Flash | Retrospective

Our local Adobe Users Group is going to have a special CS3 Launch Event meeting at 7 PM on March 27th. If you’re in the LV area, you’ll want to be there. I know I will be.

http://www.vegasaug.org/

Please join other Las Vegas designers for this official CS3 Launch event!

If you work with any of the Adobe Creative Suite products, or the formerly Macromedia Studio products, this meeting is for you! Please be sure to forward this meeting announcement to all who you think may be interested.

This will be a special joint meeting of the Las Vegas Adobe Users Group (VegasAUG.org) and the Las Vegas Dreamweaver Users Group (LVDUG.com). The meeting will include presentations by Adobe executives, CS3 product demonstrations, and a chance to win one of the first copies of the new CS3 suite when it starts shipping!

Adobe has been providing demonstrations of the CS3 products for several months (including here in Las Vegas at MAX last fall). And Adobe has also provided a public beta of Photoshop CS3 at labs.adobe.com since December. Please join us to learn and discuss details of the official CS3 release!

A new era in creative expression is about to unfold, freeing us to color outside the lines, to think in multiple dimensions, to engage audiences like never before.

If you have further questions, please contact info@VegasAUG.org

I watched the Hacking Democracy movie tonight. If you haven’t seen it or heard about it, it’s a very interesting movie that explores the security vulnerabilities of electronic voting machine software, in particular, the software from Diebold. I’m not much into the whole conspiracy theory stuff, but I was very intrigued by the exploration into securing our votes or how insecure they really are.

In the case of the Diebold software, it seems like the voting card (looked like a compact flash card?) seems to be easy enough to be tamper with. Not to mention, the voting information is stored in on a central polling machine in a Access database which can be easily modified — or so it seemed from the movie (they really didn’t cover the actual specifics on how they tampered). The movie didn’t cover the security measures that surround the voting memory card and how it is cleared prior to a vote or how it is transferred from a voting location to the central tallying machine, but I’d imagine it doesn’t include Brinks Security and an armed escort. These systems are being used by lots of counties all over the U.S. and its probably regular people like you and me.

The possibility of tampering with votes has been an issue since probably the first time we ever took a formal vote. And it’s only a matter of time before electronic voting moves from the current physical electronic boxes to using the internet so we can all vote from the comfort of our home or office. So how do we really insure the integrity of the data … voting data or other? How do we ensure the public that our votes are really being tallied correctly? Maybe we can’t? Maybe the further we get removed from the vote and the counting system, the less sure we are that our votes are being tallied correctly. Seems like we still have a lot of work to do.

Anyhow… it was an interesting movie and will definitely make me think during my job.

[Update]I wanted to add that I found it extremely humorous during the movie when the representative from Ohio voted to reject the Ohio vote and then we saw statements from several other senators, etc basically saying in Congress we shouldn’t question the system that elected them. I couldn’t agree more. If we are going to question the system that elects people, we really shouldn’t have those to stand to gain/lose the most to investigate.

Over the last few years, there has been a horrible, ever-increasing trend, of companies patenting, or buying companies that hold patents that are vague and generic and then going after the people with money who have already implemented technologies.
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The iG:Syntax hiliter plugin for WordPress wants to swap out my > (greater than), < (less than) symbols for > and <. I haven’t posted code in awhile, so I’m not sure if this is something that popped up after I upgraded to WP 2.1 (from 1.5) or from the recent updating of the iG plugin.

Anyone have any suggestions? I found the line of code in the PHP doing the swap, but don’t want to hack it if I can figure out whats going on.

[UPDATE]
Well.. I fixed it for now. I just turned off the visual editor for my WP profile. Users > Your Profile > Use the visual editor when writing.

A buddy of mine had asked me how to make Flash scale an image to fit the entire background, but keeping the image aspect ratio. I knew it wouldn’t be hard to figure out, but I also hadn’t really done it before. I’m posting it here for his benefit and just in case I need to look back sometime in the future. I make no promises that this is the most efficient way either, but it definitely works. The real “trick” is scaling the background image movieclip to the width and height of the Stage and then checking to see which scale (xscale or yscale) is bigger and scaling the other to match.
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After the AppleTV and iPhone were released, I had some key questions about both which would impact my decision to buy either product. Looks like I may have my answers.  I found David Pogue’s iPhone FAQ on his blog (via MacRumors) and it looks like neither product will fill my needs.

 Apple TV: It can play MP4/H.264 (protected and unprotected). So it won’t play my other video files. This is a major issue (for me).  I would rather pay the extra $$ and just get a Mac Mini. 

Apple iPhone:  Can it display Flash or Java? No (according to David Pogue).   Ack.. That just about kills it for any web page and web app.    Hopefully this will be fixed in the future.  Will Apple provide a SDK for it or allow 3rd party development? This also looks like a big “no” from Apple.  They will provide additional apps (ala iPod games), but not allow us to develop our own stuff.  Ugh.. Apple has such a great product and they will kill it (for me and others..) by not allowing us to develop our own apps/widgets.

Apple TV - Can I watch movies other than just those purchased from iTMS?  What codecs does it support? 

Apple Phone - Can it display Flash content? If so, what version (hopefully FP9)? How much built-in memory?  Will Apple provide a SDK for it? 

And its says I’ll be switching to Cingular this June and getting the new Apple iPhone (iPod, phone, camera, and it runs OSX).  You must always obey your inner-geek. 

I just saw this on MacCentral. Wow! And Encore is coming too. I like competition and this is a good thing, but its been a long time and Adobe has a lot of ground to make up. They’ll need to mend a lot of fences to get ex-Premiere users to swap back from FCP (or offer some really great competitive upgrades).

“Adobe will announce on Thursday that it will revive a Mac version of Premiere, the software maker’s video program aimed at professional editors. The new Mac version will only run on Intel-based Macs and will be part of a larger Adobe Production Studio suite that will include Adobe Encore DVD and Adobe Soundbooth.“

Other announcement links:

Mike Downey blog

Steve Kilisky’s AE blog

By the way, in case it’s not clear, I’m very excited about this news. 

On my Windows box at work, I’ve used Sizer (http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html) to resize my window panes to an exact size when I was doing screen captures.  Its a great little (and free) utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact pre-determined size.
I’m looking for a similar app for OSX to use with Snapz Pro X.  If anyone has any suggestions, I’d appreciate it.