Oscar Trelles

Yesterday, I came across the posting about the release of WACK 1.0 over at quasimondo.com, but I didn’t have the time to give it a try until today. WACK is a Component for Flash MX that allows the dynamic creation and population of window instances inside a Flash application. WACK stands for Window Application Control Kit, and lets the developer fully customize the objects created with the tool. Ok, we have seen incarnations of this idea before, but this is actually the first time I have one in my hands. From my point of view, WACK offers three concrete advantages:
- It’s extremely flexible and easy to use.
- It’s well documented (they even have a support forum)
- It’s free for personal and commercial use.
WACK is available for download from coma2.com. Congratulations and keep up the great work!

This is something I’ve been finding quite frequently in forums and mailing lists: “I can make the [insert some object: ball, bar, etc.] follow the mouse, but how can I make it stop in certain position?”. Last week, I got this very same question from one of the users of my components, and he gave me the idea for an example. For some of you this is bread with butter; for the rest than don’t know the answer to this problem, well, there are many… but you can read about a very simple one in this example.

Michael William is a Macromedia’s Product Manager for Flash. He just started a blog, but the response to his invitation into the discussion about the future of Flash, in the very first postings, has been overwhelming. The comments to his posting are really worth a conscious read:
Plowing along through time and space, and
Fantastic!
I am a little late on this, but I would like to welcome Michael to the bloggers guild. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on his blog and the discussion of his postings.

I don’t pretend to be an alarmist, but this is really big. In the last hours a massive attack (started last night) has been slowing down the overall performance of major Internet Backbones (including UUNET), and even shutting down several web servers. The information I have indicates this attack is taking advantage of vulnerabilities in (un-patched) installations of the Microsoft SQL Server: the worm breaks in and tries to spread, generating lots of network traffic. Depending on your location, some websites can be too slow or completely innaccesible. More information:
CNN, Warp2Search.

Yesterday, Macromedia revealed last’s quarter (three months ended December 31) financial results, with good news for its shareholders. According to Macromedia’s CEO, Rob Burgess, sales of Studio MX boosted overall revenue, exceding the company’s expectation. More than 350k copies of Studio MX where sold since its release about 8 months ago (May 2002, if I remember correctly), making it the fastest adoption of a product in Macromedia’s history. More information in this Report.
So, where are those rumors about Microsoft buying Macromedia now?

Most of you have already heard or read about these events, but I wanted to mention them anyway as a reminder:

MX Down Under – Macromedia DevCon Asia-Pacific is the first big event this year, featuring Macromedia MX technology and line of products. The organizers convinced notable “macromedians” to make the trip all the way to Sydney (Australia), to make this conference a great combination of local and international talents, gathered for what I expect will become a regular event in the region for the years to come. From MXDU’s website: “We know what an expensive, time consuming task it can be to get to a conference in the US. So we decided to run one ourselves”. So good for decentralizing the experience and giving the opportunity to a whole new group of professionals. February 19 – 20.
Flash Forward 2003 will be held in San Francisco this year, and is the event of choice of hundreds of Flash professionals and aficionados in the US and from all over the world. As usual, there is great expectation over the ‘Film Festival’ and what people have been doing with Flash since Macromedia launched the latest version of the authoring tool. FlashForward is an excellent opportunity to put faces on the names you are familiar with from web forums, mailing lists and blogs. March 26 – 28.

About two weeks ago, Mario Klingemann over at quasimondo.com posted a warning against somebody trying tricks to appear as a referrer to his site. My traffic, I asume, is way smaller and maybe that is the reason I was able to detect this phenomenon happening here, in the statistics of this site. Basically, these people use some sort of automatic script to generate connections that your web server counts as visits coming through their sites; of course, they don’t have any links to your site. So, is this becoming a new practice in the realm of online marketing? I don’t know about Mario, but I found 4 of these ‘referrers’ in my statistics, one of them even attempting to appear in my top 10.
But, what is the purpose of doing this? Wouldn’t it be easier -and an honest way to get attention- sending an email to see if their information is useful? I won’t expose those who attempt to increase their traffic by means of yielding inaccurate statistical reports to unaware individuals, that would be giving them credit for their actions. Instead I will ignore it for now, but I reserve the right to take further actions in the event of continuance.

As announced by Mike Chambers a couple of days ago, the official numbers are already published at Macromedia’s website. The online survey conducted by NPD, yielded the following results for the latest version of the Flash Player (version 6), by regions: US 71.7%, Canada 77.5%, Europe 77.4% and Asia 70.6%

As promised to the boys and girls of the Long Island Flash Users Group, Ben Forta‘s presentation was not for seasoned ColdFusion developers, but intended to show the beauty of ColdFusion’s markup language and how Flash designers/developers can take advantage of its ease of learn.
After some introductory concepts around the differences between web servers and application servers (ColdFusion is inside the last category), Ben aimed to shatter the misconceptions that prevent non-programmers from using Cold Fusion. He showed us how to progressively transform our static plain-vanilla web pages into modular applications using ColdFusion Components, making our code resusable for multiple interfaces, including our Flash application! By modular I mean separation between design, data and processing structures. Ben explained with examples how useful this development model could be when integrating Flash and ColdFusion: the same structures can be used to process data and pass the results to either an HTML document or a Flash interface.
Special ActionScript instructions are needed for this task, they are called Flash Remoting Components. In a nutshell, Flash Remoting Components are tools that extend the standard Flash MX authoring environment, adding the ActionScript APIs needed to invoke remote services, process dynamic data from external sources and monitor events across client and server. Time didn’t allow for many examples of how it works, but I think the core concepts were discussed to the satisfaction of the attendees.

Mike Chambers has revealed new Flash Player penetration stats for December. The NPD‘s massive online survey to measure the adoption of popular media types yielded 72% for the latest version of the Flash Player. Although these numbers will only become official when the Report at Macromedia’s site is updated, this is already good news for everybody out there trying to convince clients and co-workers about developing with Flash.