Whilst working with some huge bitmaps for Aviary I had to face the undeniable fact that huge bitmaps are memory hogs and that the memory that is made available to the Flash Player by the browser is not unlimited. Actually it is...

It's just a few days until THE Flash conference starts, so here is my schedule: Monday: 9:00 - Even though I'm a notorious keynote skipper this time I will check out Richard Galvan's Flash Now and in the Future sounds like a...

Like parents that are excited when they see their brood grow its first teeth I'm getting a warm fuzzy feeling when I observe how people like mpeutz take my little baby Peacock further and further. In this video he builds virtual LEGO™...

Recently I had the pleasure to get interviewed by Peter Elst - it looks like you can read my babblings on aSH now....

Yesterday at the 10th flashconference in Stuttgart I was amongst the lucky ones who could witness the first public presentation of Source Binder by Visual Minds from Hungary and I can say that I was deeply impressed. What is Source Binder? In...

1, 2, 3, 4 different Seam-Carving implementations in one weekend, all made in Flash... One could say "oh what a coincidence", but I must say that I saw this coming the moment I watched that awesome video demo of Shai Avidan and...

Sven Wagener just informed me that their online tool Flashsaver is now a free service. Flashsaver allows you to turn your swf files into screensavers that run on Windows. It even allows you to customize the installer routine with your own images....

I am quite surprised that I do find no mention of Line Rider yet on MXNA - since it's one of the most charming Flash games I've seen for a very long time and the idea is so simple: draw some lines...

After a year of development Visual MINDS Studio have just launched a very interesting project called Flash Filter Lab. It allows to create experimental Flash visuals with a patch based system. So instead of programming with code you can visually connect functional...

If you like patch based tools and experimental visuals you might want to check out FilterForge a new Photoshop plugin which also works as a standalone application. Currently it's in beta and you can register at their site to apply for a...

I just got notice that my Flash 8 BitmapExporter class is currently being used in a real world assignment: on spamrecycling.com it allows users to save images created from the innards of creatively recycled spam emails. To try it yourself, all you...

Jens Franke has just finished Orange Project, a portfolio site for the photographer Sandra Weimar - what makes this so newsworthy apart from the beautiful photos is that he built it with the challenge to implement all features that Flash pundits usually...

Daniel Wabyick from fluid.com has updated his Tween Playground and the underlying Fluid Tweener Class so it plays nicely now with AS2.0. So if you are not satisfied with Flash's out-of-the-box Strong.easeIn or Regular.easeInOut but want the full Penner Easing Package you...

The only thing that is worse than hearing my own voice on the answering machine is to see myself on video. So I personally cannot watch my Spark session on Fabchannel.com - but you might want to in case you couldn't make...

Powerclients is a new german blog specialiced on the development of RIAs with Flash and Flex. As a free download they offer a ColorFan component which uses the interface metaphor of a Pantone fan. It's very nicely done and feels good to...

I must admit that I once ruined the monitor of one of my colleagues when I played the "look what cool effects this heavy magnet has on your monitor" game. And, no, the built-in degauss function was far from powerful enough to...

Looks like my trackback spam blocker almost made me miss a very promising looking new blog by Timothy Groves: Brand Spanking New featuring an inspiring mixture of everything a web professional is interested in: HTML Design, Flash and Stuff. Plus - he...

When it comes to project and client management it looks like all of us web professionals have encountered the same problems sometime. Didn't we all have at least once that project from hell? Fortunately with growing experience one learns to either avoid...

Alexis Isaac has released the beta of a very interesting project called FlashMidi: it's an API that allows you to send MIDI events from Flash to any of the 16 MIDI ports in your system. This means for example that you can...

With SEFFS Claus Wahlers from our brazillian branch of côdeazur demonstrates an elegant and compatible way to build Flash sites in a very user- and search-engine friendly way. The method he has developed deploys SWFs on top of XHTML which means, that...

Do not miss Marcos Weskamp's freshly overhauled marumushi site - where the grandmaster of information visualization presents his stunning works. His latest creation is flickr graph which visualizes the social relationships inside flickr.com. And of course those magic graphs are as attractive...

Can you imagine this: PONG built entirely out of mechanical components? Well Niklas Roy has done it in 900 hours of hard work - and it is absolutely amazing. It is controlled by a relais computer like Konrad Zuse's first computers from...

Citizens for Global Solutions are looking for short Flash movies that can "inspire, amuse and activate people out there who believe a better world is possible". Build a 1-2 minute piece that shows a global problem or problems and gives a global...

Mike Davidson has created quite a stir in the blog community with the release of sIFR (or long: Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) especially among designers that want to have more options than Arial, Verdana or Georgia in their HTML websites. To make...

For those you can't wait until September 2nd, here's the link to the beta version of part 6 of the Yetisports series. This time the location is Hawaii and you have to ride the wave....

talks.php.net is a little known part of the php.net site which features most of the presentation slides from the PHP gurus' speaker sessions. Even though the slides will not always tell the complete story (and were obviously designed by nerds) they are...

Finally there is some movement on the Flash Europe site: it looks like the Flash Europe Blog has been launched. At the moment it only features the partial list of speakers, but I'm sure that it will soon be updated with more...

Hi everyone, I'm back in town. Denmark was wonderful- I'm so relaxed - I think that this feeling will at least last for two more days, before the true programmer's working mode will snap back in place. Hey - that's at least...

I wish I had some spare time right now to start playing with this: Fudge - a wonderful application that enables you to manipulate font outlines with actionscript. The tool is still in beta, but in the gallery you can already get...

Debugging Flash files outside the IDE is not really a positive experience using the tools that you find in the box. Actually I think it's quite horrible. Probably most of us professional developers have built their own tools or suites to work...

Congratulations to the as2lib team for their alpha release! If you don't know what as2lib is about here's a quote from their site: The as2lib is an opensource framework targeted to Macromedia Flash MX 2004+ developers. It offers support for basic idioms...

In the eternal battle of good vs. evil - aka coders against decompilers - a new weapon is being forged to strengthen the lines of the brave programmers: The free web-based tool as-protect by Ilya Shlyakhovoy and Ivan Dembicki claims to use...

I'm hopelessly late on that one - I think this site exists since 2001 or longer and has even had a lot of media attention - anyway somehow I've managed to miss it until now: Ze Frank. Well, I am really impressed...

Ladislav Zigo has just published version 1.1 of his custom easing tool. You can now convert motion tweens to keyframes with easing effects (Flash MX 2004 only that is)....

Robert Hodgin has just released Version 7 of his experimental platform Flight 404. And just as in Version 6 it's Processing all over the place - and the results are awesome again....

By recommendation of Marcel Fahle l came across Zempt which looks like a handy standalone widget that allows you to post directly to your Movable Type blog. The extra benefits of it are a built-in spell-checker and the option to interface with...

If you switch from traditional table-layout to CSS, there is one thing that you will miss a lot: the ability to position elements at the bottom of a page. In "Exploring Footers" Bobby van der Sluis shows how to get back that...

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad movie. Hopefully not. It looks like finally they really do it: Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

Okay - don't look any further. Here is the last page turn engine that you will ever need: it's scripted, it's perfectly smooth, I did not find any bugs and it has one feature that none of the currently known engines has:...

Ivan Dembicki has created a font manager component which allows you to load fonts into flash movies on demand. It looks like this takes a lot of pain out of the use of shared libraries for fonts. Read more about it on...

I'm not a fan of her music, but the site of Sabrina Setlur is extremely well done. Super stylish - three thumbs up! [via k10K]...

In case you missed the shockwards conference 2003 in Stuttgart - which you probably did - you have now the opportunity to see some of the sessions as a videostream. You have the great chance to see 3 of Colin Moock's sessions...

It looks like Kartoo - the meta search engine which uses a Flash frontend - has undergone some major update. They have improved the layout - more text, less cartoon style - it's still too blue for my taste - why don't...

I do not often advertise commercial tools, but here is one I think is worth it, especially as I was waiting for something like this for a long time: SimpleFont allows you to create your own pixel fonts. Have you ever tried...

Say hello to Lawrence Carvalho's new flash blog Nodetraveller which seems to have come into existance already in August but still managed to stay hidden until now. I can spot some interesting posts about Design Patterns in Flash and Webservices in Flash...

Surprise, surprise. The person I always suspected to be a secret consultant behind Macromedia's decision to go very strict in AS2.0 turns out to be a follower of "old school" actionscript. In the comments to his latest post on waxpraxis.org Branden Hall...

Now that's what I call a cool domain suffix - .dj the two letter code of Djibouti. I just found a hit from google.dj amongst my referrers, so I guess that's a new country domain they have got. I just made a...

If you take this discussion about Central on Yahooray as a snapshot of public reception (aka non-community) I see a rather mixed feeback with a tendency to the negative side. Two issues are: What is this thing anyway? People don't see the...

"A clean, unified place for your Internet work": Macromedia Central Public Beta...

Electrotank have just released a new version of their multiuser XML socket server ElectroServer 3. For up to 20 concurrent users it's free. For more users the price range goes from US$299 for up to 50 users up to US$2999 for unlimited...

One of the most useful code libraries I know is already available for ActionScript 2.0: Robert Penner's Easing Equations are ready for download now....

Flash MX is almost retired and there comes Robin Debreuil with his new blog and reveals a command that has always been there and hasn't been discovered by anyone yet: __bytecode__ - it allows you to insert precompiled Actionscript bytecode at compile...

Google has a new feature I didn't know yet: the calculator. It looks like it can give you the answer to regular calculations (17+4), covert units (12 inch in centimeters or 30 degrees celsius in fahrenheit), tell you the value of constants...

I must say that I take it as a personal insult not to be included in Dave Yang's new blog's swfoo.com 100+ entries long link list. Was that a grammatically correct sentence?...

The guys from extrajetzt, known for amazing projects as Fastfroots or Composer, have finally launched their website. I like it! A well chosen color scheme and love for the little details. Under the hood you'll find browser-back button support, direct deep links,...

Okay, this is waayyy off-topic, uninteresting, and selfish but as it's the weekend I give myself the absolution. I just found out that I made it up to position #16 in search results if you search for "Mario" on google. And this...

Looks like I'm a bit late on this, but this is definitely a case where I make an exception to my first-or-never-policy: Grant Skinner, the creator of FlashOS and gModeler joined the ever growing pack of Flash Bloggers with his gBlog. I'm...

I just came across a relatively fresh Flash related blog: it's maintained by Darron Schall and is titled "the personal and professional thoughts of yet another application developer". He's recently conducted a speed test to compare the different methods to run a...

Joe Rinehart from clearsoftware.net has just released Flui, a GUI interface for Flash applications or in other words: Windows for Flash. It looks very clean and feels smooth. It's free for non-commercial purposes and non-profit organizations....

It looks like Robert Hodgin has found a new love. Version 6 of his experimental stage flight404 is using Flash merely as a presentation engine. The stunningly beautiful and elegant experiments themselves are handled by the java-based proce55ing which is way faster...

You probably have read it already on every other blog and even though I normally don't repeat what you can have somewhere else, this time I'll make an exception: CHECK OUT THE RELAUNCHED STUDIOWHIZ.COM SITE! Of course there are several good reasons:The...

If you are quick you have the chance to take a first view at Andre Michelle's amazing 3D racing game ala Mario Cart: FastFroots. For 12 hours he opens it to the public for a beta test. So try your luck: URL:...

Is this something new or was I just ignorant? On studiowhiz.net I saw this banner to Macromedia which said "Macromedia Authorized Affiliate". So it turns out that there's indeed an affiliate program on Macromedia where you can earn up to 10% commission....

I'm pretty impressed by this example of a Flash 3D game engine. Amazing speed. It's done by PercyPea who has also some other 3D engines on his site. There's a whole discussion about this engine on FlashKit. There's also a variation of...

There are a few tools out there that allow you to convert swf file to a video format like Quicktime or avi. The problem with almost all of them is that they fail as soon as you are using actionscripted animation. That's...

Yesterday I've been invited to the world-premier of the cinema version of Germany's first science fiction series from the sixties: Raumpatrouille Orion. The series ran on German TV in 1966 which means that it existed before Star Trek. It's really amazing to...

If you are into Flash gaming either on the developer's or on the player's side, the new gotoAndPlay() site from Italy might be just right for you. Currently it only features one game called Dick Dynamite, a Pacman/Bombeman derivate but the selection...

I wonder why I haven't seen something like this before, the idea is so obvious: STC have created a Flash based font browser which lets you explore all fonts that you have currently installed. For v2.0 I'd like to propose an automatic...

Here is another source for graphical algorithms: Magic-Software by Dave Eberly author of Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics is a treasure box full of 2D and 3D algorithms. It's all C++, but it's not really difficult to transfer this to actionscript....

Just a few days ago Giacomo Guilizzoni has started Peldi's Little Blog. It looks like the focus will be on Flash Communication Server and useful tools, like his latest Shared Object Explorer. As he want quality before quantity he asks you what...

When I was looking for some intersection algorithms I came across Kevin Lindsey's site. And even though this is acually enemies' territory (he is a follower of SVG-ology) his site is full of interesting concepts, utilities and useful code snippets that could...

Finally the pain is taken out of file uploads from flash: Yamago have created a very convenient file browser component which solves the problem absolutely elegant. [via enterFrame]...

Looks like there are two new newsgroups on forums.macromedia.com: macromedia.central.general_discussion: "We opened this forum to create a space for discussion about the opportunities that Central provides and to answer some of the many questions we've seen popping up about Central in weblogs...

I just came across flashfanatiker.de among my referrers. It's an Actionscript blog by Holger Kohnen aka hOk and features some useful scripts and addons. Definitely worth a regular visit....

Looks like I've been sleeping this month. So I have missed the advent of Cyberfunk's outlines and demo for his Flash Markup Language short FML. The idea is to create a XML based language which allows to build flash apps/sites. And from...

There's a new wonderful-waste-of-time in town! It's called blogshares and it's a virtual stock market for blogs. You can trade shares of blogs which has the nice side-effect that it plots a picture about which sites are currently interesting. If you are...

The Dura Brothers Josh and Daniel plus Keran McKenzie are in the process of relaunching flashcomponent.com - unfortunately they lost all their former data including all components to their previous host. So if you have developed components and want to have them...

I'm happy to hear that valyard is back with a new site. As you might remember he has a great talent for finding those special sites that make your jaw drop. Welcome home!...

Suddenly there seem to be window engines all over the place. Here is another one by Erik Lembke called armadeOS. Work pretty smooth and implements some nice details like the animated minimize function. Unfortunately the engine itself is closed source so you...

Now that's what I call a nice idea. Simple but smooth. Plus a great soundtrack. And do not miss the part when it zooms back to the very first page from the very last page....

I use Robert Penners Tweening Equations in almost all of my projects. So I'm happily surprised that this tread on Flashcoders drove Robert into another great addition to this library. This one creates an elastic bounce tween: Math.elasticTween = function (t, b,...

How's the weather in Tokio? I have no idea, but Marcos Weslamp has. He has built a cool graphical multiuser application called geoTracker based on his Zoompane Component which allows you to check the weather all around the world. To achieve this,...

I must say that this is the most disgusting packaging for Flash experiments that I ever came across. But it's great. And daaark... [Via coolstop]...

The guys from Entclosure have started Component Headquarters a new site dedicated to Flash Components. The navigation is very clean, 100% Flash and based on their window system which they want to release in a few days (looks like there will be...

It looks like kinematics in Flash are becoming en vogue again. At least there is this thread on were-here.com which created some interesting results: Bit-101 has created this arm which looks very promising (source code is here). Elrik contributes two demos: this...

It looks like there have been some additions to the Flash blog community: JABBy Panda aka "just another blog by Panda" seems to be focussed on working with components. Флэш Потрошитель or Flash Ripper is a russian Flash Blog, so I cannot...

Grant Skinner, creator of FlashOS has just opened his new site www.gskinner.com. It is running on his new FlashOS2 and features already some screenshots of the upcoming system - smooth! Soon he will release the sourcecode of FlashOS1.0 so we can take...

Ale Muñoz from bomber studios has started a project which sounds quite interesting: the working title is SciTE|Flash and it will be an actionscript editor based on the Scintilla/SciTE editor. This editor has some very nice details to offer, for example collapsing/expanding...

Even though I'm living in Germany my contacts to the local Flash scene have been little to none until now. So the shockwards conference was a great opportunity to meet some well-known members of the scene face-to-face: Danny Franzreb showed some behind-the-scenes...

Perhaps you already know Reason by Propellerheads - it's this cool sound rack that you can virtually turn around and replug cables all over the place just like in reality. Well, Andre Michelle has just released a cool demo called "cable interface"...

Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns have released the source code for their verlet integration demo NinjaEngine on FlashVoodo.com. Verlet integration is a technique which gives you high performance in physics simultations or games....

I just discovered Andre Michelle's new blog among my referers. Even if it is in german it's worth a visit, as he offers a selection of intersting experiments, some components cool music studies. And if I say german flash blogs I must...

...is the subtitle of Hive-brain by Charlie Cordova. Welcome to the wonderful world of flash blogs! [Via onRelease()]...

Looks like the next perfect-waste-of-time is in the making. Gameneverending will be a web-based massive multiplayer online game of social, political and economic interactions. It is partly flash (I wonder why not completely) and they are currently doing an alpha test which...

Whilst outside my window the autumn wind does its blowjob on the trees' leafs, in Flashland it seems to be springtime: I count the arrival of two new sites. - Daily Bread is a Flash based Flash Blog RSS aggregator. Samuel Granato...

Levitated is back. Get your dosis of daily Flash experiments. Enjoy the beautiful presentation. Get inspired by reading the descriptions. Learn by looking at the open sources. [via FlashGuru]...

Simon Barber's blog Barber's Pole is the latest addition to the ever growing flash blog community. His motto: "Flash MX news that makes the cut". Well - to stay within the hairy context: Experience is a comb which nature gives us when...

I just came across the site of Mike Johnson aka exorcyze and wonder how I could miss that one until now. You find lots of interesting Flash experiments there. Funny enough he seems to be interested in a lot of areas that...

Macromedia's CTO Jeremy Allaire has joined the blog community. Now the question arises: Who will be a among the chosen ones that will have the honour to be mentioned on these holy grounds.... [Via illogicz.com]...

Scott Stoddard has created a gaming-hall quality fighting game called Capoeira Fighter 2 that is an absolute must-see. But on top of that you can get a great insight into its production process on FlashVoodoo plus an interview....

After a long pause valyard has made a redesign and a huge update to his site. We can expect a lot of inspiring links again!...

Whoa - I just discovered the first website I ever did back in 1996. Don't bother to look at it - it is in german anyway. This was made possible by the Wayback Machine, a 100 terabyte archive of the historical internet....

yhb's postcard collection features a very nice collection of, well, postcard motives. Just the stuff I'd buy at fleemarkets. [Via Everlasting Blort]...

This site has a look that is really original. Great idea, great execution. Definitely worth a visit: blocmedia.com And wait a while for the little surprises. and play the game. [Via K10K]...

Say welcome to the latest additon to the Flash Blog community: Daniel Dura (Josh Dura's Brother) started his Flash Application Development Blog a few days ago. I'm looking forward to another source of inspiration, challenges and discoveries! Even if I was a...

Oh my god is this beautiful! Andries Odendaal from Wireframe has designed a site for the german advertising agency Hoffmann Reiser Schalt DDB. I don't know how old that one is, but I did not see it before. And it is made...

Game On is a big exhibition in the Barbican Gallery, London featuring the history and culture of video games. What you definately must not miss is their great game in the goodie section. [Via pixelsurgeon]...

British Telecom starts a full scale approach to ruin the image of Flash. Their new 1,000,000 Pound online museum Connected Earth is a great example on how not to do it. It starts with a quirky browser detection, uses an innovative "mystery...

podLob.com is a very well done personal page of Travis (could not find his family name) featuring Flash & DHTML experiments, photography and as an extra: beautiful pixel patterns. And this guy can't be a bad person because among his favorites there...

I wish everyone who can attend Flash Forward NYC a great time! Damn, I couldn't make it - I hope there will be a europe event in autumn this year. I will try to follow the event from here reading Mike Chambers...

Somehow I must have missed this until now: mProjector by binary noise is a cool tool that allows you to create windowless flash projector files having any shape you like. On top of that you can even control the positioning of the...

I just came across another flash mx component site: flashcomponents.net. They have already more than 50 components for download presented in a very clean layout. Nice....

Apart from having a design that probably causes eye-cancer the idea behind kartoo.com sounds interesting. This is a flash-based search engine which visualizes the results graphically by showing the connections between the results, filtering out keywords and allowing you to refine the...

Worst Case Scenarios is a site where you can find useful tips for every dangerous facette of life, like "How to Determine If Your Date Is an Axe Murderer", "How to Cross a Piranha-Infested River" or "How to Survive Being Hit in...

I just came across flashcomponent.com a site that deals solely with flash components, done by Josh Dura and Keran McKenzie. So if you want to spice up your Flash MX a little bit and save you some work check out their download...

Bit-101 starts another round of his do-something-amazing-in-25-lines-of-actionscript-contest. There were some truly amazing results last time, like the winner entry JELLO. Check out the entries from may here and decide if you can live up to the expectations... [Via swfnews]...

3 is the magic number... Are you sure? Turbulence.org feature a very interesting piece by Golan Levin about the relative popularity of each number between 0 and 1000000. The visualisation tool is written in Java and is a real beauty. Especially the...

Lee Semel from Innofinity explains here a little bit the background story behind his excellent 5k Award entry "Wolfenstein 5K". On the same page he links to an interesting tutorial by F. Permadi about ray-casting, a 3D technology which probably could also...

What a cool idea - Making invisible wireless networks visible by chalk markings. The guys at Warchalking explain it like this: "What is all this about? Well - it was born out of a good lunch, like lots of ideas; where we...

"Yes and No" - A pretty evil flash film that shows you the right ways to drive a car. By Bruno Bozzetto the creator of Signor Rossi. [Via brain/map]...

I think there is a very interesting voice speaking up against OOP - on "Object Oriented Programming Oversold!" you get something to read which is probably pretty unpopular in certain circles. In short they state that OOP is not the solution for...

I think these are the most beautiful photos of goldfish I've ever seen: imagedive from Japan have an amazing portfolio. The whole site has an incredibly clean design. Another great link I found on valiyard|ru - this guy digs up such impressive...

Robert Hall has an amazing text-to-speech Flash demonstration on his site. Actually all his entries are now speech-enabled....

What a funny idea: take a simple program and write it in 304 different programming languages. On 99 Bottles of Beer you find solutions from "A+" until "ZZT". But you won't believe it - there is no Actionscript version yet....

[./ logicaland v0.1] is a multiuser global simulation which happens to have a pretty cool design. It looks like flash, but it is actually done in Java. This project was featured during this years Biennial in Torino, Italy which did not really...

Isn't this horrible? I just came back from the fleemarket where I discovered this collection of "crying kid" prints. I think the last time I saw something like this was in the late seventies when I was with my parents on...

There are some very interesting IK and physics simulation techniques demonstrated on flashvoodoo.com. And it looks really fast and smooth. Definately worth a closer look....

I just rediscovered this game from my youth and must say - pretty cool cover design. Fits perfectly my current retro feelings. So I made this my current desktop background. If you also like it, you can download it here....