Peter Elst

We’ve finally got the MMUG Belgium site back up and running after a serious server crash just before Christmas. For our next meeting on February 10th we’ve got Peter Ginneberge (aka Muzak) lined up to talk about ActionScript 2.0. Unlike our previous meetings this one will be held at the Expertise Centre for Digital Media facilities in Diepenbeek (Hasselt), thanks to the kind folks @ Nascom.
The event is free of charge as always but be sure to register! Visit the website for more information.

Ultrashock has recently released its top notch Audio Essentials collection and now also has a great SFX pack available. It’s often a real pain to find quality sound loops and effects for Flash content and these collections will definitely help you out with that.

Be sure to check out the Audio Essentials and SFX pack sample MP3, if you’re a registered Ultrashock member you also get two free SFX packs for download.

Visit the Ultrashop for more information!

Does anyone know what is happening with the Flash Europe conference? After rescheduling the conference back in November it all looked very promising for this coming March, great venue, great speaker line-up etc.

The only catch is that myself and many other speakers I’ve talked to have been unable to get in touch with the organization or even just get confirmation whether or not it is going ahead. It sure makes you wonder what’s going on there, keeping my fingers crossed the conference will go ahead but won’t hold my breath (or buy a plane ticket to Barcelona for that matter) just now.

[update] comments are down for now after a serious spam attack, sorry for the inconvenience — feel free to email me your feedback!

As no doubt everyone is aware, South-East Asia was hit by a massive earthquake and resulting tidal floods have caused possibly hundreds of thousands of casualties.

When confronted with a disaster of that scale you can only hope and try to make a difference in your own way. It is encouraging to see so many organisations and individuals getting involved from all over the world making this a united effort to help surviving victims that are at this very moment stuck without shelter, food and clean water. In areas I’ve visited over the past few years and are close to my heart in Tamil Nadu, India and Sri Lanka the collective death toll at this moment is over 45,000 with many more people directly affected by the disaster.

After considering what I could do to help, I decided to put the first in a series of Flash Elements I’m planning to release as a commercial product up for download. Those of you that saw my presentation at the MediaElements conference have already saw it in action, the MP3Player Flash Element allows you to quickly and easily add an MP3 playback controller to your website. The MP3Player currently supports setting the autoplay, volume, caption text and timeline visibility properties and support for ID3 tags and playlists is planned for a next upcoming release.

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Anyone that donates 10 Euro (14 USD, 7 GBP) or more will be eligable for free updates and a substantial discount for the final product when it is released. All donations received will be forwarded in full to help fund the relief effort. You can download the MP3Player Flash Element here, feel free to contact me with any questions or comments!

[update] The first donations are coming in, thanks to those contributing! Looking at the download statistics just about 1 in every 50 people donated through this site.