Adrian Parr’s Blog

Yipee, only ten days to go until another awesome Flash on the Beach conference down in Brighton, UK.

With such a great speaker line-up the hardest thing is to decide which sessions to see and which ones to miss.

Here is a list of the sessions I am hoping to see …

Sunday 28th September 2008

• 09:30 - 17:15
  Ralph Hauwert
  Papervision3D Workshop

Monday 29th September 2008

• 09:00 - 10:00
  Richard Galvan
  Keynote: Flash Now and in the Future
• 10:15 - 11:15
  Marco Casario
  Mash-up widgets with Adobe AIR
• 11:30 - 12:30
  Dr Woohoo (Drew Trujillo)
  Transforming ideas to pixels to atoms
• 13:30 - 14:30
  Geoff Stearns
  YouTube Lessons Learned
• 14:45 - 15:45
  Richard Lord
  Creating particle effects with Flint
• 16:00 - 17:00
  Erik Natzke
  Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play
• 20:00 - 21:00
  James Paterson
  Modulating a Lot

Tuesday 30th September 2008

• 09:00 - 10:00
  Aral Balkan
  Welcome to The Cloud
• 10:15 - 11:15
  Adobe
  Town Hall Meeting
• 11:30 - 12:30
  Neil Webb
  Cairngorm for Beginners (Architectural frameworks 101)
  * Hmm, clashes with Grant Skinner’s session *

• 13:30 - 14:30
  Peter Elst
  AIR Beyond the Basics - Taming the Desktop
• 14:45 - 15:45
  Lee Brimelow
  Platform Jiu-Jitsu
• 16:00 - 17:00
  Nando Costa
  Motion Graphics, one frame at a time
• 20:00 - 21:00
  Robert Hodgin
  The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life

Wednesday 1st September 2008

• 09:00 - 10:00
  Rob Bateman
  Finding Away3d
  * Hmm, clashes with Ben Stucki’s session and Keith Peters‘ session *

• 10:15 - 11:15
  Seb Lee-Delisle
  Papervision3D Simplified
• 11:30 - 12:30
  Andre Michelle
  Adobe made some noise!
• 13:30 - 14:30
  Koen de Weggheleire
  Play With Pixels, bitmap manipulation with AS3
• 14:45 - 15:45
  Mario Klingemann
  Here be Pixels
• 16:00 - 17:00
  Jonathan Harris
  The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure

I have just come across an interesting video clip of Jim Guerard (VP/General Manager, Adobe Dynamic Media) talking to Beet.tv about using speech-to-text technology to embed transcripts in to FLV files as metadata. This is great news for Flash Video and encouraging to see Adobe’s continuing innovation with the format.

YouTube has been looking in to this area as well and Google has a working version of it on their Elections Video Search Gadget for the iGoogle homepage.

With the addition of Multi-Bitrate Streaming in Flash Player 10 (more info on Adobe Labs here) there are some great new features to look forward to for digital video delivery using Flash.

I’ve just discovered a way to generate a blank dialogue box in Flash CS3. This was on a PC, I’ve not tested the Mac version yet. You’ll need to have the Adobe AIR Update for Flash CS3 Professional installed.

Just follow these step-by-step instructions …

1. Open Flash CS3.
2. Create a new Flash File (Adobe AIR).
3. Save the file as ‘a&b.fla’.
4. Click on Commands >> AIR - Create AIR File.
5. Create a self-signed digital certificate if you don’t already have one, enter the password and click the ‘OK’ button.
6. Voila!

Basically it is the ampersand (&) that is causing the problem. I’m not sure exactly which reference to the ampersand is causing the problem. Let me know if the above steps work for you.