June 30th 2008 was a day that Flash developers had been waiting for a long time; Google and Adobe had finally announced that Flash .swf files could be crawled by Google! In fact, the extensive news release from the Adobe Developer Center also stated that Yahoo would be incorporating similar technology in short order. When I read this news and the consequential articles from the web marketing community it became very clear that this update was a great step but far from the fix that some Flash developers are likely to pitch to their clients. As a result, I wanted to add my voice to the buzz on this topic and share with you my thoughts on how to optimize a site using Flash while considering the current updates.

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Making money is hard these days. But for Flash Game Developer, Meez got a “Avatar Games Contest” with over $20,000 prize in cash.

Meez is organizing a Avatar Games contest for Flash Game Developer. There’s $20,000 worth of cash in prize money. Meez has partnered with FlashGameLicense to run this contest starting today through September 8, 2008.

How?

You’ll need the Meez Inside Games developer tools — Avatar API. The games won’t be limited to the world of Meez. Some of the 3D Meez avatars are doing their thing in Dance Floor Destroyer. Your games will be judged on the overall cool factor of your avatar.

The Grand Prize winner will get $10,000, second place will come away with $5,000, third with $2,500 and five honorable mentions will get $1,000 each.

Adobe has just made it easier for Google and Yahoo! to uncover Web content that was previously “invisible” to Web searches.

With technology provided to them by Adobe, Google & Yahoo! will be able to better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications including Flash files.

Currently, search engines index text and links with Flash files, but up until now rich Internet applications and dynamic Web content have been elusive to search engines.

Google has already got the ball rolling with this news by announcing that they have launched a new Flash indexing algorithm which will index content from Flash menus, buttons, banners and entire Flash sites.

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This is a follow-up to my post “Live Uefa Euro 2008 via FMS”. I’ve just heard that the Euro 2008 is streamed live with Flash in France too.

This time DBee is doing the encoding for the website of the french TV Channel M6. They are serving a 1.1Mbps stream (1Mbps VP6 video + 64 Kbps MP3 audio) sized at 534×300 (16/9), using a Digital Rapids StreamZ Live and FME as a backup, from a DVB-T source via SDI input. The stream is served by the FMS3 Limelight platform which sustains a ‘very heavy load’ in terms of concurrent streams, however exact details on viewership could not be shared.

The user experience both on the page itself as well as in full screen is nice, a fact confirmed by the choice of the public: up to 65% of the users choose Flash, compared to Windows Media which is also being offered. This is an interesting figure, because on a comparable event one year ago during the Evian Masters, DBee reported that only 40% of users picked Flash while over 60% chose Windows Media.

The next match is the semi-final between Russia and Spain on the 26th of June, but note that streams are geo-locked to French web users.

Do you write a lot of ActionScript classes in FlexBuilder? I do and one of the great little keyboard shortcuts I use time and time again is Apple-Shift-O (or Source > Organize Imports, for a Windows shortcut consult the docs).

What this command will do is remove all unnecessary imports and organize all the required ones nicely. A block of code such as this:

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And now for something completely different. Have you ever thought about riding a submarine? Or how about simply controlling it, RC style? Well now you can and you can do it in style via Flash and FMS.

On Fosters.co.uk riders can control a marine ROV (remotely operated vehicle) which is more commonly used for commercial exploratory underwater operations. The ROV is in a 100,000 litre (roughly 26,000 US gallon) tank at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth.

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Usually solutions are there to solve problems, yet I am having a hard time figuring out which problem Silverlight is trying to solve. My view point on Silverlight is that of an end user since I have not yet developed any Silverlight content. This is not down to a lack of interest either, after all it is a much hyped technology, but due to a lack of development tools on my chosen operating system, OSX.

As an end user I have yet to see anything that offers any benefit to me. Quite the opposite actually. When I recently asked about Silverlight demos on the streamingmedia list was pointed to Silverlight.net by a Microsoft employee. I walked away asking myself if this was the cutting edge of Silverlight deployments…

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While ISC has not upped the threat level yet, some 20,000 web servers have been hit with a code injection that leads to a zero day flaw in adobe flash, providing total ownage of your computer.

Reports of the zero day on Adobe Flash Player versions 9.0.124.0 and older meaning current version and older are getting some traction this morning. The drive by down load has been verified, and while it is still early, this could promise to be a bad day for clean up efforts because the wide distribution of flash, and the known web sites that are vulnerable to a SQL code injection attack are many.

This threat should be considered very serious because of the widespread distribution that Adobe Flash enjoys on the Windows ecosystem. If this exploit gets seeded on high-traffic Web sites, we could be in for a long clean-up operation. Source: Zdnet

Right now not much is known about the method, but odds are highly likely that adobe is on this one and if they issue a patch today, make sure you update your computers with the new version. The use of flash streaming, flash advertising, and flash everything else on the Internet is fairly common. This would also not be the first time that flash has been found to have an issue that has the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of computers.

Flash Decompiler Trillix for Mac

Flash Decompiler Trillix is perhaps the only tool available for the Mac which can help you regain lost FLA source files. It supports up to Flash 9 and ActionScripts 3.0. The people from Eltima were nice enough to send me a review copy of their software.

Flash Decompiler Trillix can extract images, sounds, video, shapes, morphs, fonts, texts, buttons, sprites, frames and scripts into various file formats. All objects are extracted separately into flash animation (SWF) and flash sources (FLA) file formats, except scripts which can be saved to AS and TXT file formats.

To modify a Flash file, you can simply convert the SWF into an FLA, modify/replace any of the Object and publish it back to SWF. Well, the interface is rather Window like but ported to the Mac, but I guess that’s OK.

Well, if you’re on Windows, have a look at ActionScript Viewer which is an awesome piece of Flash Decompiler for Windows.

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Good morning coders, and what a morning it is. There’s some huge, huge, huuuge news. Did I mention how huge this is?

Flash Player 10 Beta has just dropped on Labs and while the most hyped features center around 3D support and custom filters (amongst other things), there’s also a goodiebag full of toys for the audio/video crowd.
How do you fancy some UDP? Peer to peer? Speex audio codec support (finally!)?

Let’s dig a little deeper. The new rich media features in Flash Player 10 beta cannot be leveraged until the next version of Flash Media Server ships (this is likely to be a dot release to go hand in hand with the Player 10 release). However you can apply to take part in the FMS prerelease program and test these features before they are publicly released.

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