I posted Benjamin Herholz’s Matrix Effect in Flash 8 awhile back and I guess word got back to him! He was nice enough to share the source with me and so I asked if he cared if I shared it with my fellow blog readers. He said sure! So here you go. Enjoy. Thanks Ben!

http://www.bherholz.com/experiments/matrix/

Google has released a sweet new extension for Firefox that will show you comments people are making about the current blog you are on. I think it’s pretty sweet. If you are into that sorta thing you should check it out.

“Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you’re on.”

Blogger Web Comments for Firefox

So recently there was a rumor – you know how rumors are… The Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat will be combined into a unified player. Shrieks were heard around the Flash World. Look – I like most Adobe products but on a PC PDFs take forever to open in the browser if you haven’t had the reader open yet… So the last few days I have been fearing that the new “player” would take all the beautiful ease of installation and speed (especially of Flash Player 8.5) and throw it to the dogs. I mean I think that it would have turned out either great or disastrous – probably the latter.

But today I read about Adobe Apollo over at Digital Inspiration.

“Apollo will offer data synchronization, the ability to work online or offline, one-click installation and desktop integration. Apollo will join Flash Lite (the mobile client) and Flash Player (the browser client) to form the Flash Platform client family.

Adobe Apollo is seen as the next generation Flash player that run out of the browser and offers Macromedia Central client like capabilities. Meanwhile, Adobe will continue to deliver the standalone version Flash Player and Adobe Reader for viewing and interacting with PDF documents and forms.”

If this is true we can all breathe a sigh of relief… Well – Geeks like me can at least… Thought I’d share – check out the post over at Digital Inspiration: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/adobe-apollo-acrobat-reader-flash.html.

Thanks to fredrik for the link – here’s a link to information about the company responsible for the sweet new Matrix Style Website that everyone has been raving about.

A problem I have had ever since installing Flash 8 is that all swfs I double click on to preview in the stand alone player continue to open in the Flash 7 (MX 2004) stand alone player. I tried the old trick where you right click the file type and choose open with and point to the new Flash 8 .exe and choose to use that to always open the file. It never worked. Still all the swfs opened in the Flash 7 player. I took matters into my hand once my buddy Wayne said he had the same problem. I thought it might just be my install or my system acting up.

So just in case anyone else has this problem here is what I did to fix it. I am in no way responsible if you screw your machine up editing your registry. Make a back up before doing this too. If you don’t know how to make a backup or edit your registry maybe have someone do it for you. Here is the Key to edit:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\SAFlashPlayer.exe\shell\Open\Command

That probably has the value of: “C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash MX 2004\Players\SAFlashPlayer.exe” %1

Change it to: “C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash 8\Players\SAFlashPlayer.exe” %1

This seems to work for me – hope if you have this problem it works for you.