Some Flash related stuff:

• Swf_fu – a neat little Rails helper for embedding SWF files in your applications, especially handy if you’re using CDN’s
• Ruby-ImageSpec – Another tiny, but handy utility which gets you the dimensions of a given image, or flash file, very handy if you’re using SWFs in a CMS, and want to avoid the Firefox 100% bug
• HTML5 – The momentum against using plugins in the browser appears to be growing. The XHTML 2 Working Group is shutting down at the end of this year to focus on HTML 5

And some people talking out of their arses:

• An argument against selling different versions of your product – which only works in the M$ case, the epitomy of evil. The 37signals argument just fails completely. More resources = more cost to them.
• Jacob Nielsen claiming masking passwords is bad – which is fine if you don’t mind having any security

Bookmark It

Both have been well covered in the media already, and Catalyst (or Thermo as it was known) is heading for it’s third year of being demo’ed at Max, without a release.

“Design in Mind” was one of the core themes for this release, and these tools, together with the updated Flex 4 SDK, deliver on that to make it easier than ever create high fidelity, rich Internet applications that target the Flash Platform.

Andrew Shorten’s also released a little tutorial that you can work through to familiarize yourself with the tooling. In this tutorial Andrew shows you how to build an employee address book application that lets users enter search criteria and view a list of results fetched from a database (via a ColdFusion service), from which they can select an employee to get their full contact information. The completed application could work either as a browser-based application (using Adobe Flash Player) or a desktop application (using Adobe AIR).

So, if you haven’t already, head over to the labs and check them out, they are certainly interesting tools.

Bookmark It

So, what’s this year? Well, it’s a bit of an odd one as it’s not really anything new to me, but something that is now dramatically different from when I last looked at it – and that’s good old Flash.

My last run-in with Flash was using Flash 8 and Actionscript 2 back in my days at 2nd byte. Whilst there I developed the Flash interfaces for a number of the used vehicle locators that the company builds for UK car manufacturers. Looking back at them now, they’re nothing amazing, but back in the day they were cutting edge.

So, why should I be revisiting Flash? Well, since I last had a play Flash has gone through two major revisions (CS3 and CS4) and ActionScript itself has changed dramatically. Tie this in with the necessity to make todays Flex applications a better experience for the user, there’s an increasing need to create animation and flow that you just can’t really get from Flex alone.

Plus, there’s the fact that I’ve never been a 100% analytical type developer. At college I was training as a product designer, and was even taught to draw properly at one point, but since then I’ve never really gotten the chance to flex any creative muscle so to speak, having largely been stuck on the back end of applications development with ColdFusion and Rails.

So, there you go, that’s my promise to you lot over the next year – that I will take a good long look at Flash CS4 and ActionScript 3 and try and really get them into my head. You never know I might even document some of my new found experiences here for you all to laugh at

Bookmark It

What’s more interesting is that this is a relaunch. From what I understand from a quick google this was previously an application written in WPF (the Windows Presentation Foundation), a platform based in the murky world of .NET, and also one that won’t run on my Mac making it 100% inaccessible to me, and thus rendering it completely useless.

So, WPF lasted 2 and a half years before it got ditched, but it’s not entirely clear as to why. One theory is that the original application was originally sponsored in some way by Microsoft*, as it was unveiled by Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Gates in Seattle on April 28th 2006. It may be that the NYT have since reviewed user feedback (like: let me install it on my frickin Mac!) or they are super impressed by the new Text Layout framework.

To some extent this also echoes the recent switch of the MLB.com from Silverlight to Flash for streamed content. Again, a “collaboration” between Microsoft and MLB, that has now been ditched in favour of the Adobe technology again.

Now, the conspiracy theorists out there might suggest that Microsoft paid for these apps to be built in order to get the technologies out there, but now the media companies are reacting to customer feedback and ditching them in favour of the flash platform for various reasons.

I would genuinely like to know what’s going on here. Is it a case of the media companies are choosing the better technology, or are Adobe quietly paying out to these companies to get Flash out there, in order to kill the opposition? Answers on the back of a postcard please…

Interesting stuff…

* I’ve just found on Wikipedia that this was a “collaboration“

EDIT: It also appears that in the UK Channel 4 have recently done the same thing, previously having used a “Windows-only DRM”, and now having switched to Flash.

Bookmark It