Multidmedia Limited (MDM) has announced their new 2005 Software Line Up. The products include Zinc V2 aka Flash Studio Pro, Glow V2, Capture and MDM Studio Pro. At this point I would like to say a few good things about MDM Flash Studio Pro. With my experiments it’s one of the best tool in the market for creating stand-alone Flash applications and has tons of very good features build into it. It pushes the limits of Flash applications to new planes and people are creating great applications using this tool. Don’t forget to checkout their showcase page.
January 28, 2005
A comprehensive site for Flash Video
I stumbled across this site, today. Its really cool, it has tons of information on Flash Video and a lot of free components that you can download. The forum has most of the questions related to Flash Video, answered. Don’t forget to check out the samples section, though the list of samples is not that vast, it has some real cool videos. They have different players for streaming and progressive videos. A must-visit site for all you FLV freaks.
January 25, 2005
SWiSHmax Competition 2004 Winners Announced
SwishZone has announced the winners of its SWiSHmax Competition 2004. The winners are rewarded $500 each. The winners have been choosen in two categories : Animation and Scripting. Both of them looks impressive.
Check out the winners and the runners here.
January 24, 2005
MSN Beta Search
MSN has launched the Beta version of its search engine. Now MSN is generating its own results. With the recent decision of Yahoo to slowly drift away from Google feed and with its acquisition of Overture, AlltheWeb, AltaVista and Inktomi it now has a big enough database to get serious in the search engine space. Looks like there will be a healthy competition.
You can access the MSN Beta Search here. The UI looks pleasing and uses a very similar interface to that of Google's.
January 21, 2005
Flash - Shamelessly copied !
This may be a bit late of a news, but I strongly felt the urge to blog it and express my opinion about this. I have been hearing about this product named Namo FlashCreator from some people, claiming that it’s a product competing with Macromedia Flash. I just got curious and went ahead and downloaded the trail version of it and installed it. I was stunned to see that the interface of Macromedia Flash was shamelessly copied. It looks alike, except for some very minor changes in timeline and stuff. The most annoying point is that these people are challenging Macromedia Flash, how funny. The biggest advantage as people claim is that it is priced at $50.
I saw John Dowdell blogging about this some time back, he was so generous towards them and even projected that as a positive growth towards accelerating development for mobile devices using Flash. In my personal opinion Namo doesn't even have 10% of features which Macromedia Flash has. It's a shame on Namo to give such a foolish press release. One thing I am wondering is how come Macromedia have not yet sued them for copying Macromedia Flash's interface.
January 19, 2005
Avalon 3D Video Download: Channel 9 MSDN Video Interview with Daniel Lehenbauer
Microsoft has released a video on Avalan 3D, where Daniel Lehenbauer explains some cool features of Avalaon 3D. The video is actually an interview for Channel 9. You can download the video here. Its quite heavy, almost 74 Megs, they should have used an FLV instead of WMV ;)
January 14, 2005
New Poll : Do you think Microsoft Avalon is a possible threat to Macromedia Flex?
As I have mentioned in my earlier post on Flex Vs Avalon I am starting the series of polls in an attempt to find out what the community thinks about the what the next wave in RIA's is. The first poll on this series is this, you can vote your option on the right side of the sites main page.
January 13, 2005
Flex Vs Avalon
There has been some interesting posts and very interesting debates about Flex Vs Avalon all over the web. Some of them which I came across recently are Dylan Greene's and Jesse Ezell's. One thing which you find common in all these kinda discussion is the fact that at one side we have the diehard Microsoft or rather Longhorn fans and the other side Anti Microsoft guys. Whatever it is, people are optimistic about both Avalon and Flex. The one point which got my attention was about the non-availability of working demos which showcases the power of Flex, which is not true any more, you have a lot of them here. I have decided to create a series of polls based on this topic and publish the poll results every fortnight so we know what the community thinks about this.
Some more interesting entries worth reading are listed below :
Microsoft Developer Days: Avalon
Drop a line, about your thoughts on this.
January 11, 2005
Flash Lite : iMode HTML Simulator FAQ
I think most of you who have been using Flash Lite for sometime now, would have been aware of this one, this is for those ones like me who are pretty new to FlashLite and especially for people who dont have access to actual devices. The most suffered part of the world is India as most of the mobiles that has Flash Player inbuilt are not available in India. Considering all this and some other questions which people come up with I decided to write a small FAQ on iMode HTML Simulator. Here we go..
FAQ 1 : What is iMode HTML Simulator?
iMode HTML Simulator is a HTML Simulator for iMode's which can be used by Flash Lite developers to test contents on iMode phones.
FAQ 2 : Where can I download it from?
You can download it from here.
FAQ 3: Is there a English version of this page / I dont understand what is written there?
As far as I know there isn't one. But you can try using Google Translator. The procedure is very simple to download this. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will find three text boxes, in the first text field type your Name, the second your Company Name and Email ID in the third and click on the first button below it and your download will start.
FAQ 4: When I publish a HTML file using Flash and try to load it, the Log window displays error messages and the Flash content is not displayed in the browser window. What should I do about it and what is the reason?
Yes, its true that published HTML files do not show up in the simulator, the reason being the way a Flash SWF file has to be embedded in the HTML file, is a bit different from how its normally done. For your HTML page which has Flash SWF embedded in it you have to use a special property named data in your object embedding code which Justin Everett - Church has rightly pointed out in the Macromedia Flash Lite forum. I heard about this sometime back from a friend of mine. To add to what Justin has mentioned in the forum, you can additinally add a HREF to the HTML file which when clicked will launch the SWF file.
FAQ 5: Is there any example files which I can download?
Yes, you can find a example which I tried out, here.
Here is a screenshot of how it looks like :
If you have any more questions feel free to drop a comment or use the Feedback menu on the main site to write to me.
January 06, 2005
Flashforward Film Festival Site Nomination
The Flashforward film festival site nomination ends on January 10th, so hurry and nominate your favourite site. The URL for nominating sites is here.
The featured speakers at the Flashforward2005 San Francisco conference are :
- Craig Swann/Crash!Media: ORIGINAL SOUND, San Francisco 2002
- Grant Skinner/gskinner.com: APPLICATION, San Francisco 2003
- D. Garrett Nantz/Big Spaceship: GAME, San Francisco 2003; ORIGINAL SOUND, New York City 2003
- Patrick Gardner and Tony Hogqvist/Perfect Fools: NAVIGATION, San Francisco 2003; 3D, San Francisco 2004
- Kymberlee Weil/Mixed Grill: APPLICATION, New York City 2003
- Emanuele Petrungaro/Vianet: PEOPLE'S CHOICE, New York City 2003