Adobe VS Apple - on whose side are you?

Last weeks' discussion between Apple in the person of Steve Jobs and Adobe about why Flash is not and won't be supported by iPhone OS is widely commented in the Web and I don't want to retell others' comments. I just want to discuss this problem with you, my readers and subscribers.

Why it's important for me personally? You know me as a Flash lover for many years and about a year ago I've also became an iPhone owner. I like both Flash and iPhone. I'd really like to view my blog in iPhone with all those pretty flash stuffs I publish. As well as to visit lots of websites that use Flash interfaces and are a part of my everyday web surfing. So, it's nothing to hope for after the Steve Jobs's Thoughts on Flash?

I respect Adobe cofounders for their restrained yet convincing response Thoughts on open markets.

If you haven't read this yet, please do so now - I highly recommend you to read The truth about Flash. I believe all the arguments in this article to be true because they coincide with everything I knew about Flash before reading.

All my work and life experience convinced me that the only reason something can't be achieved is the lack of efforts and desire. So I think Flash could work on iPhones, iPads, iPods well... if only there were efforts and desire from Apple's side. As it's obvious now, there is neither desire nor efforts...

It's up to everyone whose side to be on, but I strongly believe that the freedom of choice is more important than even "reliability, security and performance".  And what do you think about it? Your opinion in comments is highly appreciated! 

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Add Twitter interactivity to your PowerPoint presentations

Creating a presentation of your product, service, idea or even your pet's new photos, you may want to have instant feedback from your customers, partners or friends. What is the best way to share your news and get a feedback today? Of course, it's a popular microblogging service - Twitter.
Timo Elliott of SAP Web 2.0 has developed free tools to let you integrate real time Twitter responses into PowerPoint presentations. All you need to add real Web 2.0 interactivity to your presentation is MS PowerPoint, Adobe Flash and free PowerPoint-Twitter tools by SAP Web 2.0.
So, what can you do with PowerPoint + Flash?

• Insert Twitter Feedback Slide into a PowerPoint presentation. This slide enables you to search Twitter for any term and display results in real time. You can display Twitter feeds or custom feeds (select needed feed in Options). Feedback slide can be great when you make a presentation about service or product and want to show your audience what people say about it. Don't worry about inappropriate tweets which can spoil the presentation instead of making it cool! Simply create a free account at TidyTweet to easily filter out everything you don't need, automatically or manually.

• Add Twitter Ticker Bar to every slide of your presentation. To make a feedback even more real-time, you can use Twitter ticker bar in the bottom of every slide instead of separate feedback slide. Insert a bar and enter search term to add creeping line with related twits to your every slide.

• Real-time Twitter voting. Get votes from your audience and display them in a chart with Twitter voting. You can select pie chart or bar chart with 2 to 6 choices. The chart can display up to 100 votes.
  

• As a variation, you can use Twitter Mood Meter. It can be inserted to every slide as well as ticker bar to show audience's mood in real time.

You can find and download these great Twitter-PowerPoint tools and much more at Timo Elliott's blog. Enjoy!

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Interesting Christmas offers for Flash tools

Christmas is coming and it probably is the best time for purchasing software. Developers seem to compete with each other whose discount is bigger. And why they are competing, we have a great chance to save money. So, interesting offers and interesting prices for Flash tools:

1. Moyea software offers bright Christmas skins for its web players for $10 only. Custom player skin could be added to Flash Video MX series with version 5 and above, FLV Editor Ultimate, Moyea PlayerBox, Moyea FLV Player. A great way to decorate your web pages in Christmas style.

2. Wondershare Christmas Family Pack includes PPT to eCard, WebVideo Author, PPT2DVD Lite software and 10 Christmas eCard Templates. It's a nice stuff for easy creating animated eCards, producing video clips and more. This special pack is available until December 31th, 2009.

3. Flarium software offers discounts for all products. Among them are some useful Flash tools - Animated Chart (flash chart maker), FlashSlider (flash slideshow tool) and Web audio players - Flash SoundPlayer Maker and FlashWamp. Check out their Christmas Sale.

Merry Christmas and Happy Buying :)

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Video Tutorials for Flash newbies - 8 hours of free learning

Hi everyone, I'm back after being away for a long time and keep sharing my most interesting flash findings with you. Thanks for staying tuned!
I'm sure that you can find lots of links to free flash tutorials, but as you probably know most of them are not actually free or not very useful. Usual text tutorial consisting of "Step 1: do this and Step 2: do that" can be hardly understandable, especially to newbies. The page I want to share contains free downloadable video tutorials. They can give an idea of basic flash operations even to the person who's never seen Flash before. Welcome to Cartoon Smart. Here you will find tutorials for basic drawing and animation in Flash, ActionScript 2 and 3 preloading courses, publishing tricks and much more.

After watching 8 hours of free tutorials, you may like to purchase advanced pay tutorials. Even if not, you'll get valuable knowledge and learn lots of great tricks. Go and get free Flash tutorials right now. Happy learning! :)

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All Electronic Music in Flash

Are you fond of Flash? Or electronic music? Even if neither, I think it'll be interesting for you to look at this amazing Flash guide.
A new version of Flash Guide to Electronic Music was published by Ishkur at techno.org. Maybe it's the most detailed guide to all electronic music genres. It contains examples of every music style described and a tutorial for newbies. Interface is intuitive and clear and... you'd better click the screenshot below and try it yourself!

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Links of the Month (September 2009)

Flash news that impressed me this month:

1. FluidHTML - "a very powerful markup language that you can use to build most anything. Our intepreter reads instructions from the markup and sends instructions to Flash plugin." So, you can create Rich Internet Applications as easy as write a page in HTML. Very tempting, isn't it? One more benefit is that the problem "how to SEO Flash" can become the past with FluidHTML, because the new markup language will be searchable and indexable by search engines. The project is in private beta now, and I'm eagerly waiting for open beta to try this promising technology.

2. Adobe Labs Ideas for Flash Catalyst launched - "This initial launch of Adobe Labs Ideas allows Adobe Flash Catalyst users to vote on feature requests and share new ideas with the development team and user community".

3. Flash Websites Gallery - do you need ideas or inspiration for creating your new website. Or maybe you simply like to discover new interesting websites? Koflash.com Flash websites gallery is a nice place for both gaining inspiration and for satisfying curiosity.

4. 28 Interesting Flash Preloaders - "I am going to show some Interesting flash sites which will never bored you in the loading time; in fact, the loading time of these sites will amuse you".

5. Sonoflash Audio Flash Components - interesting Flash audio technology. "Unlike all other Audio Flash Components that still use mp3’s the Sonoflash AS3 algorithm allows developers to embed fully interactive sounds that generate real time sound in direct response to any movement by a user. ... The sounds available at Sonoflash are typically one tenth of the size of an equivalent mp3 file".

Happy discovering to you :)

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Free Video to Flash Converter

The name says it all - today I want to review a nice freeware app for converting video files (AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, MOV, 3GP, DVR-MS) into Flash video (SWF and FLV formats).
Although you can google for lots of "freeware video to flash converters", after trying them out you'll see that good converters are not actually free, free ones aren't good. Free Video to Flash Converter is a rare combination of a really good conversion quality and zero price. This tool is sponsored by Ask.com and the only hassle you have with it is checking off two boxes if you don't want to make Ask.com your default search provider and a home page. It also installs Ask toolbar to you browser, but it can be easily uninstalled (if you don't know how to do that, check Help menu of the program).
Free Video to Flash Converter allows easy batch converting of video files. Select input file(s), set output folder, needed output format and video quality, click convert and get your flash file(s). That's it.



Great options:

• you can trim video file to convert the desired part only
• you can set custom output name
• you can use custom conversion presets and set custom width and height, video bitrate, frame rate, sample rate, audio bitrate, select mono or stereo sound and save your custom settings for further use
• 12 available interface languages
  

Download Free Video to Flash Converter

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