As Christian mentioned, Firefox 1.5 was released today. Unfortunately, it seems to have broken the Macromedia News Firefox extension.
Basically, if you click a link in the extension, it will prompt you to pick an app to handle the URL, and will then crash Firefox.
I am going to look into this, but it might take some time to isolate and / or work around the issue.
Just a quick note before I run to my session, but FabChannel is broadcasting live all of the sessions from SparkEurope, including tonight’s keynote.
The keynote starts in a couple of hours, and the website above has a time converter to make sure you don’t miss it.
You can find more information, as well as watch the sessions here.
Colin Moock has updated his ActionScript 2 ImageView sample to ActionScript 3, and has posted a detailed article on the migration process on Macromedia Labs.
You can view the entire article (including code) here.
Check this out. Darron Schall has put together a Flash Player 8.5 VNC (Virtual Network Computing) client with ActionScript 3. Basically, it is a remote desktop client that allows you to view and control other computers remotely.
Darron has a good post up explaining what new features in Flash Player 8.5 / ActionScript 3 made this possible.
You can find more info on the VNC client over at Darron’s weblog.
If you want to download and play with ActionScript 3 (via Flex Builder / mxmlc), you can grab it from Labs.
Just a quick FYI, but I just uploaded a couple of simple ExternalInterface API examples to labs.
The ExternalInterface API allows for player / container communication (such as ActionScript / JavaScript communication).
I plan on uploading some more examples over the next couple of days.
Note, these are built with ActionScript 3 and Flex 2, although the API is available in Flash 8.
You can view the examples here.
You can download the Flex Builder 2 / ActionScript 3 Alphas from here.
I just did a minor update to the Macromedia News Firefox Extension. The new version is 0.9.7 and adds support for Firefox 1.0.7.
What is the Macromedia News Firefox Extension? From the extension page:
The Macromedia News Extension for the Firefox browser and Thunderbird client provides a simple way to keep up with the latest news, information and weblog posts from Macromedia. It places a small icon on your Firefox or Thunderbird status bar. The icon will blink when there is new information, and when clicked, displays the latest information from Macromedia, allowing you to click on any item for more information.
As you probably know, we launched Macromedia Labs yesterday by releasing alpha versions of Flex Builder 2, Flex Framework 2 and Flash Player 8.5. However, there has been some questions and confusion over where the Flash Player download is.
The Flash Player installers for both Mac and Windows are included within the Flex Builder downloads. If you are on Windows and are installing the standalone version of Flex Builder, the installer will prompt you to install the players.
The FlashCoders mailing list is back online.
Big thanks to FigLeaf for all of the time, energy and resources they put into making this and other resources available to the community.
Just a quick note before I head off to MAX, but as I am sure everyone has seen, we just launched Macromedia Labs.
Basically, labs allows ANYONE to get access to early builds and information of technology we are working on. Labs launches with downloads and information for the following Alpha technologies:
Yes. That is correct. You can download and play with everything right now! Just remember, that this is alpha quality code. Not all features have been implemented, and you will almost certainly run into issues and bugs.
Kevin Lynch has posted his thoughts on Web 2.0, Flash and HTML. He discusses a lot of the topics covered during his Web 2.0 conference session last week, and focuses on how Flash and HTML can be used together to build Web 2.0 applications, and provide an all around better user experience.
Flash brings capabilities that HTML doesn’t currently have, and they can be used together to great benefit - in fact, Flash has already been architected to fit perfectly in the Web 2.0 model.
