Sometimes I really wish I worked over in San Francisco — now and again Adobe does these great meet ups, like recently happened with FlashCamp. They’ve put the video of the presentations online including a keynote by CTO Kevin Lynch and the following topics:
It seems Google did an update to how it indexes Flash content yesterday. Some of you might have already heard about the headless Flash Player aka “Ichabod” that Google and Yahoo got from Adobe — it seems it is now being put to better use.
Google has been indexing Flash content for years, basically extracting any static text that might be embedded in there. If you do a search with the filetype:swf flag you’ll see what that turns up.
Now with this new headless Flash Player, rather than trying to extract static data from the SWF file, it runs it over a command-line (non-visually) and gets back information about the contents of your Flash file, it will simulate button clicks etc. and capture the text results for indexing.
The important update now is that Google will also follow external resources, so for example XML files or other data that gets loaded in and not index it as a separate URL (as before) but in context to your Flash content. If you want to avoid your SWF files from getting crawled you can simply include them in a robots.txt directive like any other content.
I just finished my “Creative Programming in ActionScript 3.0″ session at day 1 of Multi-Mania 2009. Really enjoyed doing this new presentation though from the looks of it seemed I had more of a designer audience — so might have been a little code heavy.
As promised here are my slides, along with the example source files for download.
Something had to be done about confusing Flash Platform product names and if you paid close attention you could see this one coming for a while now. From the upcoming release onwards Flex Builder will be known as Flash Builder.
I initially had some reservations about this but it does go a long way in making the name more accurately describe what the tool does. Flex Builder is more than a development environment for Flex framework based applications. Myself and I’m sure many others in fact use it primarily for creating pure ActionScript 3.0 projects.
The Flex name will still be used but now exclusively to refer to the framework. If you call yourself a Flex developer and code using the Flex framework that is still a perfectly valid job title. This seemed to be a particular sore spot for some people, but I don’t get their argument — after all, you don’t call yourself a Dreamweaver or Visual Studio developer when talking about HTML or C#. Surely your job title describes the technologies rather than the specific tools you use.
One point I do feel strongly about: Flash Builder vs Flash Professional naming. The epithet “Professional” doesn’t cover what the Flash authoring environment really is. With the new name changes it comes across as though Flash Builder is a basic tool and Flash Professional an extended version of that.
I’d recommend going one step further and rebranding Flash Professional to something like Flash Designer and get it back on track to being primarily a tool for animation and interface design.
For a moment it looked as though I was going to miss out on this years FFK in Cologne — the largest German speaking conference covering web products and technologies organized by Marc Thiele and Sascha Wolter of Flashforum.de. This is already their 9th edition and not surprisingly it has completely sold out!
At the last minute I managed to secure a spot (thanks to Marc) in the “Discover the third dimension” workshop on Away3D that Jens Brynildsen is teaching on Monday. I’ve already experimented with Papervision3D quite a bit but was eager to look into what Away3D has to offer so this is the perfect opportunity.
I’ll be sure to blog about to workshop and perhaps share some experiments after I’ve familiarized myself with the code.
Flash at the Lake is a two day conference organized by the SFUG (Switzerland Flash User Group) taking place at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich, right by the lake side.
I must have seen Joshua Davis present at least half a dozen times over the last few years but there’s something about his work that keeps inspiring — pushing Flash beyond its limitations to create some beautiful artwork. Definitely one to watch!
I’m happy to announce a new set of intensive one-day courses on Flex, ActionScript and AIR that I’ll soon start delivering at Skills Matter in London. During that day you’ll get a thorough overview of the technology and some good hands-on experience building various real world examples.
Here are the next few teach dates you can register for:
30-03-09 Introduction to Adobe Flex 06-04-09 Adobe Flex for Flash Developers 14-04-09 Beginning Adobe AIR 11-05-09 Introduction to Adobe Flex
I came across another great presentation by Seb Lee-Delisle that you’ll want to see — he talks about augmented reality and working with the FLARToolkit, some incredibly cool and fun stuff to try with Flash.
Well worth 15 minutes of your time to sit back and get inspired!
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