We have put up a new build of the Flash Player Beta. This one is the release candidate build, which means that we are getting pretty close to the final build. It also means that you only have a little time left to submit new bugs.

You can find more info here.

You can read the release notes here.

Sorry for the lack of posts and updates the past couple of days. I had planned to blog the first day of DevCon Japan, but I ended up getting a pretty bad case of food poisoning and was stuck in bed for the past two days…

Anyways, I am feeling better and have a couple of sessions today. I will try to get some reports up from the conference.

You may have noticed that video games that require the players to dance or run around are becoming increasing popular. In fact, I must have seen about 10 different ones today (one where you play the bongo drums, and one with maracas). Now, I am sure you have been asking yourself, how can I create a multi-player game in Flash that is based on the players motion.

Well, you are in luck, as DesDev Japan just posted an article on this very topic. The article basically shows how to use the camera activity levels and the Flash Communication server to create multi-player games based on user movement.

Just a quick update. I am sorry I haven’t been able to update much this week, but I have been swamped with some stuff here at Macromedia (details to follow shortly).

I am off to Tokyo tomorrow for DevCon Japan. I should have internet access and will try to do some reports from DevCon. However, it might take me a little longer to get back to you if you send me an email.

We have released updated Flash Communication Server components. It includes a number of bugs fixes, as well as two new components:

• VideoRecord
• VideoPlayback

I think that these are the components that Jeremy used to create the DevCon video blog applicaiton. Here is some info from the errata.txt file included with the components:

Client-Side

• The SimpleConnect component no longer has a memory leak on the client-side; previously, the memory leak occurred if you typed faster than 1 character every 10 milliseconds.
• The Presenter Shared Object property of the AVPresence component has been removed. Flash Communication Server now sets the value property of the property automatically. You can use multiple instances of the AVPresence component in one application without having to set this property for each instance.

Server-Side

• The application.asc and framework.asc files have been modified to allow garbage collection for applications using components.
• A new method, getClientID(client), has been added to the components framework. This method returns a unique ID for each client. The server-side scripts of the components provided have been updated to use this method.

You can download the updated components from here.

We have launched a new Flash Remoting Application Development Center on the Designer and Developer Center. As the name implies, the center contains tons of information, articles and other resources on using Flash Remoting with ColdFusion MX, Java and .NET servers.

You can check out the center here.

This actually launched last week but i missed it. Sorry about that.

Phillip Torrone has posted a couple of pics of the Flash 5 Player running on the new Palm based Sony Clie.

You can view the pictures here.

We have announced a new product today, named Contribute. What is Contribute?

Contribute is the easiest way to update content for any HTML website, including sites built in Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, and other web tools. With Contribute, non-technical users can make changes while automatically respecting site standards for style, layout, and code in minutes—without knowing HTML.

Basically, it makes making small changes to a web page super simple. I have been using it a while for my internal pages at Macromedia, and it saves me a ton of time.

If you find any bugs or documentation errors in the Flash 6 File Format Specification, you can report them to: flash_format@macromedia.com

We have released a new build of the Flash Player 6 Beta player. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, and contains quite a few fixes and addition.

You can find a complete list of fixes in the release notes.

You can find more info as well as download the player here.

Make sure that you report any bugs that you find, and you could win some pretty cool prizes.
In particular, we need the following areas to be tested: