Flex is cheap as chips
Flex is not so much about rapid Flash development (although this is one of the advantages) as it is about collaborative Flash development. Flash IDE, the FLA, and everything about it is the bane of largescale development -- it sucks. This is why Flex had to be built.

Flex Released
Credit goes to Darren Tracey who observed on CFAussie (http://lists.daemon.com.au/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=cfaussie&text_mode=0&lang=english) that Flex has been released (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/), there's trial available and the DevNet Center is up and running too (http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flex/).

Consensus Awards Finalist: FarCry by Daemon
We made it through to being finalists in the Consensus Software Awards. Last week we went through the torment of an hour presentation to a panel of nine (9) judges. However, we won't find out if we're winners till the end of April. For those that our interested, our original round-one submission for the award is available online.

RoboDemo: first crack at a web-app demo
Picked up a copy of RoboDemo and thought I might have a stab at putting together a few demos to see how it all works. It's not as easy as it looks, at least for web applications. I'd assumed that this was some sort of non-technical tool for space cadets wanting to build screen-cams but RoboDemo turns out to be quite a bit more sophisticated.

As long as they're not complete muppets...
Here's the final installment of the awesome Nectarine animation triology. The original was supposed to go down on day two -- but it was just so good it had to open the show. So Nectarine put this day-two marvel together just a week before MXDU.

Open source: the great software divide
Looks like we made the papers again. It's always a worry when you get interviewed by one of the major broadsheets -- sometimes you just come off second best. Although not exactly what I said, it seems like my 30 minute interview has been distilled to mostly accurate sound bites. Overall the article is an interesting read -- of course, you need to see the physical paper to catch me mug shot!

MXDU Keynote Intro Day One
We've finally given into the huge demands for the keynote intro's to be published uncensored on the web. It's taken a little while to get the file size down to a respectable level, and we've had to change the odd little thing here and there to scrimp and save on file size for delivery over the web -- but it will bring back memories.

30 Second IE vs Firefox Challenge
Matt Robinson of MossyBlog has "a small challenge to those who contend that Mozilla Firebird supports CSS better than IE."...

MXDU farewell from Nectarine: Another corker!
For those of you that saw the MXDU keynote intro animations, you know this guys are pure talent. Looks like Nectarine have whipped up another little episode to say farewell. They're a shy bunch and offered a *bleeped* version -- but listening to Bek swear like an old sea dog was just too delightful! So I settled for warning only.

MXDU: Geekspotting
I thought that I'd add a couple of extra photos to those that are floating around of MXDU geeks & their cameras. Excuse the quality, taken with my Nokia 3650, these were taken in the kitchen at Daemon HQ during the speakers bbq.