Okay, I'm exaggerating. Several years after BitmapData was introduced to the Flash player it's not really a secret anymore that Flash uses a feature called premultiplied alpha when it stores transparent pixels. But it is a bit dirty after all. In case...

Developing Flash games for the Wii browser has just become easier and better: taking my initial Flash WiiMote prototype Adam Saltsman had turned it into a robust and comfortable API called MarioToo (no - I seriously didn't ask him to call it...

Flickr.com has made some changes to their API structure and unfortunately also decided to remove the crossdomain.xml file from their http://www.flickr.com url and only have it on http://api.flickr.com in a few days. The consequence of this is that pretty soon many Flash...

Now that Adobe has published the specifications for the FLV format I wonder if someone smarter than me can write an open source alternative to Flash Media Server? As Tinic Uro writes the format is essentially AMF, so with AMFPHP out there...

You've probably read it all over the blogs today - Microsoft has discovered a security vulnerability in the Flash Player which seems to affect almost every version. The good news is that Adobe has published a fix already. And it sounds to...

After almost two weeks of travelling between Asia and Europe I have finally arrived back at my homebase in Munich again. Whoa those have been some very intense and amazing days - Singapore - Seoul - Amsterdam - so many new impressions,...

As Marc Thiele just tells me there are almost no tickets left for the Flashforum Tour Events in Düsseldorf (Sep 21st) and Zürich (Sep 26th). So if you are still deliberating whether to attend (for just 25 Euro a ticket, that's actually...

Macromedia has officially released Flash Professional 8 today so finally you can download the 30-day trial version and get your hands wet. And if you haven't done so yet here's your chance to quickly update your Flash Player to the latest version:...

As you might have read before on my blog Flash's text handling for languages that are written from right to left as Arabic or Hebrew is not the state of the art. Unfortunately also in Flash 8 there will be no native...

As some of you might have noticed all my sites where down for the last three weeks. I want to thank everyone who contacted me (or at least tried to) in order to find out if I'm alright - fortunately there was...

The Finalists of the Flashfoward Filmfestival 2005 SF have been revealed.You may vote for the People's Choice Award, too....

John Grden from Acmewebworks.com has finally created a tool that I always wanted to build myself but never did due to excessive lazyness: it's called The Admin Tool and is probably best described as an swf debugger on speed. It allows you...

I just received this email: Dear Friends, Please take a look at the attached picture [Update: as you can read in the comments the boy has been identified already, so there's no need to pass along his picture anymore] of this victim...

Rhys Davies offers a very interesting tutorial on the creation of isometric design. In The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art he explains the basics as well as the creation of pixel people. If you want to start into isometric game design...

Jelmer Kuperus has found a way to access a user's local harddrive via Acrobat Reader's ability to embed swf files. This opens the possibility to steal local files or cookies. As it is necessary to know the exact filenames he rates the...

By now you have probably read it already everywhere: Ellipsis, the long awaited 7.2 update to Flash MX 2004 is finally available for download. As I don't want to repeat what you can also read directly at the source all I can...

How often have you experienced this: you receive a FLA file from one of your expensive freelance designers but after you publish the file most of the texts are shifted out of place? The reason for this is of course the same...

... that's the motto of this year's OFFF Festival which will happen from 1st to 3rd July in Valencia, Spain. So if you are into experimental audio and visuals it's definitely the place to be. And even if you are not sure...

From May 7th until May 9th there's a good reason to visit Stuttgart, Germany: it's the 6th German Flashconference, featuring a super lineup of speakers. I'm especially looking forward to Marcos Weskamps' sessions who comes all the way from Japan, whoa! I...

After my my first announcement of Ivan Dembicki's Shared Fonts Manager was a bit too early, this time it's official: you can now check out his solution to make shared fonts work within flash. What does that imply? It means that with...

Mika Palmu from meychi.com has just released a custom distribution of the SciTE editor for Actionscript 2.0 - which is my favorite editor for coding. Thanks a lot Mika!...

Finally the 5k Award is back. This year it will be hosted by SIGGRAPH 2004. What a great chance to demonstrate to the international nerd society the power of Flash. Build something amazing in 5120 bytes? What other tool is out there...

Mathieu from Yamago has transfered their very useful Flash file upload component YamzBrowser to Sourceforge and at the same time did some updates and bug-fixes. The great thing about YamzBrowser is that this component works with a lot of browsers as well...

In case you speak german and you are into Flash I think that you do not want to miss the latest issue of the MX Magazin which is available since yesterday. And I'm not just saying that because I happened to contribute...

Create True Type fonts out of the embedded outlines contained in swf files? It's strange that until today nobody has written a tool to accomplish that, because technically it's pretty easy and it is possible since Flash 2.0. The only hurdle is...

Macromedia has just released an update to the Flash Player which fixes a security flaw that was discovered in connection with the local shared object. This is solved by storing persistent shared objects in unpredictable locations - I'd say this is important...

Finally we get some news from Macromedia regarding their solution for the Eolas problem. They have built a Central application called "Active Content Ressources" to keep you updated about the latest developments. There is also a new article demonstrating Macromedia's JavaScript solution....

Ram Almog asked me to publish his solution for circumventing the inability of Flash to render right-to-left texts correctly. Of course I do. Here's his comments: "Its far from perfect but maybe someone with an in-depth knowledge in bi-di algorithms can help...

And again those guys at Google have come up with a new widget: The Google Deskbar integrates directly into your taskbar and makes searching one step easier. Now you don't even have to launch your browser anymore to search Google. Currently this...

I just took the time to read Paul Betlem's Article about Macromedias upcoming tools for preparing your websites to the pending IE updates. (Has that article just been posted or did I simply overlook it before?) Funny enough they will pretty much...

Theodore from powerSDK has found a very elegant workaround for the upcoming Eolas related IE-Update. Unfortunately you cannot add comments to his blog, so I will add my comments here: - I've tested the proposal and in order to sastisfy the patent...

One of my visitors pointed me to the fact, that it's currently a bit difficult to find old Flash Player 6 versions for testing purposes as there is only v7 served. You can get all old version from v5 down to v2...

As this is a beta after all, for those who wonder how to report a bug in Central or if you are missing a feature already here's how you do it: just use "Send Feedback" which you will find under "Help" in...

I guess you already read elsewhere that the FlashParade in Marseille will be one of the biggest European Flash conferences in this year. You also might have noticed that the 3-day-ticket price of just €53.82 is unheard of for a conference of...

In case you didn't know: MX 2004 trial versions are available for download now. And of course you can buy them, too....

I just noticed that the official Flash Player version is now 7,0,14,0 - no mention of public beta anymore. So if you haven't done so yet - go and upgrade your player to the latest version here and experience a nice speed...

My first day back from holidays and it looks like it's a heavy news day: Today Macromedia announced Studio MX 2004 the long awaited update of the MX family. Of course most interesting for me is the new Flash and here we...

Browsing through the appendix of Colin Moock's excellent ASDG2 I noticed a new command addRequestHeader() that was added with the release of the Flash Player 6.0.65.0. As Macromedia only mentioned this once in their release notes, it looks like this command has...

Now with the free XML socket server Oregano out there, I guess there are some people who would like to write a little test application. And if you have never programmed multiuser games or applications before you might be looking for a...

If you are thinking about getting a XML socket server for Flash you should seriously consider this new kid on the block: Oregano is a multiuser server for Flash clients written in Java. It is using JDBC to connect to any available...

Amir Dotan, Mushon Zer-Aviv and Naim Kamel have started a petition called The Right To Flash. Its goal is to convince Macromedia to fully support the Unicode standard related to bidirectional languages in Flash. As you might have read also in my...

I just received a very funny Flash movie by the italian animator Bruno Bozzetto via email, visualizing the differences between Europeans and Italians. This reminded me that lots of people search for his clips on my site, because I had a related...

Occasionally I check my Requests page which displays what keywords people where searching for when they came to my pages. It turns out that unknowingly Quasimondo has become #1 result for matrix effect swf. I don't know how that evolved, but on...

My hometown doesn't make it very often into the headlines, but here is something which is worth a lttle buzz: The city hall has just made the decision to switch 14,000 PCs of the administration from Windows NT to Linux. And this...

It looks like Macromedia has created a new newsgroup for discussion about the upcoming Central called macromedia.central.prerelease_discussion. It seems like the title of the original Central newsgroup - macromedia.central.general_discussion - was misunderstood by too many folks as a kind of general purpose...

Apress have acquired the majority of Peer Information Group's Assets. This means that Friends Of ED will live again. Now that's good news!...

Wow - it looks like this year there will be an Ultrashock conference in Munich - my hometown. The details are not out yet, but the venue will be in Germany probably late summer and Munich is a hot candidate. Follow the...

The FlashForward 2003 winners have been announced: Motion Graphics : elevationApplication : GModeler (Grant Skinner)Educational : BrainPop3D : Tokyo PlasticArt : The Beauty if DetailsTypography : WDDGNavigation : Perfect FoolsCartoon : KunstBarCommerce : Nike BasketballOriginal Sound : Defenders of the UniverseTechnical Merit...

I wish everybody at FlashForward a great time! Unfortunately I couldn't make it, but I hope that we will again see some live-blogging by Mike Chambers, Josh and Daniel Dura, Marcos Weskamp and all others who are participating. Can anybody tell me...

If you should ever be in need of some Polynomial Curve Fitting inside Flash, don't look any further: Jim Bennett has prepared a nice demo and the accompaning source codes on his site. Quote: "This is a WAYYYYYY sexier alternative to simple...

First of all: Kudos to Gregg Wygonik for his great Flash to PDF class! Check out his site dedicated to the subject: flash2PDF.com and do not miss his blog broadcast.artificialcolors.com. There is one aspect in the latest Flash2PDF craze which I wonder...

Just in case you haven't read it everywhere else: Macromedia just released version 6,0,79,0 of the Flash Player. It contains once again some security patches for the infamous "buffer overflow exploit", improves Flash Communication Server preformance and fixes some other minor bugs....

It looks like WACK has got some serious competition: Component Headquarters have released their XWF Window Component which is already used as the engine for the site itself (which looks great). It may be still missing proper packaging and documentation, but when...

It was about time. Finally the first steps are made to use parts of the Flash Remoting functionalities also in PHP. It looks like a guy called Musicman has reverse engineered the Actionscript Message Format (short AMF) which is the binary format...

I just came across this page by ericlin which is a collection of his flash research, forum post, tutorials and sourcecodes. There is some very interesting research [part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4] about the behavior of code inside movieclip...

Hello everybody! After quite a long pause I'm back at the keyboard and you know what - I'm feeling dumb... I've read somewhere that during holidays your IQ drops by a reasonable amount due to the reduced challenges for your brain, looks...

This is a very boring entry, but I want to contribute a little bit to the knowledge out there. I just stumbled by chance over the <LI> bulletpoint tag which looks like it is supported by the htmlText of Flash MX. I...

Perhaps you haven't noticed it before, but there is a little bug in the .htmlText property of textfields: whitespaces between html tags are automatically removed. You can prevent that by using &nbsp; instead of spaces, but Casper Schuirink has presented a nice...

If you are interested in page turns you might want to have a look at this interactive diagram by Eric Natzke where he illustrates some of the Math involved. What is missing is some of the line intersections, but as Eric says...

After a long beta phase Macromedia has now released the public version of the Flash Player. It's available for Windows / Mac Classic (6,0,65,0), Mac OSX (6,0,67,0), Linux (6,0,69,0) and if you haven't upgraded yet you should do so now. I don't...

I always wondered why nobody ever built something like this and finally I came across this: xat.com has a tool that can simulate real world internet speed. Well, 99$ is not really cheap for something that simply slows down the connection, but...

The closer you get to Christmas the more requests are out there for tutorials on how to create snow with Flash. I guess there are zillions of possibilities, but let me mention just a few. If you know of more, feel free...

When it comes to search engine indexing, Flash has definitely one big flaw - it doesn't register. Macromedia tries to change that with their search engine SDK, but the question remains if or when Google will use it and on top of...

Grant Skinner has just released the source code for his pathfinding class. The algorithm is not the normal A*, but his own flavour which is speed optimized for flash - as a tradeoff it might fail sometimes for long paths. But, as...

Ale Muños has just finished version 1.0 of his Actionscript editor SciTE|Flash which is based on Scintilla. You can download it from his site. My first impression tells me that this will be my new editor: the autocomplete function alone has convinced...

Whilst playing around with Javascript to Flash to Javascript communication I came across ishlab.ru and his amazing SimBEOS API. Unfortunately the whole site is in russian, but if you look at the examples you pretty much get the picture and fortunately the...

The latest Flash Payer beta round is almost over. Macromedia has just released version 6.0.61.0 which is titled "release candidate build". This means that if you do not report any bugs that you found in this version NOW you will have to...

Greg Burch has just released two very good tutorials on Ultrashock. One is about Shared Objects, the other one about FlashVars....

Aritali.com offers a helpful little add-on for MX Flash projectors which gives you back some Flash 5 functionality that was taken out in MX for security reasons: SOP - Shared Objects Parser allows you to interact with Windows from Actionscript. The features:...

The guys from Electrotank have released their multiuser server ElectroServer 2.0 and the specs sound promising: it is available for Unix, Windows and any Java-Enabled Platform. You can send complete AS-objects between players, it comes with a lot of community options and...

Scott Blanchard has started a project on Sourceforge.net with the goal to develop a Flash MX based cross browser/cross platform XHTML browser/editor based on Samuel Wan's table parser. You are invited to join him on his efforts....

Mike Chambers has started a community project called Flash ActionScript Standard Library (short FASL) on Sourceforge.net. As previously discussed on Flashcoders the goal will be to create a standardized library of actionscript utilities and classes. If you want to join the development...

The good news is: Macromedia takes care to solve all remaining issues with the current Flash plugin and starts a new beta round with version 6.0.60.48. The good news is also that there is now a linux version, increased Netscape compatibility and...

Just when you think that there are no more white areas on the Flash MX map, an interesting thread on Flashcoders comes along. The new terra incognita is called System.Product() and it looks like it is meant for future expansions of Flash....

Macromedia's Edge presents some preliminary results from the usability lab tests of their "employee of the month" Jacob Nielsen. In short it says: if you want users to use the flash applications on your site do not make a big fuss about...

Finally also all non-FlashForward visitors get a look at the new datagrid component. Mike Chambers demonstrates its most important features. And what a beauty it is. It looks like a whole bunch of work was put into this. A very good reason...

Macromedia now gets really serious about security by opening up its new Security Development Center. They open up with quite a lot of new content - Branden Hall outlines some basic Flash security facts, Mike Chambers has prepared a PDF about keeping...

Just in case that you have not yet heard of it or even worse - are not yet using it: flog: the last 72 hours in Flash development is THE way to get your daily dosis of Flash information. It looks like...

Looks like the rumour mill was running a bit too hot on the Jakob Nielsen part of Jarles DevCon crusade. Mike Chambers has to clarify some things: >I am sure Jakob is paid nicely and gets a free ride and stay at...

Sad news for the community: Macromedia promotes a two-class society at their DevCon 2002: whilst former arch enemy of flash Jacob Nielsen charges $500 extra on top of the regular $1000 entry fee for his lectures, other speakers like Chris MacGregor do...

I'm a bit late on that one, but on August 7 the winners of the 5k Award where announced. And the overall winner is .... a flash entry: frutiger toy by binky. Very nice, very useless. Anyway among the winners in the...

Guy Watson has started some thoughts about selling flash components instead of giving them away for free. Looks like this created quite a reaction... [Via Mesh on MX]...

You can help Mike Chambers to stress-test his Flash Communication Server App. On Wednesday (July 24) at 1pm eastern time he needs a lot of people to join to see how his application handles the bandwidth. The link to the venue will...

Shortly after the update of the Flash plugin to version 6,0,40,0 follows an update to all the developers' players. Download the english version here and non-english versions here. Thanks a lot Macromedia! [Via Mesh on MX]...

Eric Dolecki has a special area on his site where you'll find links to the speakers' notes of the latest FlashForward. Thank you Eric for compiling them!...

Amazon is following in Google's footsteps by officially announcing the official launch of their XML-based webservices. Now you can write applications that can do quite a few things to the amazon.com database: 1. Search for products in a variety of ways –...

Looks like everybody's coming back home from FF NYC. Hopefully most of the speakers will put their notes online. Samuel Wan is already preparing it. (My guess is that you will find it soon here). I will try to gather the urls...

Videoconferencing, Audio Chats, Streaming Video and much more - finally the Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX is released. And if you fork over $4500 it's yours (that's for the professional version - it's only $499 for the personal version). So download the...

Branden Hall has done some very good detailed research about the do's and don'ts of using shared fonts in Flash MX. This topic is definately painful - I have my own experience from working on the Triumph International site. My proposal for...

Playing around with graphs and trees I came across quite a few projects that have done that on a more advanced level: Touchgraph is an open source project which looks very promising. Microsoft has a research project called Netscan that allows you...

On webreference.com you can find an interview with Douglas Bagnall, the author of a 5K chess game which is among the entries in this year's 5K Award. He talks about the development process, how he got the whole thing down to 5k...

Somehow methods that go down to the core of Flash programming have always a strange fascination to me. When it comes to inheritance, abstract classes and prototype chains first of all I have difficulties in following at all. So I am lucky...

Dive Into Mark gives a lot of useful tips on how to improve one's weblog, with a special focus on accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible weblog. Looks like I should improve some stuff here myself......

Finally we can have a look at the 366(!) entries of this year's 5k award and vote for the best. Wading through all of them looks like a lot of work, but I'm sure it's well worth it....

If you are running an Apache server you should immediately download the latest patches from www.apache.org. A big security exploit was discovered a few days afo: Versions of the Apache web server up to and including 1.3.24 and 2.0 up to and...

Among the finalists of the Webby Award I discovered this very interesting Mathematics site: mathworld.wolfram.com. It looks like you find almost every mathematical topic in there, for example the explanation of Complex Numbers which I encountered during my circle experiment. And if...

Only a few hours are left to add your entries to this years 5K Award. The deal is, you have 5 kilobytes to make the best web page or site you can. Unfortunately this year I simply didn't have the time to...

Perhaps someone can help me on this: is it something like bad etiquette to post a link to a different blog entry if you have found that link already in another blog? I just started with this site, so I must admit...

It looks like I've been working with Flash for too long. Fiddling around with all these CSS settings makes me feel like I'm a complete fool. I'm sitting here for hours trying to find a good solution for the layout of this....

Hello? Is this working? I hate to be last on something like this, but I think this time I have to jump over my shadow and simply take the beaten path. I have no idea what this will be about - probably...