Chris Heschong picked up on the conversation between Jeremy Allaire and Dave Winer. In response to Dave’s call that he wants MX to work with Radio, Chris says:
The fact is that it works pretty well with Radio. I can use Dreamweaver to manage all my content if I feel like it. I can have Fireworks MX create images automatically based on my navigatorLinks.xml file if I wanted to.
I have to agree with Chris on this. There are numerous ways that you can work with Radio and Macromedia MX products together. In fact, my page contains a simple example of integrating Radio with Macromedia Flash MX (notice the updated time in within the Flash movie at the top of the page). I will release a quick tutorial on this pretty soon.
Branden Hall, of FlashCoders / everything Flash ActionScript fame, has set up a weblog over at waxpraxis.org, and has already made quite a few posts on his first day.
Among other things, he mentions that he has a book coming out soon (FlashEnabled) on creating Flash content for devices (note : i also worked on this book).
I am really excited about the number of quality Flash related weblogs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) that have sprung up. They provide a way of quickly getting Flash information and news, without having to search through and clog up the mailing lists and forums. They have completely changed the way I participate in the Flash community (for the better).
Branden Hall has some info on customizing the List Box component with custom symbols.
FYI : We should have an article up soon at the Flash Application Developer center on how to customize / extend the List Box (and other selectable components).
The FlashForward website has been updated with information on FlashForward 2002 in New York City (July 10 - 12). It will be three days with an entire day of seminars, and two days of sessions (2 tracks).
The list of speakers is impressive as usual and includes Branden Hall, Nigel Pegg (he created all of the components included with Flash MX), Andries Odendaal, Glenn Thomas, Phillip Torrone, Christian Cantrell, Eric Natzke and Fred Sharples. Jeremy Allaire and Kevin Lynch will be doing the key note.
We have released a new version of the Macromedia Flash Player 6 for all web platforms.
The new player is 6,0,29,0 and is available from:
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash
The new player fixes the following issues:
For information on how to ensure that your users have the latest version, check out the technote at:
http://www.macromedia.com/go/16267
Chapter 29 of “Developing Macromedia ColdFusion MX Applications with ColdFusion Markup Language” (download pdf / all CFMX docs) contains documentation on using Flash Remoting with ColdFusion MX.
Since we haven’t officially announced other versions of Flash Remoting, we don’t currently have any documentation publicly available on using Flash Remoting with non ColdFusion implementations. (stay tuned.)
Note : Make sure to read through the other posts here as i have put up a couple of examples of using Flash Remoting with web services, ColdFusion, and ServerSide ActionScript.
I was bummed to read Dave Winer’s comments about Macromedia’s position vis a vis “BigCo’s”. The two primary issues - the mass community of scripting-level developers, and Macromedia’s efforts around web services interoperability - actually underscore a philosophy that I think is shared by Macromedia and Dave, and which is actually quite the opposite of BigCo-obsessing.
The point about scripting-level developers is simple: the vast majority of people building web applications are using scripting languages, not big enterprise architectures; a huge number are using VBScript/Jscript in ASP; lots of use ColdFusion; tons use PHP, some Perl, some Python, and on and on. This is a good thing. Scripting is pragmatic and cost-effective. Our mission with MX is to empower these people. I’m not sure how this is paying homage to BigCo’s.
There have been some questions about documentation and examples for ServerSide ActionScript (included with ColdFusion MX to be used with Flash Remoting).
There are five chapters on ServerSide ActionScript (SSAS) included with CFMX, and they are available from the main doc page. If you are running CF MX as a standalone server, you can access the documentation here (if CFMX is running), and here (as a pdf).
I have also put together a couple of simple examples of using ServerSide ActionScript
On a Future Macromedia Communications Server:
We’ll be introducing a new communications server later this year. It’s codenamed Tincan, and it allows you to build these communications applications.
You can do real-time shared audio and video. You can do real-time shared text. But more importantly you can do what’s called shared objects. Shared objects allow you take any object in a client in your application, a data object, or a user-interface object, and share that across a connected client. So I could have a collaborative application where multiple users are interacting with the data and the user interface. They may also be doing communications, they may also be speaking to one another and so on, but they may just be collaboratively interacting with a user interface and the data in it.
Check out the new DWTeam DesDev Dreamweaver MX extension. It makes it ridiculously simple to add information from the Macromedia XML Resource Feed to web pages when creating them with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Simply open the panel, check the data you want to display, and you are done.
I also wanted to point out the Harnessing XML with Custom Tags or ColdFusion components articles at the ColdFusion MX Developers center. This uses the Macromedia XML Resource feed to show how to manipulate XML in ColdFusion MX.
