Just finsihed trying out the new Flock web browser based on the fire fox core (I think). I have to say that the UI is super slick, and it takes all the little things which I wished browsers could do and joins them all together. I think it will take a while for this browser to catch on with the masses but as a heavy user of the net I love it already.

It has a built in Blog editor and as an example of the features which make it such a logical broswer the blog editor intergrates a Flicr photo bar thingee across the top from which you can drag and drop images into your post.

Another cool feature is it has a sort of drag and drop clip board viewer to store temporary links.

Just so many small features like this are packed in along with tight  browser Dom and javascript  debugging make this a web savy user  or developers dream.  Check it out by visiting  www.osxcode.com   or download details from techzap.net  . Cheers for the link through to this great beta guys!!

Yep hes pushing out the good stuff already! Respect to the man for parsing a 3dsmax file and then displaying it in the flash player 8.5.

"The example parses 3ds (3dmax) files and renders the scene pixel by pixel with a ‘real’ zBuffer for exact z-Sorting and a simple distance shading"

If you have the player installed go check out his blog post  HERE  

Or for those of you without heres a quick screen capture:

Im amazed at the speed at which you can move around.  Feels almost like openGL  it just need some sort of antialiasing and you have yourself a basic  realtime 3d engine. Once again nice work Andre!!! hope you dont mind me linking to the example.

First up I did not make this. This is a 3d engine made by the guys at FLASHWORX  but it really shows the speed improvements made in the new Virtual machine. I love this engine as it uses proper transformation matrix’s.

CLICK HERE:

Note: to load the teapot you will have to zoom it in a bit using you mouse wheel. 

Loading the teapot under version 7 player pretty much stalled my comp, now I can rotate it (just) but the ither examples work well. 

 After hearing about the Binary readers and writers I was quite excited. Now look what you can do ) And finally you have access to a simple StringBuilder looks like c#'s. There is even a Zip compression build in for supporting servers.

"Possible uses of the ByteArray class include the following:

• Creating a custom protocol to connect to a server.
• Writing your own URLEncoder/URLDecoder.
• Writing your own AMF/Remoting packet.
• Optimizing the size of your data by using data types."

 Also to note is the inclusion of proper Error reporting in AS3, with stackover flow reporting ) Smiles all round really.

For those of you unfortunate ones stuck at MAX with no connection to download the Alpha FLex2 (I hear there are people wandering around with memory sticks) I have posted some picks of the new Flex2 default Style. It reminds me of Linux strangely enough. A nice clean multipurpose style. But the real bonus is they seem to have done ALOT of work on the ability to style things. Also Data providers ) YAY!

Its a nice to come home from work and be able to play with such a nice toy. Its 1am and I dont want to go to bed, Kinda like a new toy at Xmas. Man Im such a geek! 

I even managed to find a render bug. But hey its an ALPHA! notice the small grey line rendering under the alert box?

And for the rest of the quick snaps taken from the Style explorer.

So what are you waiting for? Go have a play!!!