Today Adobe released an alpha version of Apollo for developers on Labs. Download your copy today and start learning more about the new cross-platform desktop runtime by getting yourself a free pdf copy of Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide by O’ Reilly. There is also lots of docco on the Wiki.
Lots of playing and lots of fun to be had in the coming weeks if you have time.
The Apollo team is hosting a mini Apollo conference named Apollo Camp. Apollo Camp is a one night, single track conference hosted by Adobe covering everything developers need to know about getting started with building Apollo applications using Flex. Im going to head over there, since im living in New York nowadays.
More info here, sign up now before all the spaces are filled.
Checkout the flash demoscene over at flashscene.org. Some awesome coding and special effects, lots of 3d and oldskool trickery going on.
If you havent seen them already, then head on over to Jailbitch, scroll down the page and checkout his Flash 8 Experiments. These are rocking, definetly the best collection of experiments ive seen for along while.
A little undocumented feature for you that might come in useful, mainly for people who use the Flash 9 Authoring Tool to create their Flash Movies.
I must have missed this one in the aggregators, so thought it worth mentioning. Claus Wahlers has put together a rocking Actionscript 3 class that can progressively load and unpack the contents of zip files in Flash Player 9, which is really useful for image galleries and other such applications that involve lots of external files, simply because you can stuff all the files inside just one zip file, stick it on the server and load that into your application, then unpack it on the fly and access the files inside. Checkout FZip.
If, like me and many millions of others, you have deserted Internet Explorer, and now choose to use Firefox as your default web browser, then the following little tool is going to come in very handy. Alessandro Crugnola has written a very useful Flash Plugin Switcher for Firefox that sits in the bottom right hand corner of thr browser and allows you to select and quickly switch between different versions of the Flash Player, from Flash Player 9 all the way back to Flash Player 2. A must have in any Flash Developers toolbox.
Adobe have just recently released a beta version of an update to Flash Player 9 that adds new Full Screen capabilities to the Flash Player. This feature was primarily introduced into the update so that video players can go fullscreen, but it has lots of other uses aswell.
Full Screen mode is activated using either Actionscript 2 or Actionscript 3 by setting the value of a new property Stage.displayState, it can only be set in response to a mouse or keyboard event, which stops malicious use of this new feature. Keyboard events do not occur when the Flash Player is in full screen mode, so input fields will not work.
More information on fullscreen mode can be found here.
The new player also introduces some much needed displaylist events, namely ADDED_TO_STAGE and REMOVED_FROM_STAGE and the new player now works with Microsoft Vista.
The public voting for the first ever Adobe sponsored Y Design awards for Excellence in Digital Design is now open. The Y Design Awards is a new initiative launched as part of the London Design Festival which recognises and celebrates the UK’s leading creative talent demonstrated through the use of digital technology.
In honour of the technology’s 10th anniversary, this year’s award scheme will centre on Macromedia Flash by Adobe, i am honored to be judging the awards.
Seems like this award may become a prestigious one for studio’s silverware cabinets, amongst the ranks of the notorious Rubber Arrow of the Flash Film Festival.
Checkout the list of finalists and vote for your favourites here.
The final vote is live and kicking today. Choose which Flash site you feel is the most influential from the past decade. There have been a tonne of kick-ass sites in that time, but the people have spoken and chosen the final ten candidates for this unique award.
Personally i feel that Yugop has been the most influential site of the past decade from the final list of ten, but i would beg to differ if Praystation was in the list, i presume he wasnt nominated since there isnt a live version of his old site running anymore, but Josh Davis kicked off the whole Flash experimental era.
The Flash 10th Anniversary interactive experience is online now for all to see. See and read all about the significant milestones and websites in the past 10 years of Flash. Visit the year 2000 to find your’s truly or 2001 to find Relevare. Also dont forget to checkout the Artist Gallery area containing special 10th anniversary animations from both Nectarine and Mudbubble.
It seems my cartoon character appears at the end of the Nectarine animation for me to say happy birthday aswell 
IFBIN is now completely free to anybody and everybody, no subscription fees whatsoever. Which means that all my Flash 8 Source files are now free to download, amongst hundreds of other examples by some of the best developers in our community. Welcome to IFBIN 2.0 open source.
If your interested in the future of Flash as a platform, then Apollo is the next new part of the equation bringing the strengths of Flash to the desktop.
All of you should know of Mike Chambers, the community voice and face of Macromedia for along time and the man behind the blogging intiative at Macromedia(you read MXNA right?), and now of course i can only presume he had alot to do with Labs. Mikes latest outreach to the community is a podcast that you can listen to on your way to work or during some downtime (hopefully from now on weekly).
As a member of the Apollo team, Mikes latest podcast contains an interview (more of a discussion) about some of the concerns people have been having about Apollo being a runtime (say like Java or .NET). Speaking with two of the engineers on the team, the discussion should answer all of your concerns.
More good stuff to come, i would imagine. So, subscribe to the podcast and listen on a regular basis for some straight-from-the-horses-mouth information.
Make sure you checkout this weeks update aswell.
Aral has the lowdown on why Adobe need to change their policy on covering expenses for presenters at MAX. Controversially in the past they have not paid for speakers flights and/or accomodation for the duration of the conference, similarly the speaker support is apparently “the worst” of all related industry events.
I was hoping that things would change when Adobe took over, but at present, its not looking that way. At $1000 per ticket surely they have some spare cash lying around to cover speaker expenses 
Its been along time in the works and the guy’s over at Square Circle have finally got it live. I helped them out during the early stages with some coding for the spinning zoom concept, the quicknav and the interactive telephone in the contacts section. The site is looking slick, awesome visuals and 3d renders, the portfolio section is sweet (great use of Flash video) and the overall experience is a pleasant one. Check it out for yourself. Great job guys!
Heres an addictive game for you to play during any downtime at work. Clever viral piece made by the gang over at Stimunation. Nice rigid body dynamics.
Windows users can now download a preview release of Flash 9 on Adobe Labs that is basically the same as Flash 8, but allows Flash Developers/Designers to output their content to Flash Player 9.
There is however one new awesome feature included in there for you to play with, the Document Class feature, which makes it easy to assign an actionscript class to the main timeline (the main timeline then becomes an instance of the specified class) instead of using the old hack which was basically to have something like the following on the first frame of the main timeline:
import com.flashguru.someProject.SomeClass; this.__proto__=SomeClass.prototype; SomeClass['apply']( this , null );