When I get the chance I plan on picking this article about Flash 8 and 9 installations apart, as Flash can seemingly do strange things depending on how it’s installed (judging by past experience at work).
Straight link to the PDF here.
Beta player here, with the FAQ here. Still no word on DRM and/or protecting content in the plug-in (as opposed to outside the browser through Adobe Media Player). Shame; looks like Silverlight will still have it trumped in that respect, as not everyone’s going to want to shell out for Adobe’s media server to ensure secure streaming of content.
The third beta of the Flash player on Adobe Labs will support H.264 video, with full support in the “proper” version of the plug-in coming in the 4th quarter of this year.
Big news, and a big step towards taking on Silverlight. Lots of detailed insider information on this announcement can be found on kaourantin.net, with other sites I’ve read this morning including Yahoo!, Aral Balkan, and Flashmagazine.
Yahoo! have launched their Flash Developer Center, and among the interesting articles and downloads is this article about runtime font embedding in Flash CS3.
It looks like embedding fonts might be a hell of a lot easier in the latest version of Flash. Anyone who’s dabbled in Flash and non-standard system fonts knows it’s been a pain in the ass in the past to get working (hidden font fields off-stage, etc), so I’m eager to see how things now fair in the latest version of Flash.
As for the other stuff up on the site, I expect they’ll flesh out things as time goes on. I wonder how easy to skin and customise their components are, as one of the reasons people opt for Flash is because it allows them total control over the look and feel of the user interface.
Another thing I’m wondering about is the accessibility of their components. I’m writing this on a MacBook and checked out their components in Firefox (admittedly not a great browser when it comes to tabbing and Flash), but even when focused within the Flash movie my tabbing didn’t seem to do anything.
I’m a big fan of Yahoo’s User Interface Library efforts, and now it seems they’re going to open up a lot of their Flash stuff (including best practices on accessibility).
More info here.
gskinner.com has posted a very useful panel for use within Flash CS3 that enables quick testing and packaging of AIR applications.
Just installed and ran it myself with no problems.