A Developer’s Guide to Surviving Meetings … an invaluable guide for those long and boring meetings! Be sure to also read the comments as there are some nice tips as well! 
ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9.0 brought a big leap of speed and all kinds of changes and optimizations with it. But these mainly happen under the hood only. While Flash 8 came up with the bitmap level manipulation stuff, Flash 9 doesn’t come with any groundbreaking new features that are visible to the surface (except for the speed improvement).
So native graphics acceleration for Flash has to come one way or the other, not only because everybody wants it but also for Flash to stay competitive (think about WinFX). There is still Director one could argue. But somehow I get the feeling that Director will either continue it’s shadow existence or it will disappear sooner or later. 3D for Flash has to come, there is no way or excuse around it! Maybe the next version? Too early! Maybe Flash 10? Who knows! We might however see some sweet audio improvements in a near future!
Thy Dungeonman 3: Behold Thy Graphics, a text/graphics adventure from Homestarrunner in the style of the very early days of computing. Complete with fake floppy load delay and amber screen display! You find yourself in a dungeon cell with doom lurking all around you. The texts are intentionally exaggerated old ‘english’ and once you got out of the first area you’ll notice that this game plays quite smooth. It’s a short but funny and while you’re there, you find several other oldschool imitations on Homestarrunner and videlectrix.com.
mdm is working on a new tool named Rebus that can turn AS3 (and Flex2) files into .NET2 executables. It’s still in beta but registered users can download and test it. I’ve did a quick test and compiled my SWNameGen with Rebus and it went surprisingly smooth and flawless. It will offer some new and interesting extensions, to quote from the mdm support forums …
MainType is a relatively new font managing tool (for Win only) that puts Extensis Suitcase to shame! I’ve been trying Suitcase for a while but finding and activating fonts with it was a major pain in the butt. You had to dig around in the preview list on the right and then to activate the font you once again had to search for the same font in the left side list (all with no mousewheel support).
After I was fed up with Suitcase I went with OT1 fontmanager for quite a while but this manager, while a crapload better than Suitcase, runs a bit unstable and doesn’t support some important formats. It also can only install/uninstall fonts but not activate them temporarily. There are also a ton of other font managing tools out there but almost all I’ve came across so far didn’t fulfill my requirements.
Mike Morearty of Adobe wrote in his blog how to change the syntax colors in Flex Builder 2.0. This is useful stuff since I loathe the default blue and green colors of Flex’s syntax colors. Think about it! If you code the whole day long you have to look at your source all day long and you will look all the time at these colors! Sooner or later you start wearing blue shirts and green pants with pink socks!
To know this is even more important since Mike states in one of the comments that Flex 2.0 will not have any preferences to change these colors and that such a feature might be part of a later version. Another thing about the default syntax style that confuses me is that strings in quotes are in bold while keywords are not. I usually have it vice versa.
… I’m not talking about fun with playing the NGE mind you … when the NGE came live there was a lot of derision and mockery on the official forums. Among all this down pour of anger, hate and dismay about the NGE there were a handful cynical postings of how scenes in the Star Wars movies would look if the NGE had affected them. Because they were so utterly hilarious I decided to save them for later and what better opportunity do I have than to post them here for people who have missed them. In this sense read on and enjoy! 
I’m chased by bad luck since a while when it comes to getting this blog onto the Macromedia XML News Aggregator! First when I used Nucleus CMS it stopped fetching my feeds automatically after a while. Nobody, not me and not the admin at MXNA had any clue what was the cause. Now I’ve switched to Word Press in the hope that this would change but it now seems that I’m stuck forever with this problem. The feed URL for Word Press is very different and there seems to be no working redirection plugin for Word Press 2+. Also I cannot re-subscribe at MXNA with the same domain and any mail to the admin so far stood unanswered. Only workaround would be to change to another sub domain but I don’t want to go that far!
Short answer: no! Full answer here. However when I had Flex2 beta2 installed, I deleted the JRE that installed with Flex because I already had the JRE 5.0 installed and it caused no problems at all. I don’t really like the idea that every application installs it’s own JRE on my harddisk (Maya is such another app). Not that the ~50Mb are wasting too much space but its getting confusing if there are many JRE’s installed and Windows doesn’t make this fact easier with it’s obscure environment variables configuration.
Everybody has probably by now blogged about this but Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall are writing a Commodore C64 emulator in ActionScript 3.0! It is still to early to tell how this will take shape but things are looking good so far and by the current state the basic ROM works already. Try it and type the following listing in …
10 POKE 646,1
20 PRINT "C64 IN FLASH!"
30 POKE 53281,2::::::::::::::::::::POKE 53281,10
40 GOTO 30
Note that you need the latest Flash Player PlugIn (9.0) to see this. Either way this is exciting stuff and shows how powerful AS 3.0 and Flash Player 9 are going to be. Additionally the current beta player is a debug-only version that throttles the speed down several times. The final Player might be quite a bit faster.
I finally spend some time to make myself more familiar with the Flex 2 Beta and this is what came out as a result: Star Wars Name Generator! It’s a small and modest tool to generate random names (obviously). If you’re a fan of the Star Wars Pen & Paper Role-playing game (like me) you might find this tool useful!
You can generate names for planets and for characters, there are some parameters that can be chosen from before pressing the Generate button. After that it will spit out a list of more or less useful names (some of them sound very exotic). Interesting names can then be dragged and dropped onto the right side list. All names in this list are stored in local shared object on the users computer until the Clear button is pressed. The Switch button displays the saved names in a text area from where the names can be copied to the clipboard. (Small update: Works now with latest Flash Player v9).
Flex 2 public beta3 was just released and already all formerly written Flex2 beta2 apps started to fail working in the newest Flash Player! Seems like Adobe is making critical changes to the framework faster than we can change our pants!
This somehow spoils it for me to write more stuff with Flex until the very final release is published because I’m pretty sure it will fail working in a soon cooming beta4!
Yes, there’s a big and fat beta glued on it so it’s clear that changes are ahead and former stuff might fail but it’s all public and it’s obvious that Adobe isn’t only making it a public beta for testing but also for propaganda! My written SWNameGenerator doesn’t work anymore, giving me a nicely red flooded Eclipse editor full of errors!
