Consider this paying it forward. I was stuck at the bus stop waiting for my bus which had been delayed. I have a car but it is too low to park in parking buildings (Even if I could afford the daily rate) and my mustang is still in bits .

So I had a nice surprise when a chick in a blue wagon pulled up and asked me if I wanted a ride (keep the comments to a minimum . After a few moments of confusion my mind engaged and I took the oportunity for a free ride. Turns out it was a promotion that Skoda is doing in New Zealand to raise the profile of its cars. So I got a ride in a flash wagon (that had comfy bucket seats) and although I couldn't convince her to put her foot down to demonstraight the power of the 6 speed diesel, the ride was good. So cosider this me keeping the Kharma going with a little free advert:

If your in the Auckland CBD and see one apparently you can wave them down too

Check this out! The 3d room I mentioned was shown at the NZFXUG has been posted. http://labs.getoutsmart.com/. Outsmart are now officially trendy as they have a "labs" subdomain . That comes with being in Ryan Stewarts top 3 flex firms i guess.

You can walk the little man around and interact with all the flex components as if they were 2d. Camera zooms and depth of field. Cant wait for a fighting game version. Just imagine a Ted Patrick vs Scott Barnes fight arena lol. Best of all its Kiwi (New Zealand) home grown talent!

Features of the platform include:

• Realtime polygon rendering engine with texture mapping
• Perspective and isometric rendering modes
• Free and/or fixed camera control
• Depth of field rendering effects
• Ability to project any Flex UI, Flash SWF or FLV onto any 3D surface
• Ability to interact with a Flex UI in 3D space

Its been around for a while now. The .tv domain is the internet country code for the island nation of Tuvalu and believe it or not was introduced in 1996. The wikipedia has a small amount of info on it.

Why bring it up now? Well I am guessing that with SilverLight (microsofts new offering) and Adobe Media Player, Joost and a whole lot of other media player/agregators we will start to see internet video "channels" explode. And the .tv domain just sounds cool. There are also alot of names left there so we get call our channels normal names for a wee bit longer till the web 2.0 somthingr's start to pop up.

As of writing this post ipod.tv, gamer.tv were both available. So get in early and reserve you domain now for your upcoming cool internet video offering. Unfortunately flex.tv has gone to some random.

Have just got my head together again after the first New Zealand Flex User Group meeting. Man it was good to meet a whole lot of cool people into similar things. Big thanks to Andrew Spalding and Marc Shultz who made their way over from OZ to give us Kiwis a bit of a taste of whats to come in the coming months as we save our pennies for Adobe product upgrades. Andrew ran his presso like a the seasoned veteran that he is, and Marc kept things in check for our remote Connect viewers (and made sure the beer fridge kept its cool temperature by relieving it of its contents). Some seriously cool new features in both Life Cycle Data Services and Skinning are coming out, and will make my life alot easier.

We were also privileged to be the first group to see getoutsmart.com's new 3D library in action. They assured me they will be releasing demo's on their labs soon so Ill keep you posted. The showed a small demo of a 3d person in a 3d room with live webcam and flex components hanging on the walls (picture paintings hanging on the walls) as the 3d person walked around, with full camera control. What was really cool is that all the Flex components in the 3d world worked exactly as expected, acordions, buttons, you name it, they worked. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Finally thanks to everyone who turned up and hope to see you at the next meeting. I promise to have a better handle on things next time I can see alot of cool, and successful work is going to be coming out of our home grown Flex user base.

David Harris also has a quick round up of things over at www.harrisfamily.net.nz

Alex from getoutsmart.com has released a new component out into the wild at his new blog site www.betterthanflex.com Although at first glance it looks like a simple Gage readout, its actually a lot more complex and highly configurable. He has also used a lot of custom style definitions in his classes. So if your looking for a nice small display of that sort that is well coded and you can learn off head on over there to get the source.

If you do like it give him a ping on his email and hassel him for not posting anymore