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: Flash BlogGoogle’s Flash Indexing Disaster
On July 1st, Google announced that, using technology provided by Adobe, it had enhanced the Google Search Engine to index the text embedded within Flash movies. What followed was bad advice from Google, second-guessing by web developers, and finally a few straight answers.
Open Screen Project aims to put Flash everywhere
Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project which aims to bring the Flash player to as many different devices as possible.
Cutting through the jargon on the press release, the most significant points are that Adobe are removing restrictions on usage of the Flash and Flash video specifications (SWF, FLV, and F4V), publishing the device porting layer APIs, and removing the licensing fees for the next major version of the Flash Player and AIR for devices. Which means that developers will now be able to port Flash to any device, and distribute and deploy it for free. Additionally, the Flash Cast and AMF data transfer protocols will be published.
While Flash Player has long been an almost ubiquitous platform for desktop PCs, this new move aims to do the same for phones and portable devices. Ryan Stewart and Dave McAllister from Adobe have both written blog posts on the announcement.
Essentially, the Flash player is now about as open as it can possibly be without being open source. It’s an interesting move by Adobe, and I’m sure many will be watching to see what comes out of it.
Flex 2 is not “all or nothing”
Ever since Macromedia announced Flex 2 and made available pre-release versions, I’ve been gritting my teeth as more and more cool news has surfaced about what Flex 2 will be capable of.
Because Macromedia Adobe will not be offering free licenses for non-commercial users of Flex 2 as it did for Flex 1, I’ve avoided recommending the technology to people despite the steady stream of exciting news that has come with the successive pre-release versions (now Beta 2).
The latest exciting tidbit — which has forced me to grudingly give the platform another look — is that Adobe has developed the Flex-AJAX bridge. The name is slightly misleading, as it’s really more of a Flex-JavaScript bridge, but it does help Adobe fend off some of the perception of AJAX as a Flex killer.
This bridge is an extension library for Flex that, when loaded, allows JavaScript code in a page to communicate with a Flex application, getting/setting property values, manipulating user interface elements, and registering JavaScript event listeners for elements inside the Flex application that would otherwise only be accessible to the ActionScript code within the application. Likewise, the bridge allows the Flex application to reach out into …
Flex 2 and Flash Player 8.5 alphas available
Macromedia’s recently-announced Flex 2.0 platform (see Flex 2.0 announced with more affordable pricing) is now available to download in alpha form from Macromedia’s newly-launched Macromedia Labs site.
Macromedia Labs in itself is an exciting change of direction for Macromedia, which plans to use the site to expose developers to experimental technologies, works-in-progress, and other early ideas coming from the software company. With full community features like open discussion forums and a wiki, it will be interesting to see how this openness flies with Macromedia’s nearly-complete merger with Adobe, another traditionally closed software company.
Flex 2.0 announced with more affordable pricing
Macromedia today announced Flex 2, a major new release of its framework for building Web applications with rich, client-side Flash interfaces. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak with Macromedia about the details of this upcoming release.
Flex 2 will include Flash Player 8.5, Flex Framework 2, Flex Builder 2, and Flex Enterprise Services 2. Although the updated software will not be ready for release until the first half of 2006, Macromedia plans to release alpha versions later this month, in conjunction with the MAX conference on October 16th.
Flash Player 8.5 will add a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), supporting ActionScript 3.0 (AS3) — an updated version of the scripting language that will be compliant with the latest ECMAScript standard, including ECMAScript for XML (E4X). AVM2 will run a great deal faster than the existing AVM, and will support many advanced language features, most notably improved debugging and error reporting.
AVM2 will run alongside the existing AVM, and only Flash movies compiled for AS3 will run on this new VM. The downside of this architecture is that movies and components that use AS3 will not be interoperable with those that use AS2 (e.g. an AS3 movie …
Flash Player 8 Final released
Particularly if you installed the beta, but also for vastly improved performance, you’ll want to grab the final version of Flash Player 8 as soon as possible.
Lightweight screencasting with vnc2swf
Thinking about producing a screencast? Will quick and dirty do the trick, as long as it’s free? vnc2swf could be just what you need:
- Set up a VNC server. The free VNC Server for Windows (previously WinVNC) will do the trick on Windows boxes, and there’s OSXvnc for Mac.
- Install and run vnc2swf. You’ll need to set up Python first, but everything you need is linked on the site. Once it’s running, hit F9 to start recording your desktop.
- Stop recording when you’re done. An SWF is produced, which you can publish on the Web.
- Use the companion editing tool to chop off the pieces of the movie you don’t want to keep, and then add an MP3 soundtrack recorded separately.
And just like that, you’ve got your screencast! The screencast demonstration on the site is a little tough to follow if you’re not up on your Unix commands, but with a little tinkering at the command prompt you should be able to get it to work on Windows or Mac OS X with relatively little trouble.
Flash desktop apps go open source
All the work that’s going into Flash Web applications that look like desktop applications begs the question “Why not just make desktop applications in Flash?” Macromedia tried to answer this with Macromedia Central, which starved for developer adoption and is now given away for free.
Screenweaver was another answer to this question. It began its life as a simple app for creating Flash-based screensavers, and grew into an integrated development environment (IDE) for Flash-based desktop apps. Screenweaver was also a commercial failure, but a small group of intrepid developers have rescued it from binary oblivion to continue its development as an open source project.
The announcement provides a little history on Screenweaver’s origin, as well as a side-project called Screenweaver Core–a library for using Flash within general-purpose programming languages like Visual Basic, C++, and Python on the Windows desktop–which is also being resurrected.
If you’d like to play with the initial open source release of Screenweaver 3, hit the project’s main wiki page, click Download, and grab the precompiled binary. You may also want to follow the link to the documentation, which is not yet included in the download.
The initial plan for the open source effort is to enhance …
Online maps get flashy
Flash smartypants Paul Neave has taken the public APIs of Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth and built his own Flash interface to browse the satellite imagery offered by both of these services. And, may the JavaScript gods forgive me, it’s far smoother and more pleasant to use than either of the services’ respective Web interfaces.
For now, it lacks the flat maps, local search features, and other useful bells and whistles of the Google and Microsoft originals, but as a demonstration of what is possible with Flash as a frontend technology, it’s very effective. In particular, the ability to rotate the view is something that is a long way off in pure DHTML interfaces.
I wonder how long it will be before some enterprising folks attempt to produce a 2D clone of Google Earth in Flash. I’d be surprised if Google didn’t buy out such a project, were it to come to fruition.
BJC Bit Component Set Released
The guys over at Beam Jive have released a major component set for Flash MX 2004 containing over 30 components. Whilst the set is a commercial component set, it’s only 80 Euros, and they are fantastic to say the least
Main features are a huge reduction in file size (over 2/3 smaller than their MMV2 counterparts), easily styled and best of all easily skinnable (the most annoying feature of the MM components is their difficulty in being skinned)
Take a look at the bottom of this page for demonstrations of how easy the components are to skin!
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