogging so far is John Dowdell's writings from his lobby and poolside conversations. Which just clarifies what I find the most interesting with the various conferences: Meeting people and seeing creative sparks fly and ignite impressive use of technology. And that is what I find most interesting and fun at the conferences, meeting so many creative and talented developers!
In that respect it would almost be prudent for Macromedia to pay all the conference visitors, because many of them will go on the make great promotional experiences based on Macromedia products. :-)
But lets get serious here. Macromedia ended up with approximately 2300 visitors to the DevCon, if all of these visitors payed the ~$1000 entry fee, that adds up to $2,300,000 in tickets as well as the money that various third party companies have to pay to attend the conference to show off their products. What am I getting at? Well, with that much money, why did they choose to treat their speakers so bad?
A lot of the focus this year at the Macromedia DevCon seems to be about Flash, and that is very cool. What is even cooler is that Mike Chambers and the rest of the Macromedians have taken the blogging to the next level (much thanks to work done by Jeremy Allaire and others), and are offering video blogs together with the regular blogs.
Check out Mike's DevCon blog which shows off some of the cool things you can do with Flash today.
Director MX should be just months away. I have a feeling that it will be announced during DevCon 2002. Looking forward to seeing information about how it integrates into Flash MX and the rest of the MX family. I suspect it will be called Director MX and join the MX family. (Or maybe I should rather say, I hope).
Why am I so sure its right around the corner? Because Macromedia is already talking about it, which usualy means its a couple of months away.
Another cool project signed Mike Chambers is the ActionScript Standard Library (ASL), a new open source project opened at Sourceforge
The project homepage says:
The ActionScript Standard Library is a collection of ActionScript classes and libraries that aims to create and provide a standard library of functionality to ActionScript.
If you want to join the development team, you can send an email to one of the admins. There is also a developers' mailinglist which you can subscribe to. Nice to see there is a strong core developer group already, with Mike Chambers, Peter Hall, and Robert Penner.
[Via Quasimondo]
Norway is one of the few places around the world were we are lacking a real community for Flash developers. There has been some talk between various induviduals for some years now, but nothing has come out of it, people are still working on their own and without any networking.
LETS CHANGE THAT! If you are a norwegian Flash developer or designer, then let me know. I want to get in contact with as many up and going Flash developers/designers as possible so that we all can start helping eachother out and get a community going here in Norway with meetings, seminars and networking!
Contact me by e-mail or leave a message here so that others can get to know you as well!
A very cool project fronted by Mike Chambers and Greg Burch is the Flash Communication Framework, its opened as a project on Sourceforge (one of the main tools for Open Source developers), but is still in alpha. I am really looking forward to seeing this project get into the beta stages, and opened up so that others can easily deliver code to the project.
The Communication Framework is, to quote their own information:
a client / server communication framework that runs within the Macromedia Flash Communication Server. Its aim is to provide an advanced communication framework, that utilizes Macromedia Flash to connect client
Great initiative Mike and Greg, can't wait to see this project span out!
The latest survey shows 60% penetration in Europe (and 53% in the US). And not only that, its now starting to become one of the major (if not THE major) platform for multimedia delivery.
As Jeremy Allaire points out, the pentration of Windows media is 63%, so Flash is already biting its tail.
A lot of things happening with the new Flash 6 player, amongs the good news is that the next version of the Flash 6 player will be available for Linux.
To quote Mike Chambers:
This is a very big release, with quite a few bug fixes, new features (wider WMODE support, custom request headers, etc...) and performance optimizations.
Nice also to see better support for the Mozilla browser.
Windowless mode is now supported on Netscape (Win) and OSX browsers. This primarliy is used for those highly annoying adverts that layer themselves ontop of the page you are viewing, just to make sure that you see the ad. Movies relying on heavy ActionScripting should see a performance increase, the XML and LoadVars objects now support custom HTTP headers, improvements to the shared libraries, strict-mode parsing of ActionScript - confoming more closely to the ECMA-262 standard, Accessibility Properties can now be set at runtime. The Linux player supports the Mozilla 1.1 browser and comes with complete support for Flash 6 features like audio and video capture and streaming audio and video playback. KDE 3.0.3 or GNOME 2.0 desktops are supported.
Its also great to see Macromedia offering up prices to the most active bug testers of this Flash 6 player beta. If you find the most bugs, you can win Xbox, PS2 or Studio MX package!
[Via mesh]
Sorry about that. I haven't been sleeping (really) but I have been very busy starting a new business in a completely new field.
I guess I should have informed you all about what has been going on, but it just hasn't been the time or opportunity to do it.
Flashguru is writing about the slow-down in the Flash blogs (or rather, the total silence from some of the blogs, including mine). I have been keeping updated on the other blogs and seen some interesting things happening - and miss seeing a lot of other things. I will try to have time to share some of that with you all this weekend.
In the meantime, I would highly recommend using Flog to keep updated on the various Flash blogs, it shows a chronological view of the postings on a number of interesting Flash blogs.
