ripping carefully since 1978

Skype, watch out!

Front edge of Flash Platform-based VoIP, Ribbit Phone Flex Component: make and receive calls, record/send and receive voicemail, as well as add and manage contacts.

Brief history of Voice over the Internet made with Flash:

• May 14, 2006
  GTalkr, a web-based GTalk client was bought by Google
  
• September 25, 2006
  Adobe said to be creating VoIP Flash team
• January 1, 2007
  Flex/Flash Player Based VoIP Application - GizmoCall
• August 17th, 2007
  Ribbit Phone rings true at 360 Flex conference

Now Flex Developers can sign up for the pre release of Ribbit Phone to be part of the first ones to work with this Flex VoIP technology.

So, now our lovely Flash Player will support HD TV, MPEG-4, QuickTime, hardware acceleration and multi-core processors. As well as Adobe Media Player and Adobe AIR applications will do. There’s a lot of info wrote about these great news of the decade. Follow it:

• Ryan Stewart: The H.264 Announcement in Black and White
• Aral Balkan: Full FAQ on Adobe Flash Player H.264 video support.
• Adobe Press Release: “HDTV Quality Web Video Reaches the Masses with Industry Standard Video Codec in Flash Player“.

Web goes TV.

Here’s the Google 3D Maps with added motion blur (experimental) and plain 2d mode. Installer and Sources are available.

Screen shot (click to install)

Now I’m thinking about upgrading sources to the fresh release of Papervision3D which has 40% performance growth.

Semantic data, content and any other text elements of your Flex application are hidden from search engines by default. Bad. Users should be able to find your app by its data ??” because actually your application does contain the data, despite the fact Google can’t find it inside. So, if you want your great application to be search-able, it is up to you to provide the way for Google.

So ??” how to allow you Flex product entering the Pleroma of happy SERP creatures?

Josh Tynjala of Yahoo! Flash Platform in his recent article “How to make your hot new RIA friendly to search engines” describes an approach based on XML + XSL transformation, which was applied by Ted Patrick in his Flex Directory - a comprehensive list of firms who does Flex development. It works.

Straight and clear idea: provide raw text data (XML) to the search engine, and make it user-candy (did I made this word up?) with XSL transformation. So, Google’s spiders will get their texts and browsers will get their user interfaces built on the same texts ??” all honest, search friendly and flexible.

While this idea is still not widely used, Flash / Flex developers who will apply it right now will benefit from it much more than those who will apply it a year later.

What do you think ??” maybe this is good idea to create a corresponding template for Flex Builder to make it even easier?

Release the spiders!

Update: voting closed.

So I submitted a tee shirt designs to be voted in the Gmail Threadless and hopefully printed. Here are my tees:

And my wife ones:

If I get enough high scores the shirt will be printed and sold from the site and I will win some prizes including iPhone. Take a look at it and if you like it, sign up and give it a score.

BTW, Threadless has a lot of really quite cool tees created by the really talented people. So surely you can find some good for you there!

These Firefox search plug-ins provide Flex & Flash developers not only fastest but the most clever search by ActionScript 3, Flex 2, Flex 3 LiveDocs, Adobe Labs and Flash documentation because of Google engine is used. Install with one click:

1. Install ActionScript 3 LiveDocs Firefox search plug-in.
2. Install Flex 2 LiveDocs search plug-in.
3. Install Flex 3 LiveDocs Firefox search plug-in.
4. Install Adobe Labs search plug-in.

Today’s the great day. Sun is shining, I slept for two hours because of Gmail Threadless, wake up and read that Yahoo! announces its Flash Platform Team!

P.S. After I created and published these pluginsI’ve found that Alessandro Crugnola has made cool Flash/Flex Firefox Search Plugins already, and even proposed a cool approach of searching for flash docs with Google Suggest.

Sean Hartman made reusable vector UI elements to be a basis of Flex skins in the design process. They can be customized by designer then accordingly to application needs.

I’ve updated the sources and installation file of the Google 3D Map Application made with Adobe Apollo to the latest Adobe AIR version. People who requested it — you can now download the sources and Google 3D Map 0.3 AIR Installation File.

New features:

- Map scrolling made much more smooth. Just smooth.
- Mouse wheel support: wheel to zoom camera in/out, Shift + Wheel to move camera above the horizon.
- Now uses native AIR chrome.

To run this version Google 3D Map, you need Adobe AIR Runtime Beta 1 - latest release at the moment.

Click screenshot to download / install app:

Please note: to compile the project from sources, you need the Papervision3D library. I’ve included its classes in the sources, but you surely should check out the latest version of this great library to get a taste of cute flash 3d programming.

Some details about migration from Adobe Apollo Alpha to Adobe AIR Beta 1: the main differences in application structure is renamed application container: now you use <mx:WindowedApplication> instead of <mx:ApolloApplication>. Also, there’s some changes in the application.xml file. Read the good tips on migrating here: Re: Apollo to AIR migration topic at the codeapollo.com forums.

Today I discovered that Flash CS3 JSFL reference doesn’t mention that grouped MovieClips and TextFields can be detected throught Flash Javascript API.

Documentation only says that there’s only shape.isGroup property; if true, the shape is a group.

The surprising thing is that not only shapes have the “isGroup” property but other Elements too.

For example, create TextField and group it; then create MovieClip and group it: you can easy make sure that it is possible to detect the isGroup property correctly for both of these objects!

But JSAPI documentation doesn’t say it, it only describes the isGroup property for shapes, not for any other type of stage Element.

So, you can use isGroup property for any Element JSFL object! This is very important when you doing enumeration of each elements in Documents using Flash JavaScript. Whoa!

Matt Voerman brings a truly fresh look at the our lovely Flash Player calling it a SOC - Service-Oriented Client from Adobe. Very good point regarding any negotiations between developer and client: now, instead of saying “we can use Flash” you can tell everyone: “We will use the ubiquitous, most popular, lightweight, persistent, secured and rich-functioning web client software to deliver the project to the end user”. SOA + SOC = Flash Platform.

This is Flash 2.0, baby dear stake-holders, project managers and every true creator.

How your name can be translated to Japanese? Enter it in form below and have fun:

Inspired by InjunSincerely yours,
Shimoarichi.