For a company that spends most of its time working with traditional web design and development, we seem to be doing more and more video work for clients. Traditional? Can you use that word for web technology yet? At any rate it looks like video content is fast becoming the norm.
The boys and girls at Nectarine have finally released their marvellous Real World animation. Folks may have seen a sneak peak of this during their presentation at MXDU. A fantastic mixture of 2D Flash animation, and more visceral 3D modelling to put together a professional music video.
Martin Ollman passed me this superb graphic representation of what I like to call the "RIA Evolutionary Timeline". Actually in truth I call it something like, "the whopping, great big, unprintable graphic about Flex positioning" -- but you get the gist.
Dale Rankine and crew have been working with us on a fabulous Flash Lite conference companion for MXDU 2005. Here's a bit of sneak peek complete with screenshots on how the app is shaping up.
Out of curiosity I was checking the features of MS Office for the Mac and came across a really neat bit of multimedia demoing the features of the new version of Office that makes good use of Flash video, worth checking out if you have the bandwidth.
I don't know about you but I really like the Start Page in Flash MX '04, use it all the time. Just launched Flash MX '04 Pro to find a surprise treat... In the lower left of the Start Page is now a Google powered search form to search Macromedia.com, did a quick ego search, why not, and it works like a treat!!! Wasn't there a couple of hours ago, to whoever dreampt this one up thanks - it's nanna goat sweet!!!
Happy Australia Day to one and all. Was at Dee Why beach this morning for the celebrations, saw an Aussie traditional sport that some might be interested in: Thong Throwing. Now some of you might reel at the name, but the humble thong has a different meaning Down Under - it's the footwear for the common man (AKA the "Flip Flop" for the ignorant).
Stumbled across this site while looking for something else: http://philflash.inway.fr/example.html. The site's in French but the author, Philippe Nomail, has some great code examples for download - particularly his HtmlCellRenderer, worth visiting for this code alone.
Macromedia has a great Supported Devices list for Flash Player. Interestingly Sony Clie is not listed -- Clie is the only Palm OS supported Flash Player implementation. So I decided to have another hunt for rumours of Flash on Palm. [JD via fullasagoog]
I'm presenting at W4C this weekend, talking about XML & Flash MX 2004, so if you're in Hobart swing by and say g'day.
The recent gab-fest on the blogs regarding Microsoft and Macromedia's response to the Eolas patent comedy has prompted me to actually look at the proposed solutions and see what's in store. So here's a screenshot of what you'll see with the IE update in place... and the remedy -- you're gonna laugh.
Studiomx.com: CS/MX/hijack, this is a dogey bit of domain squatting in anyone's book...
OK, after bashing my head against the wall I'm owning up. I reckon the V2 Window component is nice to look at but try and write code to talk to it's contents and you're gunna have some fun.
Well I thought It would be a match made in heaven but alas. One of the drawbacks of a Breeze presentation is that you have to provide a separate mechanism for printing slide notes. I thought how super-cool to have the speaker handouts embedded in the final slide as Flash Paper!!
Saw this great little question on the Macromedia instructor's mailing list, and it had me stumped. What's with the odd "0x" in front of hex colors instead of the standard # sign? For example, 0x000000 vs. #000000. Why is it "0x" rather than something else?
Working with PDF everyday I thought it might be interesting to see if I couldn't replace some of what I do with Flash Paper. Chatting to folks, not many feel that Flash Paper has anything on PDF -- but having run through a few real life scenarios I'm not so sure.
Checking Fullasagoog, looks like I beat the rush on folks out there for Contribute 2.0 -- good being in the Antipodes sometimes. Once installed, I sat there hunting around in Contribute for Flash Paper only to find its a separate app altogether. It's like Acrobat Distiller in that it sets itself up as a printer driver and captures just about anything you can print. I have to say I'm hooked.
Andrew "the yeti" Robertson is running in the top ten for the National Balloon Championships! The pre-cursor to next years World Ballon championship, Mildura is hosting an event literally full of hot air. If you ever wondered how you actually race a hot air balloon you'll love these mini-Flash tutorials on the rules of the sport.
In my previous post, Extending DRK3's TextField Component, I discussed adding a Tooltip (FUI Set 3) to the icons displayed to give them more meaning. While it is a very engaging way to build forms in Flash you must be aware of a depth bug in the Tooltip component code that causes the tip to appear as a black box. Fortunately I have a fix for that.
I've recently been building some forms in Flash MX for a CFMX Flash Remoting app, making use of the TextField component from DRK3. One thing that I like about the component is the ability to show an icon with the field, especially that you can create your own custom icon. What I saw missing was a tooltip to attach a hint or message to the icon itself so I've hacked at it and the results and code are here.
In developing an application that used loadMovie() to repeatedly call the same swf that CFMX was generating with modified content for each call, I discovered one small problem was that the Flash player was caching content. A quick visit to Prototype, one of my favourite code repositories, gave me a fantastic solution for caching that worked in both the IDE and the browser. If you're not using the site it's well worth the look.
Since ColdFusion MX can produce some pretty slick Flash charts with the CFChart tag there's no reason why Flash Remoting apps shouldn't have good looking charting in them as well. Originally built for my MXDU presentation, I've finally gotten around to releasing the CFMX/FMX/Flash Remoting/Charting demo that I had previously produced.
There have been several notable attempts at a decent Flash HTML editor. However, for anything but the most trivial content management, Flash really can't handle HTML very well. Composer offers renewed hope for a cross-platform rich text editor.
Downloaded and installed FireFly components on my machine, looks interesting except that I have major problems with my copy of Flash. Launching it means a 5 minute plus wait while it consumes 97% of CPU. Once it's running it's fine. I've got no particular need for it right now so I tried an uninstall which fixed the problem immediately.
In true Daemon maniac fashion I did the Flash MX Developer & ColdFusion MX Developer (Advanced) certifications back to back today. I had to upgrade my Macromedia Developer certifications so that I can maintain my status as a Certified Macromedia Instructor and to also be eligible to teach some new classes. Both exams do a fair job of testing your knowledge and I would encourage anyone who's considering to go ahead and do it!!
I'll be speaking at the Sydney Macromedia User Group (SMUG) on Tuesday 15 April, presenting the basics of ActionScript. This is the first of 5 meetings for the year and if you're in Sydney you should come along and say 'gidday'. The Sydney CFUG is also meeting on the same night, pity that the two couldn't come together.
What started out as friendly banter with local Macromedians ended up as a funky software shop with a familiar pedigree :) The Daemon Bazaar is a repurposed Pet Market application that makes for a flashy MX Market.
OpenOffice.org has released the beta for its next upcoming version. Something that stands out from a host of features is the ability to export presentation files -- from Impress -- direct to Flash.
Nested in the PPC Flash Player 6 SDK is a little video gem which I can't see being anything other than a hoax (I'd love to be contradicted), Macromedia should have released this April 1.
Branden Hall travelled to Australia for the day to deliver a keynote on FlashMX at the MXDU conference. Once he got here we managed to convince the poor bloke that flying back the following day was very un-Australia -- Branden stayed for a BBQ, a few drinks and a daring display of pop-locking :)
In early August last year I put out a Flash Remoting example app written for CFMX that emulated the Windows Explorer, allowing you to browse the drives of a server via a standard web browser. At the time I withheld the FLA as I wanted to spend the time improving on it, but in preparation for my presentation on "Data Visualisation with Flash Remoting" at MXDU I've dusted it off and have now decided to release it for other developers to have a crack at.
I presented "Consuming XML in Flash" at Flashkit 2002, Sydney, on Friday and have put both the PowerPoint presentation and the demo files on the Daemon site, Tips & Tricks section for download.
I've put together a collection of Flash Remoting examples that I hope will illustrate some of the potential of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in how they can be used to replace standard HTML forms. All examples use standard Flash UI components that are freely available with Macromedia Flash MX.
Now that Macromedia has updated their Certified Developer listing to include MX certified developers & designers I've written new agents to retrieve and store that data for the Flash Remoting application that I've developed for the Daemon site so that you can check out by country who's certified in what...
How many Advanced Certified ColdFusion 5 developers are there in the Republic of Moldova, and what are their name/s? We've gone one step further with the agent that I built to retrieve certification listings from the Macromedia site and are now publishing country listings on the Daemon site.
Phew... After stretching the brain and pounding the keyboard I'm happy to say that I've managed to complete the four...
Working with CFMX, Flash Remoting and FMX the question comes up: "How can I use the data structures that I'm used to in CF within a Flash Remoting application on the Flash side?" We've put some sample files to demonstrate how this would be done.
Extract from the FUGLI list on passing information back to ColdFusion via the Flash Remoting Gateway.
Announcing the availability of a CFMX/FMX/Flash Remoting application beta that mimics the Windows Explorer to locate files on the web server.
Macromedia released the final version of Airwolf today, the latest version of the Flash player. This includes bug fixes (including...
Sean Voisen has developed an API for Flash MX to communicate with Jabba. At this stage it'll communicate with the...
Macromedia have added three tutorials for Flash Remoting on ColdFusion MX. They are: - Building a Database Query Application with...
Here's a bit of code that those of you working with Flash UI Components might find handy. Some smart person,...
Philter has for sometime made his most excellent Flash News Feed Reader available online. It's a great interface to some...
If you haven't discovered it yet you should check out the Macromedia Executive Presentation for the MX family. This has...
