Forget spinning cubes with video stuck on their sides and instead check out the demo below. From Immersive Media, same the guys that brought you street view on Google Maps, comes an innovative new way to navigate 360 degrees inside a live playing video. How is it delivered? Flash of course.

Check out this demo. Once the main content starts to play you can click inside the video and drag your mouse into the direction you want to view. Make sure you check out the snowboarders at about 1 minute in - and follow them as they go over the kicker.

Today, Adobe announced the Open Screen Project and with it came the ultimate good news — the SWF and FLV/F4V formats are now totally open source. Adobe has dropped the licensing restrictions on the formats. So, not only can you create tools that writes SWFs (this was already open) but now you can create tools that plays the formats back (you no longer need to just rely on the Flash Player).

The Open Screen Project initiative by Adobe is supported by a group of industry leaders, including ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless.

Well, one of the missing name in the list above is that of Apple, which feels that Flash is not good enough for the iPhone. It may be remembered that CEO Steve Jobs has publicly criticized Flash for being too slow.

The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Also supporting the Open Screen Project are leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices.

(more…)

So back in January this year, Flashnewz reported the commencement of the 2008 Flash Goddess Award. Flashgoddess.com, a site promoting the creativity of female flash designers everywhere was set to grant a mortal woman a title that of a goddess! Alas, the deity was spurned by her subjects and due to so few applicants to the contest, a FlashGoddess was not dubbed her title nor granted her magnificent powers. The winner was to receive a number of gifts including a copy of Flair, a Flash presentation software package, $500 worth of development files, as well as tickets, accolades and member profile status to the 2008 FITC Design and Technology Awards.

The FITC is a Canadian-based organization with the purpose of focusing on new media technology development. The FITC Toronto & Design Festival is a conference that showcases new interactive design techniques and development tools with exhibits, workshops, award ceremonies and social party mixers. Unfortunately no one was showered with this multitude of goodies, but some women that did participate received some tickets to the event that were originally designed as runner-up prizes.

The recipients of these tickets went to the following:

Kate Bond www.pushingink.com
Shauna Ehninger www.thedreadedgrove.com
Jennifer Kossack www.jennicartoon.com
Elysha Poirier www.elyshapoirier.com
Michelle Rueda ruedaminute.com

Even though there will be no reigning FlashGoddess this year, a hearty congratulations goes out to the featured flash designers for their excellent work and admissions to the design festival.

It’s amazing how unscrupulous (and naive) some folks are these days. What’s the matter with Flvmagazine.com (no need to go there by the way, the site is rubbish) publishing content that’s blatantly scraped off other websites? And not only that, but after stealing the content they don’t even give credit to the original author.
Simon just spotted one of his tutorials on Flvmagazine’s website. I had a little dig around - and now I wonder if Lee Brimelow knows that some of his content is also being pirated. Who else?

Flvmagazine (by Flvhosting.com) - the company which advertised on this site once and never paid their bill - should get a grip.

Badmash is bored. Don’t get us wrong. We love us some Bollywood. We couldn’t help but getting addicted to MTV Roadies. We even admit to curling up with an episode of Kaun Banega Crorepati every once in a while.

Keyur Patel, of Velocity Interactive Group, likes giving birth to new companies. His latest kid is a Badmash, a newly formed pune-based (India) Studio. Sandeep Sood of DoubtSourcing, who thinks brown people are funny, is the head writer at Badmash.

Isn’t it a perfect day to read another lambast of the Flash Player for Security Issues?

Security firms and Interested Institutes keep stumbling on security issues and vulnerabilities almost every waking hour of the day. Very recently, Google Researchers documented serious vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash SWFs. Another Flash related security issues surfaced about a week ago that the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) interface of your Router may be highly vulnerable to use by hackers seeking to modify their settings — such as choice of DNS Server — from an external location using Flash.

(more…)

Adobe have today released Flash Media Server 3.

The server now ships in two editions, the Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3 (FMSS) is ideal if all you want to do is serve up live or on demand video while the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3 (FMIS) gives you access to all features including video recording, server side Shared Objects and more.

FMSS retails at USD $995 while FMIS will set you back USD $4500.

(more…)

Good morning Flashers. It’s official: Flash Media Server 3 will be released in and it will improve pricing dramatically (yay!).

New Server Editions
This has been a long time coming and it marks a huge step forward for FMS as a platform. There will be no more bandwidth or connection limitations (instead it’s all you can eat so to speak) and there will be two server editions which simplify the whole offering greatly: Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server and Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server. A free developer edition is also available.

As you may have guessed, Flash Media Streaming Server will allow you to - wait for it - stream video (both live and on-demand) while Flash Media Interactive Server basically presents the current feature set of FMS2 (and then some more), the swiss army knife of media servers which supports not only streaming but also has scripting capabilities, server side remote objects, and everything you are used to to date. This means that Flash Media Streaming Server (FMSS) is basically a stripped down version of the Flash Media Interactive Server, and it will cost less too (and pricing was a major sore point to date). This makes sense, because so far you had to pay for all features even if all you wanted to do was push video.
(more…)

Yahoo is upgrading the Yahoo Widgets platform to be compatible with Flash and HTML widget development.

“Flash opens the door to all sorts of rich experiences” said Yahoo director of product management Scott Derringer.

Version 4.5 was announced yesterday and supports actionscript as well as Flex. eWeek reports:

Other new features from Yahoo for developers include the ability to create more engaging desktop widgets by using new rich-media capabilities, including video. Developers also can now download their desktop widgets from any Web page with one to two clicks via the new in-page installer badges. Developers’ widgets also can now be discovered by more users via the Yahoo Widget Gallery, which features a new search engine optimization capability, Derringer said.

Yahoo also revamped its widget offerings for consumers. The company is making it easier for users to discover and download desktop widgets that deliver content and services from the Yahoo Widget Gallery.

Apart from that, a new security model has been put in place as well as a full W3C-compliant DOM allowing for easier JavaScript development.

The New York Times has more on Yahoo Widget Engine 4.5.

Were-Here, which once used to be a must-visit resource site for Flash and related developers, is shutting down.

They are now concentrating on their software development rather than running the site.

Here is from their email that was sent out to the members;

As some of you may have already noticed, we closed down our Were-Here Flash Resource site last week. If you have spent any time on the site recently, it was pretty obvious that all of our resources are being used to make software, rather than running the site.

We felt that it was simply time to put Were-Here to rest and focus on our core business. With all of the great Flash resource sites out there, we feel confident that our Were-Here members will migrate to a more fresh and vibrant community.

Please accept this email as a note of thanks for being part of the Were-Here community and for your support throughout the years.

Wishing the erstwhile Were-Here team the Very Best for their current and future endeavor.

Comments