I have had an issue on my windows machine for a long time. The problem goes like this: You have some PSD and/or AI files and want the see a quick preview of what the document looks like when you select “Thumbnail” from the View type in Windows Explorer. Problem is that instead of the document preview it gives you this:

So I did some digging and ran upon this article on Sitepoint.com
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/12/13/adobe-cs2…
Now I have this:

I followed the directions and it worked like a charm. Just thought I would share for those of you suffering the same fate. They warn that they take no responsibility for modifying your registry – neither do I. Cheers.

I have been messing around with Apollo for awhile trying to come up with some ideas to test the capabilities of the initial release. I thought it might be neat to have a CD on the desktop that would reflect what the user’s webcam sees. This works great on my Mac with the iSight.

An interesting note is that you don’t get prompted with the “Allow” message that you would on the internet when a swf wants to use your webcam. It just runs. Beauty…

You may not need to do this but on the Mac with the iSight I did have to go modify what “camera” the flash player was using in order to get the video to appear. I did this by visiting a page that uses the webcam within an swf file (gran’ts webcam fire), right clicking and choosing “Settings”. Go to the camera tab and pick USB Video Class Video.

This is written in Flash 8 and doesn’t actually leverage any Apollo API calls such as the FileSystem or such. This was just a silly little proof of concept that I thought I would share. I needed something to show at the PittMFUG meeting tomorrow .

Requirements
A Webcam (Duh)
The Apollo Runtime

Downloads
You can download the source here.
You can download the .air here.

Daniel Dura had this video posted on his blog. It shows a little bit of the new Adobe Media player we have been hearing so much about. I had a hard time finding any details let alone video so I thought I would share.



Original post on Daniel’s Blog.

Adobe is providing a ton of free videos giving detailed information and drill-downs on much of the new software. The videos are nicely laid out and sorted in their Flex-based application. You can view the videos here.

Being a manager of the Pittsburgh Adobe Flash Users Group, I was given an awesome opportunity to interview Colin Moock. Myself, Joe Kromer and Val Head were fortunate enough to talk with Colin Moock about his new O’Reilly book, Essential ActionScript 3, how he got started with Flash, Apollo and much more. Colin was nice enough to spending about a half hour chatting with us. We covered a lot of ground and got some great insights from him concerning ActionScript 3 and the Flash Platform.

The PittMFUG is releasing this interview as a special podcast today. You can download the mp3 itself here. Subscribers to the podcast may also access the new podcast on the PittMFUG podcast feed.

Thanks
A big thanks goes to New Perspective for providing the audio recording facilities and expertise and to Mike Rajakovic for his audio engineering know-how.

About Colin Moock

Colin Moock is an independent ActionScript expert with a passion for networked creativity and expression. He is author of the world-renowned guides to Flash programming, “Essential ActionScript 3.0” (O’Reilly & Associates, 2007) and “ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly & Associates, 2003, 2001). A web professional since 1995, Moock runs one of the web’s oldest Flash developer sites, www.moock.org. When he’s not writing books about ActionScript, Colin spends most of his time exploring multiuser application development with Unity, moock.org’s complete commercial framework for creating and deploying multiuser applications for Adobe Flash.

Links
www.moock.org
FITC Presentation Info
ActionScript 3.0 and Flash CS3

Many of you have expressed interest in the original version of the Active Blur class I released. One of the questions was how to allow the object casting the Active Blur to resize and have the blur update as well. The new version of this class should fix that issue for you. The old class was not very dynamic either. I attempted to make the class easier to use. You can also have non-rectangular shapes (an “x” or “o” shaped item works just fine). Click here or the image below to open the example. Drag the window around and mess with it. Hope you enjoy it.
You can download a sample FLA and the class here.