This was inspired by a slashdot article the other day

I’m so tired of Flash bashing on slashdot. I find it funny that an audience that generally doesn’t care about a user friendly UI can comment so much about a product aimed solely at that market. The reality is that 99% of computer users are not software development geeks like us, until software developers understand that they will keep bashing Flash and i’m tired of it. I’m not obsessed with Flash, I just think that there is a proper time to use it and a proper time not to. Here are some realities that people who don’t have extensive experience with Flash need to keep in mind
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I didn’t have time this week to attend MAX in New Orleans, but tomorrow I’ll be on my way to MAX Taiwan. I’ll be giving two sessions, one on “Skinning Flash MX 2004 Components”, the other on “Flash MX 2004 Component Development Using the Version 2 Architecture”. There are some excellent Flash related sessions lined up, and a good list of speakers.

If anyone has suggestions on what to see/do in Taipei let me know, this will be my first time in Taiwan

Colin Moock has posted a video from macromedia flash conference in tokyo thats a must see.

The new player is looking very very good. Personally 8Ball (next version of Flash) is exciting but the real excitement is the player. It looks like macromedia has been working really hard to keep us all happy

We received a slightly puzzling bug report for our charting components today. The user changed the export frame for classes in his movie to 2 in order to allow for a preloader on frame 1. As soon as he did this, the components stopped working.

He was very diligent in his report and provided examples and steps to reproduce the problem. I followed his steps and immediately saw the same problem he was reporting–the components no longer worked. Without immediately realizing what was wrong, I went as far as creating SWFs in with classes exported on frame 1, the default, and on frame 2 and compared the SWFs with ASV and saw that the differences were really minor.

But there was one important difference that was a problem–the components were being exported before the classes were available. Both the user and I had forgotten to uncheck Export in First Frame for the components. So of course they didn’t work. Uncheck that option and put them on the stage after the classes frame, and everything works fine.

As it turns out, the Flash MX 2004 Help on this issue is very clear. It provides steps for setting the export frame for classes and then explains the ramifications for doing that and that you have to uncheck Export in First Frame for components. Guess I need to rtfm more often….

We’d like to take a survey to see what open-source Flash projects exist. Can people involved in open-source projects post a comment here or e-mail us? Information we need is the URL, whether it has anonymous (read-only) CVS access, approximately how large the project is (number of lines) and approximately how many different packages it contains.

We want to make sure open-source projects can take advantage of BLDoc to meet their documentation needs.