Jukka-Pekka Keisala

I was amazed about Flex when I first saw it but even more amaze I got when I realize that as a developer I was not able to get even trial without paying. Like I posted about it in 2004. I never installed it to my pc where I evaluate everything before recommending to a customer. Macromedia clearly had forgot something that Microsoft does quite well.

Anyway, it seems that now that Adobe takes more developer friendly approach by announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). I hope not too late, though.

Microsoft will be very strong on bringing Silvelight to their developer community. Many says that Microsoft will fail because they have no graphics community behind but I don’t think it’s entirely true. After all they do have directX and great developer tools and network. Also, penetration market on Silverlight is easy to fix by wrapping it to some security update from WindowsUpdate.

I have always loved Adobe/Macromedia desktop products but somehow they are not very appealing for me when  it comes to ServerSide. I think they should focus much more giving out to developers. After all it’s us who recommend products and it’s us who answers to our bosses questions if we should look deeper on the given technology.

Here is a small list of Open Source Flash Projects. Tell me if you know more.

FFIE
Alternative for Macromedia Flex
http://www.fluidflashinterfaces.com/

Laszlo
The development and delivery platform.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/

Flash For Linux
Development environment for Macromedia Flash,
http://f4l.sourceforge.net/

AS Development Tool (asdt)
A plugin for the popular Eclipse platform to work with ActionScript 2 files
http://www.asdt.org/

JavaSWF2
Set of Java packages that enable the parsing, manipulation and generation of the SWF.
http://www.anotherbigidea.com/javaswf/

Ming
SWF output library and PHP module
http://ming.sourceforge.net/

SSWF
The library which enables a programmer to easily create an SWF file.
http://sswf.sourceforge.net/

AsUnit
Unit Test Framework for Macromedia Flash ActionScript 2.0
http://www.asunit.com/

GPLFlash
GPL licensed flash player.
http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/

MTASC
ActionScript 2 Open Source free compiler
http://www.mtasc.org/

Flash Ant
Command-line Flash Compiler
http://www.flashant.org/

Flirt
SWF rendering library.
http://flirt.sourceforge.net/

Swfmill
Tool to process SWF files. It can convert SWF from and to an XML-dialect. xml2swf, swf2xml, libxslt-based XSL transformator etc.
http://iterative.org/swfmill/

SolVE
Local Shared Object Viewer/Editor
http://solve.sourceforge.net/

Andre Michelle has made AS2 framework for blogs made with wordpress. Get it here

Check out this beatiful little story. Pretty cool idea

Probably every single web designer have had to explain to their clients why in webpage they cant use font what is in their design guideline. I found this nice little hack that allows you to go around with this by replacing text with small flash movie. With sIFR you get nice anti-aliased headers or navigation elements to your page.
Check out sample and article about it.

Heh, A virtual fridge is a funny little app. Try to write your name before anyone else

Interesting usage of ming Convert Flash MX Drawing API Output To Other Image Formats

sephiroth.it publish all the steps in order to get MacOSX working on Windows XP system.

Macromedia release today Flex with $12000 price tag. Damn, that is expensive piece of software anyone remembers Generator and Site-spring those died on same reason? just too expensive? But what makes matters even worse developer needs to pay for demo 8 bugs. Quite funny actually, you need to pay for demo.