Friends of ED has been releasing competently compiled web design books made with collaboration from some of the best for quite a few years now and when they offered a few books to the Flash Insider team to read I jumped at the chance. The first book I cracked open was the latest in their Essentials series, Flash 8 Essentials. The Essentials books are meant to grab current and future web designers and give them a quick dip into the latest web design software. This book was written a quick guide to Flash 8 and includes enough tutorial and code to get most designers and developers up to speed. The writing style of this book is similar to a motivational seminar on Flash. This helps the reader become extremely excited about the new version and can make you feel like you can do everything in the book.

Flash 8 Essentials has six authors, but the reader will not notice a definite change from one chapter to the next. Each author has already made a name for himself in the Flash design and development world. Two of the authors have already written a few books on this subject and one helped to create the current Developer Certification Exam.

read the rest of the review after the jump

Though the book doesn't come with a CDROM, all the referenced FLAs and samples can be found quite easily on the Friends of ED website. The screenshots within the book help to bring the content to the reader on an OS independent platform. This is good for designer like me who work with Mac for personal projects but on PC at work. If I have to reference back to the book at anytime in the future, I know it won't matter where I am or what OS I am in.

Flash 8 Essentials is divided into 10 chapters plus an appendix. The chapters take you down the road or all the new and improved features and leave you with the impress that coding will be very important for this version of Flash. The first chapter gives a quick overview of everything in the book. Each chapter after the first gives at least one concise example of a major feature and includes well-explained code and easily understood figures. Then the appendix gets into a few advanced tutorials that touch on dynamic bitmap manipulation, file uploads and more.

At the end of the book I felt ready to tackle a bunch of new projects and pondered ways to improve some old ones (I've been wanting to retackle an old Camera() based project for a while. I think most will find this a good addition to their technical bookshelf, but new Flashers will need to invest in a few other books in addition to this one as they come up to speed, including at least one Flash bible or over reaching glossary type book that explains it all. Experienced Flashers will find this to be an essential part of their library in order to transition easily to Flash 8, if they haven't already.

Now, what am I going to do with this book? If you are in the New Orleans area and come out the NOMMUG Tenth Anniversary of Flash party on Tulane's campus on August 14th, you will have a chance to win the now well-read copy I used for this review. See you there!

About this book:
Flash 8 Essentials
by Paul Barnes-Hoggett, Stephen Downs, Glen Rhodes, Craig Swann, Matt Vierman, and Todd Yard.
ISBN: 1590595327
publisher: friends of ED

Finally someone has taken our advice and started displaying premium content via Flash video with embedded ads. As I have said in this space before, content providers need only create Flash based video content to distribute their stuff to viewers and then they can grab the largest online viewing audience of any video app. Larger than Windows Media Player, larger than Quicktime, larger than all other video types.

ABC has created and released a new Flash based video player for four of its shows that embeds video with non-skippable ad content from AT&T. Users can choose from four differenct shows (Desperate Housewives, Lost, Commander and Chief, and Alias) and view content in each with sponsor advertisments within.

Screenshots and more after the jump.

In each segment of the show the viewer can skip to any point before the ad. This forces the user to view your sponsor's content. Plus most users don't mind having to deal with a few ads to get better access to better content in more places.

The Player also lets viewer choose between all available shows while viewing the current show. This way you can choose what you want to see without having to leave your current choice. Plus short show descriptions are included so you don't have to leap before you look. Apparently all of the current season of Alias is available for work day viewing.

Shows are in wide screen format and use the high quality view codec from On2. Since shows are broken up into pieces surrounding ads, load times should be minimal.

While watching a show the user can also click on the faded show titles surrounding the video and skip to that show's current video.

Now if the other content providers would wake up and do the same thing life would be easier (I'm yelling at you AP, MTV, Comedy Central, etc).

Er, um... While flipping through my Flash search feeds today I came across a post by  Jean-Francois Arseneault at ArseNealt.ca blurting out how he didn't realize how complex Flash is. He downloaded the 30 day trial of Flash 8 recently, installed the app and opened the IDE to its shinny new GUI in OSX. He was quickly over powered by the shock of panels and all sorts of options to be found once inside and almost immediately had to close down the program. He says he will grab a beginner's guide soon in order to get into Flash for real in the future.

Reading this reminded me of the first time I jumped into Flash with Flash 4 on a Mac G3 workstation with OS9. My hardship involved jumping from Windows to Mac and jumping from limited Director 7 and Photoshop 5 experience into the new Flash world. Though my jump from Director to Flash was probably easier than my original jump from straight web design (only Frontpage and Corel, please forgive me, it was 1998) to Director. I lucked into jumping into the IDE via an art class on Digital media and immediately jumped into scripting (using my background in Java and other object oriented programming languages really helped here) and animation(Director and experience with art in general helped here). And now I'm here... What about you? How was your first time? Did you get thrown off track till finding that perfect starter guide? Did you dive right in and push out that first site or game or what ever? Let me know in the comments below.

Yesterday Google debuted its new Finance page and today I got a chance to browser the app for a while. Google Finance promently features a Flash based live ticker for any stock and includes a zooming interface on that ticker to display financial data for the last three years. A list of news stories (found by Google News, of course) is displayed along side the ticker and is even linked within the data at various points to relate the news to the stock. I can see this as a developing application meant to compete with the likes of E-Trade for portfolio display via Flash (though E-trade's Flash RIA is a lot more complex and integrates buying and selling). I would like an API though so I could integrate the data and ready made charts into various sites. This would be great for internal live stock and market trackers for major organizations. Want to see how the world views your company? Just keep it on your homepage.

Read more about Google Finance around the web: Mike Downey links to Adobe's stats, Paul Kedrosky wants more and suspects this is a Flash demo (he doesn't see the AJAX-i-ness that lovingly integrates with the Flash fun, I guess), JD points to the Flash charting and notices the XmlHttpRequest to connect to the headlines, TechCrunch gives its usual run down with links to what the Web 2.0ers think, our Blog-daddy Jason Calacanis thinks it is no Yahoo and wants to know why more sites don't implement Flash this cleanly (me too), and our blog-sibling The Unofficial Google Weblog sees this beta as a good move that will possibly beat out Yahoo's offerring (guess he doesn't agree with Jason).

Our blog brother in design, The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog has the low down on the John Nack interview by Inside Mac (download via iTunes). The interview has lots of info on all things Flash and Adobe, including the Flash-Photoshop integration and the future of the Mac Universal Binaries of Adobe products. Be sure to download the latest and listen to it yourself.

Wow that sounds ominous doesn't it... Actually I just want to direct you a an interview Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen did with University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton a short while ago. They asked him all the important questions including how the Macromedia acquisition is going to change Adobe's future and ways Adobe will be able to use its new found control of Flash. They get into a discussion of the newly re-named engagement platform. You can either read the article at the link or download it for later listening.

via Mike Potter

Update: FlashAnt has really good rant up that talks about this in detail from a Flasher's POV.

The first of the early adopters to realize his mistake has returned his brand new iMac with Intel after just 24 hours. Unfortunately for Jed Wood of SilentRant.com the failure of Flash on the new iMac (specifically in Safari and Firefox under Rosetta) forced him to return his smooth new Mac. Again, careful how early you adopt, he ended up lucking into a trade in on the PowerPC iMac, but almost suffered a 10 percent restocking fee.

via yesterday's comments

Since the release of the new Mac Book Pro and iMac with Intel I have been considering when to make the upgrade and move on to a new laptop. A few things are keeping me in check though. First off, this is a first gen or Alpha product that is going to have bugs (this is jus the nature of technology). Second off there are no 'Universal' binaries for Studio or any other Adobe products for that matter. But what about Rosetta? Well It doesn't look like Rosetta is very nice to Flash's new step brother. Photoshop CS2 runs much slower on the new Intel iMacs in speed tests, according to Ars Technica. Plus, according to the latest Photoshop TV video podcast, Adobe has a previous history of not release incremental updates, hence they think Photoshop will not be 'Universal' til CS3 (grab the vodcast yourself and watch between 16:40 and 18:10 for more info). But Photoshop isn't Studio. Actually, now that Flash and Macromedia are tied to Adobe, I think Flash and therefore Studio will be tied (at least loosely) to Photoshop. So if you feel the need for speed, it is probably a good idea to hold off on purchasing the new Mac Intels. At least wait till someone jumps on the bandwagon with official speed tests for Flash and FLV encoding.

Currently I'm going to consider a semi-update to a 'new' PowerBook instead and pray Flash Player 8.5 includes the first Universal Binary from Adobe, because as of right now Flash Player 8 does npt appeast to work in Safari on Intel without forcing Safari to run under Rosetta.

JD is worrying about this too, but what to do you think?

via The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog

Stop for a second and take a look at the image in this post. What you see is a backetball hoop and a nice, yet simple, 3D animation of a simple looking basket ball game... but it doesn't stop there. In the bottom right of the screen is a person. Slapping the ball. Literally. Yes this is the first (I think) major web Flash-based game centered on true human interaction via web cam. PlayDoCam creator Andreas Rehnberg, which we spoke of back in August, has taken his earlier idea to a new level and combined some Shockwave/Director ideas with Flash 8 to create a very cool looking new basketball game in Flash. The game tracks the users hands and works like pong to bounce a small ball into one of two hoops while avoiding absticles and trying to hit points on the way. All I can say is very cool, and can't wait for the full version to come out next month. Head over to the official PlayDoJam site to watch the preview and drool.

Thanks to tipster Karl Cifius

On Monday Adobe grabbed a DRM company that creates lock downs for PDF files via a client-server method and document encryption. This seems old hat in the textbook and business documentation world, but I wonder if Adobe will use this method to create a new SWF based DRM. For more clues I sat at work listening to the Gillmor Gang discuss DRM and video. They brought up the new Google Video store and how Google is using Flash (7 if you must know) to display its videos. One member of the gang (I forget his name) said (aroung the 18 minute mark) that Adobe and Macromedia's merger should bring DRM to Flash in the future so Flash can become a more viable content distribution model. I'm all for it... er let me clarify, I'd prefer DRM free content for ease of use etc, but if it must be there I want cross platform content, like Flash. In order words, that new VH1 video site and the new Comedy Central video service are closed to my iBook due to lack of vision on the part of their developers (and the music industry, but that's another story), but if the content was Flash based (like CNN's free in page video) then the content would be semi cross platform (sorry Linux, wait for 8.5). The only question is: Is SWF (and On2 by association) better than WMV and M4V?

image from video for Flash