My good friend Joe Kromer served as our camera man when the Adobe onAIR Bus Tour came to Pittsburgh. Joe put together a nice video for the members of the PittMFUG (Pittsburgh Flash Users Group) and was nice enough to share it. You can check out the video below:

I am not sure how I missed this – the Flash industry is going nuts with this news… Ryan Stuart, some of you may know him from the onAIR Bus tour, has posted some info on what to expect from the updated Flash Player:

Does the addition of H.264 mean Flash Player will support HD?
Yes, Flash Player supports 480p, 720p and 1080p content encoded with either On2 or H.264. Performance will vary depending on the capabilities and configuration of your machine. In general a 2.0 GHz Mac or a 3GHz PC, with one or more processors, will deliver an optimum experience.

Will Flash Player 9 Update 3 support non-FLV files?
Yes, with this update, Flash Player will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/HE-AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2.

So basically you can play full, hardware accelerated 1080p Quicktime videos inside of the updated Flash Player. Welcome to the next generation of web video.

This is huge for Flash! If you want some additional information check out Ryan’s blog and ZDNET.

ZDNET
Ryan Stuart’s Blog

*Please note that this panel has been updated since this blog post.  The update is available here: http://blog.pixelfumes.com/?p=228

Alan from the Fireworks team at Adobe asked if I had plans to port the kuler panel for Flash CS3 to Fireworks CS3. I started crawling through the API today and thought it would be a pretty easy task. Fireworks supports Flash panels so I really only needed to rewrite some of the JSF code calls. So, for all of you Fireworks people out there, I ported the panel. I myself am not a huge Fireworks user so please download the panel and test it out. I haven’t had any people test it on a Mac yet either. Please consider this beta until I start hearing about how well it works on your machines.

If you want to see a short and small video on the panel in action you can view a .mov here.
Download the panel MXP here.

Mike Chambers, Myself and Mike Downey

Adobe onAIR Pittsburgh was one of the best events I have ever been to. The AIR Tour is such a valuable tool for any of you guys interested in developing with AIR. The night here in Pittsburgh was insane. Adobe really pulled out all of the stops with the food, games and presentations. All of the guys on the tour did a great job of explaining what AIR is capable of and even demoed some sweet apps. I just wanted to let those of you left on the tour that you have much to look forward to!

The members of the PittMFUG even had the opportunity to hit up a local Pittsburgh joint known as Primanti Brothers with some of the Adobe folks after the show. For those of you interested you can check out photos from the Pittsburgh stop here.

I have a new article out on Adobe.com’s Dev Center. The article steps you through the process and code used in my creation of the Kuler panel for Flash CS3. Many of you have requested the source to the panel and I have released it on Adobe.com along with the article. The version of the Kuler panel for Flash CS3 has been updated as well to leverage Adobe’s recent release of the Kuler API. So, now that you guys have the source, feel free to modify and improve! Hope you enjoy the article. Thanks to everyone that has emailed me in reference to the panel as well.

You can view the article here.

Adobe has released an official API for Kuler on the Adobe Labs. The new API provides similar functionality as the older (and now deprecated) RSS feeds that many of you used to use. Along with the release of the API is a brand new “colored by Kuler” logo for use in all of you Kuler branded applications and sites. If you develop a site using a Kuler theme you can even submit it to Adobe and they will list the link of the site! Here is a sample of the new API functionality:

Get highest-rated feeds

http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/get.cfm?listtype=rating

Get most popular feeds

http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/get.cfm?listtype=popular

Get most recent feeds

http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/get.cfm?listtype=recent

Search RSS Feeds
http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/search.cfm?searchQuery=[searchQuery]&
startIndex=[startIndex]&itemsPerPage=[itemsPerPage]

Theme Thumbnail

http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/png/generateThemePng.cfm?themeid=[theme_id]

View Theme

http://kuler.adobe.com/#themeID/[theme_id]

Learn more about the API Usage and features by visiting the page on the labs:
http://www.adobe.com/go/kuler_api

Campbell Anderson had a sweet post on his blog entitled: Mac style popups – its the new LightBox. You can view a nice Flex version that he mocked-up here. I thought I would attempt something similar in Flash CS3 using an AS3 class. My version uses the graphics class to handle all of the UI. I haven’t taken the time to implement modal modes, etc. I thought I would provide the source for those of you interested in playing with and extending it.Using the class is fairly simple. Here is a quick example:
import CocoaSheet;var cs:CocoaSheet = new CocoaSheet(this);//pass the width, height, display speed, and reference to a movie clip in your//library with an associated class, in this case sheetContentscs.createSheet(350,200,1,new sheetContents());//set the x and y positioncs.position(75,20);//show the sheetcs.show();
Download the source FLA and Class file here.