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 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. Download Slides 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.

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.

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.

I recently switched keyboards and picked up a daskeyboard professional (model-s). This is a really nice (and satisfying) mechanical keyboard, which I really like. However, das only makes a Windows version of the keyboard, and I am running Mac OS X. In general, this isn’t an issue, as I was able to remap control keys to be in the right position, but I really missed being able to quickly toggle whether the system volume is muted.

I have always been amazed by some of the digital art work that Mario Klingemann (aka @Quasimondo has created using with Voronois. After doing some searching, I found an early ActionScript 1 Voronoi implementation that Mario did, and I ported it to JavaScript. I wanted to share the results: Here is a graphic I created by playing around with the code: The code is pretty much a straight up port, with some minor optimizations for JavaScript.

Last week I was playing around with a little EaselJS experiment which required me to do collision detection against all items on the screen. This worked fine with a small number of items, but of course, the more items I added, the slower everything became. I knew that I needed to optimize the code, and pare down the number of collision checks. I have done this before with a grid (even held a contest for it) and was going to port that AS3 code to JavaScript.

Comcast has made the Japanese NHK channel available for the next week. It can be accessed via channel 330 on Comcast. The broadcast is in Japanese, but if you have an SAP enabled TV or set top box, you can listen to a translation of the broadcast. It took me a while to figure out how to enable secondary broadcast on my Comcast box, and I didn’t find much info online, so I wanted to post it here in case anyone else was interested.