Another Flash blog, SwfNews: News For Flash Developers. Its Matt Rice that is running it. It seems light - not much information there yet.

Dave Winer is linking to it, I think he should have linked to some of the other more meaty Flash blogs too. (No, I am not talking about mine - I am just meta-blogging most of the time).

FlashGuru is back with a new remake of his site - now titled FlashGuru's MX 101, this time based on Moveable Type (good choice Guy!)

I only discovered that it was back today, not sure how long it has been available. He has already posted a lot of interesting news blurbs. The only thing I am missing is a link to the RSS feed.

Yeah, I know I tend to nag about the XML RSS feed, but for a good reason, it makes keeping updated a lot easier - I don't have to go through a long list of url's everyday - but rather just use Ampethadesk to see what is new on the sites I follow.

[Update] FlashGuru was just having a problem making the RSS feed available, its not linked on his site yet - but you will find it here. *g*

Phillip Torrone has been hyping the release of the book "Flash Enabled" for a good while now on his site, flashenabled.com. Its a book covering Flash design and development for devices. A field that is bound to grow in the time ahead. Especially with Flash now being able to be the frontend of web services.

The book is written by a group of well known Flash community participants. Christian Cantrell, Mike Chambers, Branden Hall, Andreas Heim, Craig Kroeger, Steve Leone, Markus Niedermeier, Bill Perry, Fred Sharples, Glenn Thomas and Phillip Torrone.

A little disapointing that there is no web site and no sample chapters out on its release date. But according to http://www.flashenabled.com/ there will be. So along with waiting for the book to appear in my mailbox, I am also waiting for the web site :-)

[Update: Mike Chambers says the web site for the book should be up by monday - but might be up as early as this afternoon. I am sure I have something to look forward to :-)]

Mike Chambers: New Flash MX Content at Macromedia.com

Mike Chambers has the 411 on all the new Flash MX content released at the Macromedia Designer and Developer Center

Lots of usefull information there, articles by Branden Hall, Robert Reinhardt, and many more. On subjects ranging from objects, components, embedded video, using timelines to maintain application state, to Flash MX and PHP.

Macromedia - Designer & Developer : Logged In : Blogs are HUGE

Ed Krimer, Vice President of Developer Community writes about the Macromedia weblog experiment :

Almost immediately, other bloggers started referring to our blogs in their daily entries. Most bloggers seemed pleasantly surprised that Macromedia was encouraging some of its employees to create and update blogs on a regular basis. When Wired wrote about us, we knew for sure we had done something very different. I don't think though we're quite ready for Barbara Walters - yet.

[Via Mike Chambers]

At the beginning of this month OpenOffice released version 1.0 of their office suite. I haven't had the time to check it out before now. I used to use Sun's StarOffice (which is now out in version 6.0, selling for about 80 dollars).

OpenOffice 1.0 is an impressive package, and is replacing StarOffice 5.2 on my system. Its available for all Linux, Solaris and Windows. For Mac OS X there is a beta available.

OpenOffice 1.0 is noticably faster to start than StarOffice 5.2, and its not trying to pretend it is a desktop (like StarOffice does). All in all it looks very promising.

BTW: If you were wondering, the OpenOffice office suite does support the Microsoft Office formats, and can open and save Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. documents. The native file format is based on XML, and I am going to start investigate if it could be used to hook into SOAP/XML-RPC products. There seem to be some work being done on OpenOffice web service integration already.

Its Norways independence day today Want to learn more about how we celebrate the independence day in Norway? Check out what google finds on the subject: Google: 17th of may