At MAX this year Kevin Lynch gave the attendees a little peak into the future. He demonstrated a cool new application and teased us about a product code named Apollo. I don’t know what Apollo is exactly but it sounded interesting. It looked like Central 2.0 + HTML/JavaScript. more…
I recently published a new article at Community MX about using the file upload and download features in Flash Player 8.
Zinc 2.5 was recently released by Multidmedia. It includes full compatibility with all the new features of Flash Player 8. In my opinion, Zinc is already the best EXE wrapper for Flash on the desktop. And with this upgrade its gotten even better.
Flash Player 8 has a new feature called External Interface. This allows Zinc to offer a new feature they call {mdm}Script 2.0. The biggest improvement this feature brings is synchronous communication with the wrapper. With the old fscommand method, every call to the wrapper was asynchronous. This would cause developers to write 3-4 times as much code to do the same thing. This is a huge improvement for developers using wrapper applications like Zinc to create Flash on the Desktop.
A few weeks ago I wrote an article on writing a configuration class for your Flash applications. So I thought it’d be cool to migrate that class to AS3 to demonstrate the process. I published a free article on Community MX that walks through the process. I suggest you read the AS2 article first, but it’s not absolutely nessassary.
The Yahoo Maps Beta is being built on the Flash Platform, unlike Google Maps that uses DHTML and AJAX. While I’m convinced that the Flash experience will be way better, that’s not the most exciting news.
The cool part is that Yahoo has also introduced a Flash API for integrating the Yahoo Maps into your own Flash applications! The API comes in three flavors: ActionScript, Flash-JavaScript, and Flex. I’m hoping they come out with a Flex2/AS3 API too…that would really rock! Way to go Yahoo!
About a month ago Kevin Langdon invited me to try out a new product he was building called ServiceCapture. It’s a program that runs as a internet proxy on your computer and displays Remoting and Web Service output. I’ve since found this to be an invaluable tool and I wonder how I ever did Falsh Remoting without it.
I recently published a free review of this product at Community MX. I highly recommend every Flash developer go and purchase a copy of ServiceCapture. Its only $34.99!