Ok so were the first country to see the New Year and Xmas, with the whole Time Zone thing. So as I sit here in my g33kiness and the clock rolls past 12am I just want to wish all the peeps and friends who visit this site a very merry christmas and a great new year full of food, family and fun!

Alot has happened in this scene over the past year and I have made many new friends online. Its been a very exciting time and no doubt with more excitment to come in this next year. I cant wait for the next version of as3!!

Ok I think I can hear Santa on the roof so I best be off to bed. I promise I have been good! (hahaha)

So from the team at Xsive Web (all one of us) Merry Christmas and to all a Good night! 

Ok so if you have been living under a rock Id just like to let you know Peter Jackson has finished King Kong and is Kicking but in hollywood. That was released a few days ago. Today Another Kiwi,  the creator of shrek and shrek II premiered Narnia in England, and kicked butt there too.

But there is another movie maker in New Zealand that not alot of people know about. He too like Peter Jackson has his little quirks, but more on those in a minute. What Simon Jansen made is the Starwars IV movie frame by frame in ascii. A couple of hours worth. And if that isnt enough for you …. you watch it over telnet (thats just Uber geek done by a dutch guy). How does it work?:

Click Here and accept the popup or  type this into windows cmd "telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl"

 This guys quirks are that he also makes turbine engines out of old turbo chargers. Now this is nothing new in itself but Simon made the first Turbine powered beer cooler out of it ) GOOD MAN. I especially like the comment

"Guinness was used as it is an internationally recognised beer. I would have used a good, well known American beer but that is like finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow."

On a last note the company I work for, Right Hemisphere was in the news today with a nice marketing piece with details on how our software is used by Nasa. Maybe that would explain why bits fall off the rockets. Maybe I should have escaped that string  

Ok so if you have had a look through the rest of my blog posts you will have seen that Im quite interested in Flash on the desktop. Especially with the speed and performance of AS3.  So I am unsure how this one slipped past me. Possibly because I didnt go to MAX.

So what Mac…..er….. Adobe are touting as "Apollo" is a desktop based platform which will support the use of flash even when offline.  The "platform" will have data syncronisation, desktop intergration, update management,and a secure sandbox (which if not implemented properly could be more restrictive than benificial) and more…….

This is quite exciting, but at the same time kinda dumb as I have been working away at Flabulator giving it similar caching abilities and have spent quite a bit of time on the dragging of flash widgets. Just as a matter of interest I get alot of hits on this site from google looking for "flash widgets" and "konfabulator flash", so I think Adobe are onto a winner introducing a product like this.

Details are a bit sketchy at this point but heres a few resources:

macromedia.com (Mike Chambers)
macromedia Max Article (towards the bottom)
FlashStreamworks
Google results

Im still going to finish Flabulator, as I think it could be cool, but would really love to know more details. Perhaps someone who went to MAX could elabourate a bit in the comments. Even better Adobe peeps could place me on the beta as I have a huge wishlist for you.

Lets just hope it doesnt go the way off the original Apollo.

 As for the topic thats all over the blogs at the moment, I have to be careful what I say as work is tied to Adobe, but I must admit it was kinda sad going to the MM site only to see the adobe logo.

"Apollo: "The Universal Client"

After showing what the future of experience could be, Lynch revealed how Macromedia will attain it. Apollo, which he called the "universal client," will provide Flash and HTML functionality and will run independent from the web browser. Apollo will support the improvement of user experience by embracing the best of client technologies – data synchronization, the ability to work online or offline, and desktop integration, and more — in combination with desktop distribution. Apollo will join Flash Lite (the mobile client) and Flash Player (the browser client) to form the Flash Platform client family."

So with no further a doo here are the pics. It all started with this past post. This first one is what I grew over the month and wore. The others were just playing around before shaving the damn itchy thing off. Im still waiting on a picture from Huzz showing his mo, so for now I stuck a funny one of him. Richard discovered Ginga mos didnt really photo graph that well so he stole my girlfriends mascara to darken  it up a bit.

So moving on to the Flex 2 stuff and AS3. Have been reading the Macromedia blogs and hearing about all the improvements the team have been making on the beta. I really cant wait to have a play. I have been experimenting quite a bit with the Display class and have found several methods missing or at least not implemented yet (cummon its an aplha), SpriteOne.mask(SpriteTwo), CopyChannel for bitmaps (was my alternative o mask) and ofcourse the alpha can only be set to 0 or 100 (so visable or not visable).

I have made a "mac Front rowish" transition for my Flash Widgets application Fabulator in flash 8 and because the images are pretty big the stutter a bit at first. So I tried in the 8.5 player (re-coded in AS3) and got it all up and runing but the reflection cant have an alpha gradient. So ill have to wait for the beta to finish that off.

Work on the Flabulator had been a little slow and Im hoping to get the last few things finished this weekend.

Starting to see some really cool examples of flash with binary files being parsed; with Franto’s example showing that hes working on a new frame work called "FlashLife " which will be one to keep an eye on.

Will be cool to use flex components in a pure Action script project, like Mike Chambers explains HERE.

P.S. Vote for best mo the air guitar is all tuned up and is ready to be given away.