There has been a lot of buzz over the weekend about the video Colin Moock posted from the Macromedia Flash conference in Tokyo. In it, Kevin Lynch demonstrates a couple of new features in the next version of the Flash Player (code named maelstrom).

Since then, I have received about 100 emails asking to be adding to the 8ball beta. So, if you would like to apply for the 8ball beta, just fill out this form.

I have been in Paris all week for the Macromedia France MAX conference. The conference was great and I got to meet a ton of super talented Flash designers and developers. I sent a couple of pictures from my SideKick over to the vision site.

I will be speaking at the Belgium User group meeting tomorrow (Saturday night) in Mechelem (just north of Brussels). Aral Balkan will also be speaking, so it should be a pretty good meeting. If you happen to be in Belgium, make sure to come by the meeting. If you are lucky, you might get to hear me speak some Dutch.

I just got a SideKick II from T-Mobile and needed to import my contacts from Address Book on Mac into my SideKick. T-Mobile has a web-based tool to sync info with the SideKick, and it can import contacts from various mail programs and formats, but it does not support vCards, which Mac AddressBook can export.

So, after much time searching in google looking for a tool that converted vCards to Comma / Tab separated file, I finally figured out a (not so direct) solution. I thought I would post it here in case any one else needed to do this.

Now that there is a Free non-commercial license for Flex, I thought I would spend a little time playing around with it.

I went through this great tutorial by Robert Crooks, and was pretty impressed by how quick it was to put together the simple application. However, one thing felt weird to me, and that was mixing ActionScript in with my MXML. I am used to creating a class for my application controller. Including functions in an include file just felt weird to me (although behind the scenes they do get compiled into a class).

I am going to be running another Flash video test over the next hour or so in the Central DevChat. I am testing how well I can stream multiple live feeds. One will be from an Xbox and or PS2, and one will from a webcam overlooking the action.

Just log into DevChat, and open multiple video Pods (View > Console > Pods > Central DevChat > Video Feeds)

Ill post more info after the test.

I have been player around with Flash video for the past couple of days, and have been running a couple of tests. The first test was to test a hardware setup to get live video from a video source (in this case an Xbox) to Flash. This test is testing the ability to play back different video streams in Flash based on the user’s bandwidth.

So, here is a simple video clip of my playing a level of StarWars BattleFront on the Xbox:

As I posted yesterday, we did a little test that involved streaming video from an Xbox (playing StarWars Battlefront) over DevChat via Flash video. I actually did something similar to this about a year ago, but this was to help test a new (and hopefully better) hardware configuration.

A lot of people were asking how we did it, so I thought I would make a quick post explaining it.

Here is the setup:

Xbox connects to the Canopus ADVC 100. This is a box that takes video in via a number of different connections, and allows you to split it out via a number of connections. We used an RCA cable to connect the Xbox to the ADVC 100. We could have also use an S-Video cable, which would have given us better picture quality, but we did not have one handy.

Just a quick fyi, we are going to be running some tests involving Flash Video, Xbox and DevChat over the next hour or so. So drop by DevChat if you want to check it out, or just chat.

Btw, I’ll update this post with some pictures in a little while.

I’ll be hanging around in the Developer Chat today, so if you feel like chatting, or have any questions, drop by.

You can install DevChat from here.

There has been some discussions over the past couple of days around 8Ball (the next full release of Flash) and what its focus is going to be.

I wanted to make a quick post, and just clarify something:

8Ball is focused on designers.

What exactly does that mean? It means that the past 2 releases of Flash have been focused almost solely on developers, and that it is time that we once again show some love to designers. Does this mean that 8Ball will have no developer features? No, not at all (there is going to be some very cool stuff). It does mean that one of the primary themes though are designer focused. What are the primary themes?