Today announced the Macromedia Flex 2 product line and subsequently Flash 8.5. If you was thinking that there was a lot of new stuff going in flash 8, take a look at this round-up of flash 8.5.

• A brand new, highly-optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2) embedded in Flash Player 8.5; including E4X, regular expressions, integrated event handling, runtime error reporting,Actionscript 3 and binary sockets;
• Flex Enterprise Services: messaging services for real time data that integrate with your existing messaging infrastructures, support for automated testing, large datasets, occasionally available services and much more which will be announced later;
• Flex Framework 2; more components, more features, much more performant and more capabilities to build expressive applications;
• Flex Builder 2 build on the Eclipse Platform: more advanced ActionScript editing features, support for States that are a feature of the framework 2 (I think they can best be described as more advanced/powerfull ViewStacks), incremental compile on file save, cool new debugging and more;
• Next generation Charting Components;

Im looking very much forward to this release, and really hopes that the new binary sockets will not be crippled like the current XMLSockets.

The announcement spawned a rather large tread on the osflash mailing list, where Mike Chambers from Macromedia was good enough to answer a few questions.

Q:Ralf Bokelberg

... Otherwise i'll probably wait until adoption rate is high enough, which will take two years from now probably.

A:Mike Chambers

Fyi, traditionally we get 80% player adoption within 12 months. Due to express install, and auto update, we expect that rate to be quicker for future players.

Q:Scott Handman (Referring to Actionscript 3)

How different do you think the language will be? Won't be much more than an extension of AS2, will it? Like I guess they could introduce true private variables or something, so that I'd have to change the access modifiers on a bunch of my methods, but it isn't too tough to adapt.

A: Mike Chambers

The syntax has not changed that much, although things can be much stricter.

For example, you will need to add access modifiers (private, public, protected, internal) to your classes, and constructors (other functions as well if you dont want them to have the default modifier (internal)).

Also, we have dramatically cleaned up and rationalized the API and package structure. So some functions that were in the global space, are not in packages (which means you just have to import the packages).

Also, if you compiling in strict mode (which is the default), you cannot have implicit casts.

i.e.

trace("Data : " + 5);

will need to be:

trace("Data : " + String(5));

When I work, travel, well almost whatever I do I listen to music, in short I really love music. But as much as I like music I am bad at finding music I like. I don't listen to radio nor watch those music channels so my approach to finding music have been rather spontaneous and unordered.

Lately I used ITunes “Listeners also bought� function to browse for music, and been rather successful in finding music I liked that way. Still this was fare from optional and I have therefore tried to find another solution.

And I found it! Behold Pandora by the Music Genome Project.

You simply type in a number or a band you like, and it will use some rather nifty music analysing algorithms to find other music you like. It works pretty well, has a very well working flash interface and the first 10 hours are free of charge so go try it out now!

Hah even with prewritten entries for my weblog I donÂ’t get it updated frequently. Anyway one of the entries was about my flash 8 project barcoder.

Basically itÂ’s exactly what the title indicates a barcode scanner in flash. In short it uses some new features of flash 8 to turn your webcam into a barcode scanner. It can scan UPC-A and EAN-13 barcodes (those on the back of most consumer products).

Recently I rewrote the entire scan algorithm and encapsulated the entire thing in a separate component which only needs one line of code to implement it into a project.

I am working on finding a way to licence this out, so check back soon or contact me at chris[A]lol.dk if this have your interest.

Go to www.barcoder.nu for a demo -- ohh and remember to contribute to the database.

Just talked to Firdosh Tangri from the aswing project who informed me that they just released the first version of aswing.

Aswing is a open source flash GUI Framework written in pure ActionScript 2.0. ItÂ’s still very new but looks very promising

Ohh yes I joined the dark side. Recently I needed a new laptop as my old tablet PC got stolen. I wanted to try something different, so what better then getting one of those shiny macs?.. Which in return would also make my mac-fanatic friends happy.

So I got myself a 15� powerbook with Mac OSX tiger. It wasn't long before I fell in love with Apple Dashboard, but I missed a small and simple widget that would provide system resource information. So why not just make them myself?

To get started I downloaded the Apple Dashboard design guidelines and soon learned that its good practice to make widgets as simple as possible. So instead of making one overblown widget I made multiple.

Before getting distracted by other projects I managed to finish two widgets, one for CPU and one for Memory which are found at widgets.lol.dk. Hopefully I will have time to update them, and even add a network status widget, in the near future.

The link again widgets.lol.dk