Time for the hype to go up a gear, XBox 360 is out very soon and strange signs have started to appear… Read and see. (Let’s all remember our base 16 hey – 168 ;)) Spoiler – link

Big thanks to David Mannl for pointing this out just now. I’ve just signed up for the new ITV Mobizines service (see flash demo here). When you text “MOBILE” to 63330, you receive a link to download the client (if your phone is up to it, mine is an old 7610 and it worked no problems). The client will install the standalone Flash Lite player along with the main application and a skinned media player (just the 2 icons on the main menu, the media player is invoked by the client)....

From the “why bother?” department, I’ve created a little app that converts between ASCII text and BitmapData. Here is a sample .bmp file that I took a screenshot of and imported into my FLA’s library. Now it may look like a miniature Magic Eye, but it does actually have a message hidden in it. To read the message you need the salt which is used in the conversion of ASCII to hex colours, and of course this little Flash 8 app....

A few weeks ago I started speaking to one David Williams who was interested in taking his artifical intelligence “chat-eBots”, which are sold as virtual hosts for sites, and putting them on mobile phones in an altered form. We discussed a few technologies and a few ideas but unfortunately I had to dip out of the project due to commitments. Anyway, David has gone ahead and produced the entire thing in Flash Lite, and you can demo the first of these eBots, “Retch”, on the companion site, as well as purchase a copy for your handset....

My buddy Johan has posted a tutorial on setting up Doxygen with Eclipse. I’m posting it here as it was pretty late when he posted, for US and most of Europe. It’s very easy to set up, and the docs it produces are fully featured. You even get things like “this method is re-implemented in SubclassA, ..B etc”, with links of course. You can use a few documentation styles, personally I favour JavaDoc, so it’s picking up everything correctly, including {@code MyClass} etc....

This is one of the best made Flash Lite apps I’ve seen to date, and also one I’m going to use very often. “The Tube” allows you to navigate (with easing tweens) the London Underground map, search for a station in a rolodex fashion (this is one of my favourite features), and view individual lines. The application is very well polished, the animation is clean and one final nice addition was a little history of the Underground....

It seems Charles now has some excellent Flash features. Just got this from Darren over at flashgroup.net. The exciting new features in this release are: Firefox proxy settings auto configuration! Improved display of POST and GET form data. Improved display of SWF movies (shows some basic stats.) Improved display of AMF (Flash Remoting), now parses and shows the structure of the AMF message. Many other improvements listed on the website. Of course the main reason for using it is to simulate modem speeds when viewing your sites on localhost....

Just a quick note to say I’ll be presenting some of the brand new mobile features packed into the Flash 8 IDE at the London MMUG on the 15th of September. I plan on showing several things including the emulator, the excellent docs, and also some things you may not associate with Flash Lite programming now enabled by the new IDE. If you have any requests, please post below. Of course there’s a whole evening planned with talks from Mike Downey, Ian Turner, Aral Balkan and Guy Watson, so there’s definitely something for everyone....

There aren’t a lack of mutli-user servers out there that work with Flash, but this one has some great features: Supports Flash MX AS1.0 & 2.0, FlashLite, J2SE, J2ME. Extend the SUSHI server with Java or Actionscript. SUSHI supports socket and HTTP connections (HTTP tunneling.) SUSHI provides a web based, graphical administration. Free 30 user license edition. Hosting. What really caught my eye of course is that they have included a Flash Lite API, it uses a polling solution to keep the connection open, but it appears very flexible and neat....

Ok, so this is my first attempt at using the new MXNA Flash Lite services. I must say, apart from the initial problem with the feed, now fixed thanks for Christian and Mike, it all went very smoothly. You can run the app in the regular Flash player here (remember the key mappings, PageUp and PageDown are your phones softkeys). You can download it for your phone here (including source code!...