FlashGuru Blog

Craig Jamieson a popular South African designer and flash instructor is currently in the uk looking for freelance creative work, if you have any kind of design work or flash work that requires a creative thinker then do him a favour and help him to pay his bills by sending the work his way!

I was talking to a friend earlier this evening about a component i have developed and during the conversation he mentioned selling the component and any further components commercially for a small fee, which set my brain in motion, thinking about the pro’s and con’s of doing so. On one hand i have always been geared towards open source and providing it, since i started in the flash community, and i can see the benefits of open source not only from a personal standpoint but from a community standpoint - where would be today if we had to pay for everything? there wouldnt be half as many half decent flash developers and community forums, maybe not even as many flash blogs. On the other hand, i can see the benefits of earning $5-10 per go on a, well, from what i forsee to be a very popular and widely used interface element, as a component(one of the only interface elements Macromedia missed in their component sets). Im really stuck on this one, which way should i go? do people think there is a market for commerical components? have you considered going commercial? would you be willing to fork out for some well documented, scalable and very useful code? should i just give it a whirl and make an example of it, whether it fails or succeeds? from what i know of the flash community there are alot of students and young people involved in the industry that cant really afford to be paying for such things, there main priority is to survive ie.. buy food and beer:) Any thoughts and maybe even a huge discussion on this issue would be wicked and valuable to others like me, the developers amongst us.

In Flash MX you have the capability to load an external mp3 sound file into a flash movie using the Sound.loadSound() method. In the latest release of the Flash 6 Player it is possible to access the ID3 tags embedded in an mp3 encoded file. Unfortuneatley you cannot access the ID3 tags in an mp3 file until it has *fully* loaded, this is fine when you are using the Sound.attachSound() method but it causes problems when you are loading an external sound into the player…
(more…)

I have thought of a wicked idea which could potentially grow into a huge money earner. Its a new online dating concept and i am looking for web developers with Flash MX, Flash Communication Server MX, PHP and XML experience to help me bring this idea into reality from the ground up. It will be a subscription based service and we can work out contracts so that we share the earnings from the subscription fees. If you are interested in finding out more and would like to push your programming and design skills into a new area of online application development then email me.

As i announced earlier this week, Media Temple are the first company to provide Flash Communication Server MX web hosting. A fellow blogger and one of Media Temple’s newly aquainted customers explains his experience with Media Temple thus far, after signing up for a Flash Communcation Server MX hosting account only a week ago.

Aral and Robin Debreuil have been discussing and figuring out the bandwidth related costs associated with the Flash Communication Server MX, it turns out that even though the server isnt that cheap for developers, the bandwidth costs associated with the program are astronomically high aswell. For a complete estimated rundown of the costs involved, checkout a new blog on the block, Aral’s Clickwhere?

Well after loads of emails and an hour of my time the site is back again. It seems that the DNS has fully propogated now, my email is working and the website is almost back to how it was when it dissapeared. The articles i posted this month have been lost, but thats no big deal, there wasnt any tutorials posted this month so it would only be old news anyways. The site will resume full service as of now. I decided to continue the site earlier than expected because i felt that Relevare would have won the battle if i was to leave it down.

Media Temple the popular hosting choice for new media companies, designers and the flash community has joined forces with Macromedia to provide us with Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX website hosting. The first company to offer such a package. Checkout the priceplans.

Update your Macromedia Flash MX help system with the Macromedia Flash MX Documentation Updater. The updater includes new documentation on multilingual text, creating components, using the drawing API, and new Macromedia Flash Player (6.0r40) features. It also provides a new tutorial on using the Macromedia Flash Learning interactions and updates to the ActionScript Dictionary.

Macromedia released the latest versions of the Flash 6 Player recently. All the players have been updated; the debug player, the standalone player and the external player. Download the Flash 6 Player updater now.

Macromedia released the Flash Communication Server MX Component Set a couple of days ago. A set of drag and drop components used to build standard communication applications quickly and easily. Modify components to match your site design and add custom logos, backgrounds, and other design elements with the easy-to-use visual design tools in Macromedia Flash MX. Then customize component source code to create an even wider variety of applications.