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]
