Community College

Sunday (pm), Oct 16 - Ryan

Take a look at the cool store I found on my way to lunch

Ed Sullivan briefly opened up the Community College (1/2 day special program with meeting and socialization for user group managers and possibly Team MM members).

Our first presenter is Christian Cantrell who is giving us a presentation on Flex 2 and the new frameworks. The presentation is a little marketing heavy (which I suspect most presentations from MM staff will be) with an introduction to the history and growth of Flash IDE and Flashplayer.

The new virtual machine in FP8.5 will be faster and will include the old runtime for AS2 for backwards compatibility. It will also support AJAX. We are watching Christian build a sample Flex 2 app. He showed in 20 lines and a few tags a combo box with detail text beneath, click/scroll through items in the combo box and data beneath it instantly. No AS, just mxml.

Per Mike Chambers, to load flex framework 2 apps you will need FP 8.5 to run. You will run into problems if you have some AS2 components that run in the AS2 runtime with flex2 apps in AS3 runtime. Current builds (available tomorrow) won't let you have an app running between the 2. You could however use local connections to communicate between them. This is something they are looking into tweaking, no decision has been set.

Blaze is the codename for the next full version of the Flash Authoring environment, not an update to Flash 8. Expect a public alpha in the spring.

There will be a new area called Macromedia Labs that will have early betas of emerging products, toolkits, etc. FUD is the name of the game. Through simple registration there will be tutorials, release notes, documentation, forums, Wikis, public source control, etc. Sounds like MSDN to me. Tomorrow morning this should be availabe at macromedia , though it sounds like the Wiki may not be ready. We are looking at a staging site with pieces of it in place though changing on the fly every time Christian pulls it up.

Mike Perry, manager of mobile Flash 'stuff' (hey, I don't remember!) is talking to us about mobile support with Flash on Nokia and other phones and wireless devices/handsets. The Flash Lite 2.0 upgrade with authoring capability and FP7 support should be available in January. We are watching some demos of Flash Lite 2 and the quality of animation on the handsets is impressive. The animations are fairly smooth with decent color. There is a Samsung phone being sold in South Korea is smaller than the Nokia and expands. The wallpaper with moving shore line (of an ocean) is animated and looks much more lifelike than the icon based US models.

-Ryan