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Google Maps is amazing. Sometimes you just have to hold your hands up and give credit and the Google guys deserve it for their maps application. Now they’ve released an API for Flash! Woo-hoo!

iJoyride. Surely the future of exercise? It’s like the Hawaii chair on crack with a lot of sexual suggestion thrown into the mix.

A good post from Aral regarding the state of accessibility within Flex. I hope they concentrate on this side of Flash soon rather than adding more wizzy features; it seems with Flash and AJAX you’re always having to hold your hands up and admit that they don’t bring a lot to the party when it comes to people with specific accessibility issues.

Very good article on the dev Opera site by brothercake on why AJAX isn’t necessarily the best thing ever when it comes to building websites and keeping the web accessible to all.

Meant to post this before. Interesting comparison between the performance of Flash within a browser and within the AIR runtime.

One of the major pains of web development is having to factor in users with “non-standard configurations”. What looks good on your machine doesn’t mean it will for a proportion of your users. However, this no-flash warning up on the South Park website is pure genius, as is the 404. I wish I was given the green light at work to do this!

As read originally on Compiler.

Revamped bugs system now online.

Adobe have released the latest version of the Flash plug-in, version 9.0.124.0. I blogged about the reasons for this release previously, but it’ll mostly affect older Flash content played out through the latest player. See the updated posting on Adobe’s site for detailed information.

Slightly more worrying is Grant Skinner’s latest blog post which outlines some of the performance issues and existing security holes in all versions of the Flash 9 plug-in relating to unloading content. I can appreciate that the jump to ActionScript 3 was a big one for the Adobe team but it’s left me wishing for Flash 10 to be released sooner rather than later, although considering there’s been large functionality jumps in some minor versions of the Flash 9 plug-in I wouldn’t mind some of Grant’s suggested workarounds making their way into a minor version of Flash 9.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m too used to things working out-of-the-box when it comes to applications. Maybe it’s because I’m on a Mac (at home). Maybe I’m a bit slow (a distinct possibility).

Today I tried to get a combination of Eclipse and FDT working, after two very clever ex-colleagues of mine highly recommended it as a better alternative to Flex Builder. After going for the PHP flavour of Eclipse on recommendation, I installed FDT through the Software Updates option within Eclipse. On restart I was prompted with memory warnings; that I needed to assign more memory to Eclipse. I thought this was a bit strange, as I was used to doing this years ago on Mac OS9 but hadn’t come across it so far on OS X. Anyways, I managed to sort this issue but then compiling my Hello World test required the Flex SDK being targeted. No biggie, but needed to tackle workarounds involving playerglobal.swc on the Mac. Eventually I published my swf from ActionScript.

Decided to try and publish some MXML. Learned that FDT seemingly doesn’t support it yet but that it’s coming soon. So, right now I’m in this kinda vague no mans land where I think I know I should kinda be checking out FDT, but I don’t appreciate why it’s so good and the workflow process that might be entailed with using it (especially if you’re also having to deal with MXML).

I’ll hopefully update this again once I’ve made further inroads into the process, but after day one checking it out I’m not sold yet. Is it better than working in Flex Builder 3 and/or Flash?

P.S. Hello Adam and Joe! Not THE Adam and Joe, although they are pretty funny themselves.

Apparently. Just get on with it people…