For you RSS feed junkies using Mac OS X, you have got a new tool to add to your arsenal: Pineapple by Chris Cummers of Postal-Code, Inc. Lately, there has been a lot of coverage of developers creating Flash MX based RSS aggregators and with each iteration they are getting better and better, but I really like the features of Pineapple. Very fast and flexible. It would be nice to see some of the functionality of Pineapple integrated into the Flash RSS Aggregators out there as I very much like the way the feed data is presented.
Just a quick note about a press release that was sent out today by Fujitsu (Ranked #52 on the Fortune Global 500) on a partnership they formed with the company I work with, mCom LLC. We have been working with Fujitsu for the last 2 years on developing 3rd generation ATM machines. One of the coolest aspects (besides all the underlying technology), is that the presentment and interface layer users interact with is done entirely with Flash on a touchscreen interface. If you are interested in learning more about this, contact me. Here is an article I wrote for Macromedias Edge Newsletter a year ago on this topic that generated a lot of discussion.
You have got to see this excellent example of the integration of Voice XML and a telephony application with Flash MX that Matt Rice of SWF News has put together. This is a perfect example of integrating additional accessibility features into your Flash applications. What a great example. Basically Matt has built a system that allow you to dial a phone number and interact via voice commands (he is using a free service for developers provided by (TellMe) to control a Flash application on screen. Just amazing! Kudos to you Matt!
Yes, thats the title of the new Flaming Lips album due for release here in the states on July 16th. Yep, they are one of my all time favorite bands and they just keep getting better and better. They really have a very diverse body of work in their back catalog and are hands down one of the best bands live. What does this have to do with Flash? Well they finally have a new website that is Flash based with a nice player where you can listen to the new album via streaming mp3's in Flash. Very cool feature. I am dissapointed they opted to use Windows Media player for the video instead of the new features of the Flash 6 Player. Lets hope now that Sorenson Squeeze is down to $119 buckeroos they'll adopt it soon.
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Speech Recognition Grammar Specification Advances to Candidate Recommendation
The W3C issued a press release today announcing that their current proposed specification for Speech Recognition Grammar has reached Candidate Recommendation status. What does that mean for developers? It means that along with the spec announced today and things like Voice XML, we are getting closer and closer to having a defined standard for developers to allow communication, and interoperability between disparate systems that provide text-to-speech synthesis, voice control, and web based telephony applications. Obviously this is of interest to me because of the work I have been doing. Interested in some other ways to tackle this along with Flash? Read on...
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Another very cool RSS aggregator has been released. This one courtesy of Nicholas S.-Roy. Nicholas has added some cool features to his viewer which are definitely worth taking a look. He also has plans on releasing the finalized source .fla files. On the same topic, Phillip Chung has recently updated his RSS aggregator with a handy feature of truncating extra long entires at a user specified length and also limit the number of entries show from each feed. [Via Jarle Dahl Bergersen]
As mentioned previously here and elsewhere, Eric Dolecki has put together an extremely useful Flash based mobile event guide for FlashForward 2002 New York this July 10-12th. He has made some more improvements and tweaks to it, and Macromedia awarded him the Site of The Day for his work on this very cool application. Way to go Eric! Macromedia is really taking the mobile device area very seriously as part of their current strategy. Eric and his app were also mentioned in a press release by Macromedia on June 19th discussing the momentum the Flash MX is gaining. This year keeps shaping up to be more and more interesting. Its also worth mentioning that you should take a look at Bill Perry's Pocket PC Flash.net site Bill was one of the first folks to really explore the mobile event guide format for the Pocket PC with Flash. Bill maintains many many examples of what you can do with Flash on a Pocket PC and his site is an excellent resource for those of you looking to get your feet wet in this area.
I wanted to show off how the dynamic text to speech solution that I have been working on can also enhance html pages and provide extended accessibility via Flash. The result is that I am currently testing something I built today to allow all the entries on this main page of my blog to be read aloud via this system. You'll now notice the "Speak" button and icon. Its Flash, click it and it will take a second (Be patient, I am adding the preloader tonight) to hit my server, process your request, dynamically synthesize, generate, deliver and read back to you the blog entry which you clicked. All it requires on your end is the Flash plugin for your browser , no screen reader or special software required. Pretty sweet huh? I am currently limiting the amount of characters that will be processed for each entry to about 1000 characters and then I tack on a "Truncated" message since its just to show off, and also to keep the server from melting. We will see how long it can hold up. More to come on this soon....In the meantime, email me and tell me what you think about this or just post a comment.
So, if anyone out there has a method for harnessing, manipulating and possibly attaching a carrier component to a negative mass tachyon field, I would like to speak with you immediately as I am serious need of a wayback machine. Not to recover lost files or a hard drive, but rather I would like to get back every minute of my life that I did not use judiciously enough at the time, because I need every single one of them right now! I have had overwhelming feedback from visitors to this site and many of the readers of the books I was recently involved in (Flash Enabled and Flash MX Magic) Also from the participation I have been making lately with the Flash community, and projects I have been attempting to get off the ground, thus I am currently buried under a mountain of email and work.This is a great thing! So this is just a heads up that there might be a slight delay for me to get back to everyone who has contacted me recently. Keep the feedback and requests coming, just know that I am behind a bit on things as well as the number of updates to this blog, so bear with me. I'll be putting up a summary of recent events and news later this evening, till then make sure to check out the links on my site to get your news and update fixes. Thanks for all your feedback and support!
Philip Chung has added some very cool new features to his Flash based RSS Feed Aggregator. Now with version 1.5, you an add your own favorite custom feeds (that comply to the RSS 0.91 or 0.92 spec) which are remembered and stored with sharedObjects, there are more defaut Flash blog feeds, and some improvements to the very cool scrollbar implementation he has put in place. There is also an info item now showing recent changes, features, etc. Take a look, as its sure to be a great starting point to get your daily fix of news. Great job Phillip.
Ok, there is no shredding of documents or employees from Arthur Anderson scurrying around with garbage bags full of copies of Flash MX, so this is not what you think, but rather an excellent use of Flash in my opinion. My friend Daniel Taylor sent me a note about this link on MSNBC covering Enron 101. This neat little timeline/narration utilizes Flash to walk you through a brief history of Enron up to the current mess/situation. Very informative and nicely done. I feel this is a great example for e-learning/education and general presentation use of Flash for the corporate world. Its engaging and very easy to follow. Any thoughts?
Macromedia Flash Player 5 for Pocket PC 2002 Back Again
The link was missing for a bit, but the player is now available again here I believe a slight update was also made to the info in the FAQ. Thanks to Phillip Torrone for this info. Speaking of Phillip, make sure to tune into Online Tonight with David Lawrence at 10pm EST / 7 PST tonight June 11th to listen to Phillip speak with David about Flash, the book Flash Enabled, wireless devices, and other cool gadgets. You will need Windows Media Player or Real Audio Player to listen in. If you miss it they typically have archives of the shows available later. UPDATE: Take a look here for the archived streams of the interview.
Macromedia released this very interesting SDK yesterday. It provides the C++ source code, static and linked libraries, documentation (covering overview, technical details, sample output, build notes and implementation information), zlib decompression library (for Flash 6 Player files), and a ready to go command-line executable. The crux of this is that it will allow search engine developers to quickly implement the searching and indexing of .swf files. It's not just for search engines though as Macromedia states in their FAQ for this SDK, "Intermediate and advanced Macromedia Flash developers may find the SDK useful for other server-based text and link extraction/conversion purposes, or for client-side testing of their Macromedia Flash content against the basic Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK code." I have some additional thoughts on this subject...
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I would like to thank two people today, Jarle Dahle Bergerson and Ming Chan for their help in getting my RSS feed tested and straightened out. Thanks Jarle and Ming! I had been working on adding an RSS feed to my blog. Pivot, the backend I am using, doesn't have a built in system for creating an RSS feed so I coded one myself. I had some flaws with the XML format I was generating and Jarle and Ming came to my rescue. As a result it is now properly compliant with the 0.92 format. Make sure to update your bookmarks to point to the new location: http://www.impossibilities.com/blog/rss.xml These guys and many others of you out there are the reason I am involved in the Flash developer community. Make sure to take a look at Jarle's blog, JDB Cyberspace and also make sure to check out the entry from today about Ming's very cool RSS aggregator/multi-blog viewer built in Flash. Top notch and very useful!
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Eric Dolecki has released a very cool Flash app for the Pocket PC. A comprehensive event guide for the upcoming Flash Forward 2002 in New York this July. Its more than an event guide as it contains additional information relevant to the area, exhibitors and even a wireless polling capability. Eric also utilizes Ant Mobile's Flash Assist Pro to provide full screen Flash on the Pocket PC and to automatically create a cab installer file to provide for easy distribution. I will definitely be using this while I attend. Take look at his site to download the application, it's free! Great work Eric!
Bill Perry, fellow author of Flash Enabled and operator of Pocket PC Flash.net (a great resource for examples of Flash on Pocket PC's, news, tutorials, demos, etc.) sent me this link with a truckload of additional photos and summaries of the Pocket PC Summit from last last week. Bill is on the advisory board to the conference organizers and helped them pull off a really great event. I had a great time. Bill also put together the coolest, handiest Flash application for the show. The Pocket PC Summit 2002: Flash Event Guide. Visit his site to download it and take a look at a great example of what can be done with Flash, a Pocket PC and AntMobile's FlashAssist Pro.
Got this from Mike Chambers yesterday: Macromedia announced the winners of their XML Resource feed contest. Most Creative goes to: Phil Chung Best Site Integration goes to: Shane Elliot Congratulations guys! There has actually been a lot of talk about Phil Chungs work with RSS feeds and his winning entry lately. Very nice work. You can get more information about the contest and results at the official contest page. On that page you will find links to some of the other entries in the contest, including my entry for my all Flash version of this site.
Take a look here. It doesn't need much of an introduction. It's simply an excellent example of what can be done with Flash MX, and the new video functionality. I found it to be a really compelling demonstration. It's also very informative about Macromedia's gradual shift and now dedicated focus towards becoming the defacto provider for tools to develop Rich Media Applications and the server side infrastructure neccessary to deliver and support such projects.
For those of you developers out their bidding on jobs and convincing your boss and clients that MX is the right way to go, you are going to need info to back up your claims. All of us developers and users of Flash MX, and other Macromedia products know the value and power that they hold, but the corporate IT weenies and muckity-mucks don't always know and often need a good hand holding and spoon feeding of data to make their pillows soft at night. Well a quick search through Forrester's research revealed a lot of very useful and favorable reports and analysis of Macromedia and its products. Jump to this shortcut for a list of results of a search from Flash MX on thier site. Very handy indeed! You might need to purchase whole reports, but sometimes the snippets are all it takes. Come to think of it here is a similar shortcut for Gartner research.
So a version of the Flash player is now shipping with Nokia 9200 Communicators, and now its going to be shipping on all the Toshiba Genio Pocket PC's. At last weeks Pocket PC Summit we learned that it's going to ship pre-installed with the next generation of Pocket PCs from HP/Compaq, and it's currently available for download for almost all Pocket PC's. It's on tablets, TV's, cable boxes, and soon will be in even more places. So where do you got to see a good overview of what version can play on what and where? Well, check out this Flash Player Device Matrix. And yes, you can also pick up a copy of Flash Enabled to help you learn how to develop and tap this ever expanding market for Flash developers.
So I made a PHP script to automatically and dynamically convert all my Pivot based entries in this blog into an RSS 0.92 compliant feed so I could start experimenting with my own Flash based RSS viewer. If you would like to syndicate my blog on your site, grab the RSS feed here. I used a validator to check its compliancy, but let me know if you experience any issues with the feed or if you end up incorporating it into your site.
I posted a handful of pictures from the Pocket PC Summit event in Philadelphia last week. Expect captions by this afternoon. A few of these photos were taken at Iron Chef Morimoto Masaharu's excellent restaurant. (Morimoto is the Japanese chef of the show and my favorite). The restaurant is only a few blocks from where the event was held, so I got a big group of us to walk over and have dinner there one night. Take a look at the very well done Flash site for the restaurant. This is a good example of a nice clean and appealing, easy to navigate design. I also just happened to have taken a Dim-Sum cooking class on Sunday with another excellent local Philly Chef, who specializes in Asian Fusion, Joseph Poon. His site uses just a tad of Flash for an intro, but take my word for it, they are both amazing chefs. Take a look at the photos I took from the Pocket PC Summit show here.
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