About a year ago, I had a long chat with Mike Downey, the Flash Product Manager, regarding the launch of Flash MX Professional 2004. Mike was still stinging from much of the criticism related to the that launch, and the gist of the conversation was 'never again.' He was adamant that if Flash gets shipped, it will ship when it is ready and only then.

Flash is one of the great Internet technology stories. It began in 1995 at a small tech startup called FutureSplash, which developed a remarkably efficient solution for delivering rich animation over narrowband Internet connections. Macromedia acquired FutureSplash in 1997 and established Flash as the standard for creative and dynamic interactive web content.

I have heard so many people moan on the many community forums and mailing lists about the onLoad event handler not working and although I have already posted a fix for the problem.

With our tunes playing and the volume knob to about the 3:00PM position (I prefer it loud) lets get started. First you need to create some content to drag. I just made some nice looking mockup boxes for now.

In this article I will explain how Flash Panels fit into the grand scheme of extending Flash MX 2004. We'll also discuss some of the benefits and pitfalls you may encounter when using Flash Panels in your day to day work.

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

Design patterns are standardized solutions to common programming problems. It's good to use design patterns for two simple reasons. First, it's faster (and many times better) to implement a time-tested design pattern as opposed to developing a custom solution. Second, collaboration with other developers increases when common practices are used.

Not long ago developers and IT professionals looked at Flash with disdain. The anti-Flash camp had contempt for its lack of accessibility, minimal standards compliance, and of course there was the infamous back button debacle. But things have changed. Large companies are embracing Flash for rich media delivery. Developers are jumping on the bandwagon in swarms. In the last year there's been an explosion in Flash development tools, including several full-featured development environments and a homespun SWF compiler or two.

When Disney closed the doors of its Orlando, Florida animation studio in January 2004, many saw it as the death knell for traditional hand-drawn animation. Of the 18 big-studio animated films to be released this year, only a handful will be done in 2D animation and of those, only a couple will even make it into theaters, according to KeyFrame-Online.com. In 2001, the first Oscar for an animated film was given out and the 3D animated Shrek took the prize.

In Part One of this two-part article ('Skinning the V2 ProgressBar component ,' MXDJ vol 3 issue 4) we did what we set out to do, but I just can't bear to leave the skinning-a-Button issue unresolved.

Perhaps one of the easiest components to overlook in Flash MX 2004 is tucked away in the UI Components section of the Components Panel, and carries the uninteresting name NumericStepper. Perhaps you're developing experimental effects and require on-screen controls to alter dynamic feedback within those effects. Maybe you're building complex forms that allow users to quickly select numerical data. Either way, it's time to cast your eye over the NumericStepper component.

Flash Elements were introduced in Dreamweaver MX 2004. Flash Elements allow you to quickly add Flash content to your page from within Dreamweaver. Currently the only flash element that comes packaged with Dreamweaver is the Image Viewer. The Image Viewer quickly assembles a highly customizable album. This tutorial will show you how.

I've been playing around with the Tree Component in great depth and have found a few discrepancies which I feel are major pit holes. After a lot of searching, it was also clear that many other developers have come across the same issues. My main gripe: the tree component's support for horizontal scrolling is not very useful. I expected it to work like the ScrollPane's horizontal scrollbar, but it doesn't.

This article explains how to completely change the graphical appearance of (i.e., 'to skin') the V2 ProgressBar component. Before we begin, a warning: the techniques described in this article apply to the ProgressBar and to many other V2 components, but not to all. Some components require advanced skinning techniques not discussed in this article. For example, the Button component's skin, perhaps surprisingly, is primarily code-based.

In Part One (MXDJ, vol. 3 issue 2) we looked at one of three different ways to consume a Web service, here we look at two other ways and some of the pros and cons of each approach. In this next example we'll explore using data binding in a different way from Pt. 1, by not relying on the Bindings tab of the Component Inspector panel. Instead, we'll create the bindings through ActionScript.

With increasing frequency, employees (called 'crewmembers') at JetBlue Airways are being asked to fulfill some of their training requirements online. The aviation industry is policy-intensive, and airline employees - everyone from flight attendants, to pilots, to customer service and ground crew personnel - are required to update their training each year on certain regulatory topics. To meet these requirements, JetBlue employs a blend of classroom instruction, on-the-job training, and eLearning.

Captivate came along at a time when I was in a 'tight spot' as a web developer. Imagine the words 'tight spot' said with all the ironic fret of George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill in the film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and you will begin to identify with my situation.

What do 'fantastic,' 'fabulous,' and 'fun' have in common? All three of these words describe the creative work you can do with Flash, Fireworks, and FreeHand. The Macromedia MX2004 Studio 'Fab Three' together give you the tools to create art and animations for the web and other media. Combine these with Dreamweaver and you have a dynamic set of tools.

This is not Web Services 101. This is not an introduction to Flash. This is not art. This is not a love song. Now that that's out the way, be prepared to bind data like there's no tomorrow.

Over the past year, we have rededicated ourselves to getting broad community feedback on our future development plans and efforts. Some of that is done privately through beta lists, customer advisory boards, and customer visits. Increasingly, some of it will be done publicly. To this end, we have recently begun showing what we are working on for the next version of the Flash client, code-named 'Maelstrom.' The effort on Maelstrom roughly falls into three main themes: performance, expressiveness, and standardization.

In Part 1 I introduced you to very basic concepts of ActionScript 2.0. We looked at some simple programs such as setting a variable, basic object-oriented concepts, and some basic interaction with the Flash MX 2004 Interface.

Staff within Macromedia 'tried to anticipate various reactions' to its recent decision to package Yahoo! Toolbar with its Flash player, John Dowdell - author of the popular online 'JD's Forum' -blogged yesterday. He is open to the possibility, he wrote, that there may be 'a potential scenario which could affect the common good' in the decision, which has provoked an uproar in various online communities and blogs.

Akamai Technologies, which already serves several gigabits per second of downloadable Flash content - including several hundreds of megabits per second of Flash video traffic - has in conjunction with Macromedia just announced the immediate availability of Akamai Streaming for use with Macromedia Flash

This month the topic is Web services. Previous articles looked at the RIA, component-based development, XML, and the role of ColdFusion as a data source. In this issue we examine the role of Web services in RIA development.

Hopefully you read last month's issue (MXDJ, Vol. 2, issue 12). This is a continuation of that article, so please have it handy for reference purposes. As a small review, currently we have our back end coded and the design implemented. It is time for some real work now.

Flash ActionScript has come a long way since Flash 5. However, never has the leap been as great as with the release of Flash MX 2004.

Ahh...{deep inhale}...the smell of the holidays is in the air. I wish I could write about all of the wonderful joys of the holidays, but we'll stick with the wonderful joys of creating Flash applications with OOP.

It wasn't so long ago that video and the Web were at odds. Video was becoming more beautiful and entertaining through new post-production techniques. And with the proliferation of video editing software and high-speed buses like FireWire, creative videos started coming from all types of makers - from professionals to first-time home users. The Web, vast but slow, seemed to be stuck in a rut, resisting video's advances by confining it to small sizes and clunky, boxy players.

The challenge of enterprise-level collaboration is to make data sharing effective and keep costs down. Applications built with C++ or Java must be delivered to the end-users' desktops along with some piece of the collaboration software. That can be a headache for IT departments because it is another set of files to deploy, upgrade, and test.

What does data look like? To a stockbroker, data might appear as a stream of company names and stock values. A database administrator probably sees data as a series of tables. A developer working in XML might see data as a tree like structure. This article is all about data. We will look at data, data structures, data transformations, and data bindings and examine their role in the Flash MX 2004 component framework.

Sites as various as the J.K. Rowling Web site and a site from The Wharton School were among the winners of the MAX 2004 Awards, announced today in New Orleans by Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess. Full results here.

Perhaps you've heard of Flex, maybe you've even dabbled with Flash, or you have one or more Flash developers on your team. Nevertheless, you aren't sure how Flash and Flex fit together.

When I was asked, I jumped at the chance to do a series on Flash data integration for the MXDJ. Here was a wonderful opportunity to share my popular talks, presentations, and demonstrations with a large, interested audience.

Graphics created for games published in Macromedia Flash cannot be illustrated or animated as usual. One must understand that most games developed in Flash can be processor-intensive, with quite a bit of user interaction and several animations playing at once, which means your graphics and animations must be optimized.

I am a Web application developer. That can mean a number of things these days, but in my case, it means I write code on both the client and the server to make a complete 'application.' For many of us, the client-side code is JSP - JavaServer Pages. Perhaps, like me, you find JSP to be awkward with its mixture of languages and styles.

Pioneering enterprise social software provider, Userplane, has developed a Web-based chat application that allows users to engage one another in live text conversation. Created in Macromedia Flash MX, Userplane Web Chat is now being used to facilitate the global exchange of medical information for Swiss-based AOSpine.

I was recently looking at the winners of the Clio Awards and the Cannes Lions - annual awards that recognize excellence in the advertising industry. As I went through the winners in the Internet category, several things stood out prominently:

The world of Flash development can be a dangerous place. Although Flash offers the most comprehensive set of tools for Web site user interface development, there are numerous pitfalls that can cause a project to go sour. Flash's complexity can result in 'two-day' projects taking two weeks, database access becoming nearly impossible, and file sizes that are daunting. I'll talk about some of the methods I've used to overcome these types of problems in a site I've recently developed, www.getfreshfruit.com.

With Flash's ability to create rich, engaging, and fully interactive front end interface environments and Web services being able to offer data in a standardized, easy-to-work-with format, the possibilities of what can be accomplished with these two technologies is endless. But before the 'how' is covered, it's important to know the 'what' and the 'why.'

Macromedia has announced that a free update is available from today for its Flash Web applications program, Flash MX 2004. The update, version 7.2, applies to both Flash MX 2004 and MX Professional 2004.