Updates: Stacy Mulcahy - Project Management from the Developer's Perspective

More posts from Stacy on the same topic. Very interesting and definitely worth a read!

http://www.insideria.com/series-project-management.html

Project Management from the Developer's Perspective: Series by Stacey Mulcahy

This is something very close to my heart, so just could not resist posting this up!! 

I've been a Flash developer myself for about 7 years and been managing Flash Development projects (with a host of other technologies) for about 5 years now. Stacy post is very real life and also talks about some of the daily issues we face (as developer or a PM).

She plans to write a series on the topic going forward and am surely will be looking forward to the same.

http://www.insideria.com/2008/09/series-project-management-from-1.html

Adobe Flash CS4 Announced

As you have surely already read, Adobe Flash CS4 was announced today. It's been quite a while since I last used Flash (coding part that is; I continue to solution and manage products/projects based on Flash) I really was impressed with the overall Flash CS4 look. Some new features are really impressive and hit hard!!!

You can find more information on Flash CS4 here.

You can find more information on all of the new CS4 tools here.

Flash Player 10 is out!!

Adobe Flash Player 10 is available for download from Adobe Labs. Code-named Astro, the latest Flash Player is available for MAC, PC and the Linux users.

Following are some of the highly anticipated and requested Features:

• 3D Effects — Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone.
• Custom Filters and Effects — Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
• Advanced Text Layout — Fully supported Bi-Directional Text Support. A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
• Enhanced Drawing API — Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-style properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
• Visual Performance Improvements — Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration.
• Dynamic sound generation — Dynamic sound generation extends the Sound class to play back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object.
• File Reference runtime access — Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without round-tripping to the server. You no longer have to know a server language or have access to a server to load or save files at runtime.

Flash CS3 is here!!!!

Just learned from Mike Downey's post that today Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 which includes a huge new release of Flash, Flash CS3 Professional.

This is huge cause now you can actually do AS 3.0 development in Flash. A host of other new features are also listed in the post as well as on Adobe's website. One of my favourite new feature is:

Convert animation to ActionScript
Instantly convert timeline animations into ActionScript 3.0 code that can be easily edited, reused, and leveraged by developers. Copy animations from one object to another.

Read the full post here.

"Making The Cover" is ultra cool!!

Making The Cover is a Flash based RIA from HP and Time Warner that allows you to put your face on the cover of one of Time Warner's magazines.

You choose the magazine, the background colour, the headlines, and your photo, and using a very easy to use Flash interface you assemble the magazine cover online. One thing I missed was that I could not edit the headline on the cover. The magazines currently available for use are: Sports Illustrated, People, Time and Entertainment Weekly.

P.S. That's the pic of our daughter Rinikka ;o)