Today is the last day of the conference and I have a bunch of goodies to review and post about over the next few days. Couple of cool things for right now related to Flash. First, Macromedia announced that all new HP iPaqs (Yes they will be called HP iPaqs due to the merger between Compaq/HP, I predict they will start getting called HPaqs) will ship with the Macromedia Flash 5 Player for Pocket PC already installed! This is great news for developers as you will have a new, very interesting market for your content and applications. Second quick thing, fellow author from Flash Enabled, Steve "Leo" Leone made it onto Macromedias Site of the Day for the the companion web site he designed for the book. Leo's personal site www.unplug.tv shows off some of his other Flash related projects and design work.
Entries are going to be sparse for the next few days while I am attending the Pocket PC Summit here in Philadelphia. I will try to post some interesting stuff from the conference. There should be a lot of great stuff about the Flash 5 Player for Pocket PC coming out of this show. Phillip Torrone is one of the keynote speakers and will be delivering his keynote on Thursday from 1-2pm. If you can make it, just prior to that from 11-12 in the Commonwealth A, B room you can get a sneak peak at an application I worked on for a client that utilizes the Flash 5 Player for Pocket PC. Several of the other authors of Flash Enabled besides Phillip and I will also be there. Mike Chambers, Bill Perry and Steve "Leo" Leone. are all attending. I believe Mike will also be speaking at the conference on Wednesday about the Flash Player 5 for Pocket PC's.
The Flash portion of my site is now synchronized (for the most part) with the html blog. There are a few features in the Flash version that used ASFUNCTION to jump to specific areas of the site that I still need to revisit to get working the way i want but at least the items themselves are now synched up so you can visit either site and not miss any entries. The way I did this might be of interest to other bloggers who are using Pivot as your backend and want to integrate it with a Flash front end.
(more)
Send More Variables to Flash 6 Player Using New Parameter
I saw that Macromedia is running a contest in their Designer Developer Area where you can submit tips for using Macromedia products and possibly win an iMac! Well I tried to think of something I could submit and came up with this and submitted it a few minutes ago. Hope its useful! Introduction: A new parameter for both OBJECT and EMBED, FlashVars, is available for the Flash 6 player. It allows a much greater amount of variable information to be passed from your html document than previous methods reliably allowed...View the full tip here.
Is this a behind the scenes photo from a new Intel Pentium Ad? Or did one of the members of the world famous Blue Man Group simply hold up a copy of Flash Enabled and shoot a photograph of me and one of the other Blue Men after a recent show in New York? Or is this simply a clever fake for publicity? How come the Professor could make batteries from coconuts but couldn't fix a hole in a boat?
Due to the extra traffic I got from having my blog show up in a few other blogs yesterday and today, a lot of you heard the dynamic text to speech stuff that is played back on my main Flash site. If you havent been to it or heard it, your IP address and date and time and some other info is dynamically converted to synthesized speech and delivered/played back to you via Flash .swf files. In my user forum you can also select individual message threads to be dynamically read to you. Hopefully the extra traffic and load wont kill my server. Be nice. :)
(more)
I have had a webcam feed embedded in the main Flash based portion of my site for some time now (take a look here, click on the webcam option in the menu). You might catch the top of my head in there during the day. I have been working on an article, to be published soon, that explains how to implement something very similar with Flash MX and ordinary household appliances. :) You'll be surpised how easy it is to do. The thing that really gets me excited is reading about Macromedia Flash Communication Technology and pondering the possibilities. Has everyone seen this: The Dream Domain ? It was the Macromedia site of the day on April 20th, 2002. Take a look through it and I'm sure it will trigger questions like, "How the heck did they do that with Flash!?" I also just today ran across this thread: "Flash Cam Test" in the Macromedia Flash Handhelds Forum Take a look at the example URL posted in that thread showing off what can be done with Flash 5 and a Pocket PC. This is the kind of stuff that gets me excited about working with Flash. Keep an eye out for my article with example code soon.
Played around with this last night trying to come up with ideas for a nice navigation menu system to tie in with this blog for the links on the right. Just tossing ideas around. This was based on the free Resource Menu Component available from Macromedia > Designer & Developer Center > Flash MX Application Development Center. Take a few minutes and download this and hack away at it for yourself. If you are new to components you will learn a lot just by fiddling with things. IMHO, often times its the best way to learn something: Throw away the manual, rip the sucker apart and put it back together.
Wow, John Dowdell has a good eye for examining his logs! I had only started tinkered with this thing around midnight last night and wasn't going to let anyone know about it till I thought it was good enough for public consumption. Apparently John found my site from his referral logs and posted a link to this area on his blog. Looks like I am going to have to clean this up a bit faster than I thought. :) Excuse me for a second as I capitalize on this new found visitor traffic and direct your attention towards two excellent books about Flash MX. I am a bit biased as I was a contributing author to both of them, but don't let that stop you from taking a look at them, Flash MX Magic and the just released Flash Enabled (Check the archives and older news for more info from me on these) Both are available from a fantastic publisher New Riders
Considering all the blogging going on I didn't want to be left out in the cold. So I spent an hour or so tonight and whipped this blog into shape. I sucked all my previous entries out of my homebrew mySQL database that I was feeding to Flash and dropped them into this system, Pivot. It has some nice features. I am going to redo the Flash based version of my site to utilize the static XML files and generation capabilities of Pivot so that they will sync up. I use some custom functions in my Flash version along with asfunction tags in Flash to jump to specific areas of the Flash site. I am going to have to revisit that for this new blog. Stay tuned more to come.
Did you come here after reading my chapter in New Riders Flash MX Magic? Make sure to check the archives and read about some updates for the files that came on the CD. Drop me a note and let me know what you think.
Starting today Flash Enabled is finally available! This is the book to have if you are interested in developing Flash content for alternate devices ranging from Pocket PC's, cell phones, game consoles, to touch screen kiosks and ATM's. This book was put together by some of the most well respected authors and designers working today with Flash and devices. I was lucky enough to contribute some content for integrating Flash content with touch screens and ATM machines. Order it now and find out what everyone is talking about. For more information make sure to check out the companion site www.flashenabled.com/book/
Want to find out everything about what's going on in the world of Pocket PC's, SmartPhones and other cool devices? Head to Philadelphia May 28-31'st for the Pocket PC Summit. Myself, and several of the authors of Flash Enabled: Mike Chambers, Steve "Leo" Leone, Bill Perry and Phillip Torrone will all be there. Phillip is one of the keynote speakers. We will all be available to meet and talk, sign books, etc. To win a free ticket for the entire conference (worth $995!), visit www.flashenabled.com for the rules, how to enter and win.
First version of the Gallery Section is Now Online
You will find news and reviews about hardware, software and other things that strike my fancy in this new section. Check out the first review in the Gallery. I welcome feedback on the types of things you would like to see in this section.
The transition from Flash 5 to Flash 6 is now over. No longer having to support 5 as well will allow me to do some cool new things with the main Flash portion of the site. (NOTE: The text based blog area of this site will probably not be affected by this right away.)
del.icio.us - 
Digg It - - 
- 
-
Is this a behind the scenes photo from a new Intel Pentium Ad? Or did one of the members of the world famous 
