Archive for March, 2003

FlashComponent.com is back online

Posted on March 18, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (3)

FlashComponent.com, one of the community component sites is back online, and is asking for users to resubmit their extensions.

So, if you have built an extension, head over to the site and resubmit it.

[via josh dura]

New Flash MX Content at Macromedia.com / Integrating Flash and Visual Basic

Posted on March 18, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (3)

We have released a ton of new Macromedia Flash content, articles and resources at the Macromedia DevNet Center.

Of particular interest, we have released a new sample application. The Flash Slide Show Sample application shows how to integrate Flash within Visual Basic applications. Here is a list of the new articles included with the sample application:

We also have a number of other new articles and resources, including:

You can visit the DevNet Center here.

Video of the Week Tip Archive

Posted on March 17, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (0)

I was playing around on the newly designed DevNet Center this weekend and came across the Video Tip of the Week Archive. I knew that we had a video tip of the week, but I didn’t realize how extensive it was. The archive has a ton of short video tutorials on topics covering most of our products. There are quite a few on Flash MX including:

You can view a complete list of all of the the Video Tips of the Week here.

Macromedia.com Beta : The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Posted on March 13, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (29)

We launched our new website site last week, and as I am sure most people in the community know, it generated quite a lot of discussion. Well, we were listening. We took the feedback (from the community, survey, feedback forms, and talking to directly to users), tweaked the site, and have released a new version of the website. The new home page is a hybrid site combining HTML and Flash, has a more straight forward navigation scheme, and loads much quicker now.

We learned a ton of things from the first week of the beta, and while everything didn’t work out as we had planned, we decided the information was too valuable to keep to ourselves. We have put together a report about what we learned from the first stage of the beta. The report outlines what worked (the exchanges) and what didn’t (the home page), and provides detailed information, statistics and survey results about the website’s first week.

You can view the report here.

Some of the interesting info you can find from the report:

  • Connection speed did not influence how people rated their experience on the site.
  • Processor speed did influence how people rated the site.
  • The number of downloads on the exchange doubled.
  • Customer satisfaction for the Rich Internet Applications on the site were generally high.
  • Very few users used any of the advanced navigation on the home page (less than 5%).

Is the new site perfect? Not yet. We are still working on improving it. If you have any comments or suggestions, let us know about them through the feedback form, and / or survey.

Visit the updated website here.

FlogSpot

Posted on March 13, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (7)

Josh and Daniel Dura have released a sneak peak of their super RSS Aggregator app in the making. It is named FlogSpot, and currently has two main features. First, it is a great Flash weblog aggregator, on par with Flog and Full as Goog. Second, and the thing that really sets it apart, is that it is also a forum auto populated from the various RSS feeds. Pretty sweet.

They have hinted at some more features, but it is already pretty useful as is.

You can view the site here.

You can view the forums here.

My request? If someone posts a comment to the FlogSpot forum in response to one of my articles, use the weblog xml-rpc api to submit the comment to my site (or at a minimum do a track back ping).

DevNet : New Macromedia.com Topic Center

Posted on March 12, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (5)

I have been meaning to post this for a couple of days, but haven’t had a chance until now. We have released a new center on the DevNet center. The Macromedia.com Topic Center contains articles and resources on the new Macromedia.com website.

Here is a list of the current articles:

You can view the new topic center here.

Macromedia.com : Advanced Navigation

Posted on March 11, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (0)

Sean Corfield has posted some information on the navigation at Macromedia.com and how it uses Local Shared Objects to remember where you last visited.

You can view Sean’s post here.

There is also an article on the DevNet center which discusses some of the design elements of the site, including the navigation. You can view that article here.

Of course, if you don’t want / need to use the advanced / customized navigation, you don’t have to. Just use the navigation bar at the top of the page to find the information that you need (although you will probably have to go through more page refreshes).

Flash Remoting Update SP1

Posted on March 10, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (7)

We have released an update to Flash Remoting. Its includes changes and fixes for the Flash Remoting adapter, as well as the Flash Remoting components.

You can view the release notes here.

You can download the update here.

There are quite a few issues fixed, so if you use Flash Remoting, make sure to download updates.

Update : The update for Flash Remoting installed with ColdFusion MX will be included with the next ColdFusion MX updater.

Macromedia DevNet Pro Subscriptions are Shipping

Posted on March 10, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (6)

DevNet Pro Subscriptions are now available and shipping. What does this mean? It means that you can go sign up for DevNet Pro today, and start downloading a TON of software just a few minutes later.

If you are already sold on DevNet Subscriptions and have just been waiting for it to ship, then you can go directly to the sign up page.

Subscribe Now

Upgrade Now

You can read the press release here.

Setting up IIS for Flash Remoting and SSL

Posted on March 9, 2003 by Mike Chambers | Comments (2)

Robert Rheinhardt has made a useful post (answering his own question) where he explains how to configure IIS so that a Flash movie can connect to it via Flash Remoting over SSL.

You can view the post here.