I am currently playing around with the HTML5 FileSystem API, and have a need to test my files served via a web server. I could setup a virtual director for my local apache server, but given the number of simple tests and experiments I do, I wanted something easier that required little to no configuration and setup.

So, I put together a super simple script that uses python’s SimpleHTTPServer class.

Here is the script (requires that python is installed and in your path)

Just as we did in Europe a couple of weeks ago, Lee Brimelow and I are doing a series of Flash get togethers in North America over the next couple of weeks. I will be talking about the roadmap for the Flash runtimes, and leading a discussion around recent development in the Flash world. Lee will be showing off some of the new stuff we are working on around gaming.

Here are the cities and dates:

We have just posted a new whitepaper on Adobe.com. The whitepaper, titled Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes lays out the 1 to 2 year roadmap for the Flash runtimes (primarily Adobe AIR and Flash Player). This includes information on specific planned releases, longer term player work, and supported platforms.

This is actually the third Flash platform white paper that we have released in the past week (Adobe’s view of Flex and its commitments to Flex in the future, Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR security), and is a part of a larger process of trying to provide clear and open communications around our thinking and plans for the Flash platform.

If you follow me on twitter, then you may have noticed that I have been working on a white-paper laying out the roadmap and strategy for the Flash runtimes (Flash Player and Adobe AIR). The white-paper is going through internal review now, and should be available in the next 7 to 10 days.

As part of the release of the white-paper, I, along with Lee Brimelow, and Thibault Imbert will be spending two weeks in Europe meeting with the Flash community and laying out Adobe’s vision and strategy for the Flash runtimes. This will be a good opportunity to speak directly with Adobe, ask questions, and general discuss recent changes around the Flash Player.

I have worked with Flash and been part of the Flash community for about 12 or 13 years (over 10 of those with Macromedia and Adobe). Over that time there have been a lot of ups and down, but I think that the past couple of days have been some of the most difficult of my career. I wanted to make a post which will hopefully clarify some of the news from the past couple of days, and provide some more context around what is going on.

Yesterday was probably one of the most overwhelming days of my entire career. First, Adobe informed developers that we are going to stop developing the Flash Player for mobile browsers, then news came out that there were layoffs at Adobe, and finally, Adobe held a financial analyst meeting where we spelled out the Creative Cloud, and the fundamental strategic shift Adobe is making.

All of this news is a lot to digest at once, and I know that there are a lot of questions and concerns from the community about what all of this means. I am working on another blog post which will address this from the Flash community’s standpoint, but I wanted to make a quick post and debunk a rumor that has been going around about the future of Flash Professional.

I am in Tokyo for the week and just spoke at the Tokyo HTML5 Camp, giving a talk on some of the lessons learned from working on theexpressiveweb.com, and talking about Adobe and HTML. I have posted the slides with notes online.

Here is a video of the playground included on the site:

If you have any questions or suggestions please post them in the comments.

I have been playing around a lot lately with motion graphics created using HTML5 and / or CSS3. One of my favorite new features is CSS Transitions, which makes it super simple to animate element properties between two states.

However, I ran into a gotcha the other day, and wanted to make a quick blog post in case anyone else runs into it in the future. Basically, if you change a property that a CSS Transition is monitoring in the same script loop that you add the element to the DOM, the CSS Transition will not take effect. Instead, the element will be drawn with the new properties, and will not animate to those properties.

UPDATE : June 6, 2012 : Due to a change in the Justin.tv APIs, this extension no longer works with Twitch.tv accounts. I have created a new extension, called Twitch Live which works with Twitch.tv accounts. Sorry about the hassle.

Since I started playing Starcraft 2, I have become a pretty big fan of e-sports, and in particular, of watching streams of games. The most popular site for streaming is Justin.tv, where you can find tons of high level gamers streaming their gameplay. However, Justin.tv’s site does not make it easy to find out which of your favorite streams are live at any particular time.

I have been playing a lot of Starcaft 2 lately, and really getting into the entire community. One part of the community that I recently discovered has been live streams of games (some from pros) via sites like justin.tv and ustream.com. There are plenty of articles online talking about how to stream your desktop on Windows based machines, but virtually none on how to do it from a Mac. This article will show how to use Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder (and a couple of other tools) to live stream your desktop to justin.tv (although the setup would also work for other streaming sites).