What do you get when you combine a few hardcore design enthusiasts with the thousands of impressive portfolios and Web sites of artists around the world? The American Design Awards (ADA).

CSV is a format that has been around for a long time. It's a simple way to store multiple rows with multiple columns and it can be easily imported into a variety of commonly used desktop applications. This article examines the use of CSV-formatted data in Flash. We will write a class in ActionScript 2.0 to handle all of our CSV functionality and then we will use this class to populate the Macromedia v2 Data Grid Component.

Creating games in Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is one of the most rewarding endeavors an aspiring or seasoned programmer can pursue. People could choose to develop games using Flash MX 2004 for the sheer enjoyment of seeing a creative idea come to life, a specific project for a client, an exercise to learn the details of programming in Flash, or as a way to express themselves artistically.

Macromedia Flash Lite 1.1, the Flash Player profile for mobile phones, is now available for service providers and handset manufacturers around the world. Flash Lite 1.1 is a significant update to 1.0, first used in the NTT DoCoMo 505i handsets introduced last year.

Although an 'undeniably excellent' product, Flash Remoting presents a few problems. This article offers solutions in the areas of authentication and error-handling. Most people who have experienced Flash Remoting seem to be impressed with it. I, for one, couldn't help but be impressed by the demonstration Macromedia gave at one of their seminars.

When I first laid my hands on Flash MX 2004, the thing that really made me say 'Wow!' was the extensibility layer. If you are not familiar with it, this incorporates a new language, JavaScript Flash or JSFL, that allows you to do whole new things with the Flash IDE.

'Turbolinux's focus is simple,' says Koichi Yano, president & COO, Turbolinux, Inc., on the release today of Flash Player 7 for Linux. 'It is to respond to the requests of our customers. When those requests pointed to the ability of viewing rich media content right out of the box, we were thrilled that Macromedia was more than willing to partner with us to offer Flash support for our customers.'

Part 1 of this article (Vol. 1, issue 3) covered a general introduction to the Extensibility Layer and discussed the fundamental DOM and the relationship between different parts of a Flash document and their associated objects. It introduced the History panel and showed you how to build your own Flash panels. In this installment we take an in-depth look at XML2UI and Flash dialog boxes.

If you do Flash Remoting in .NET - read on. We at MXDJ began to hear about FlashORB and went straight to the source for an inside view of this alternative to Macromedia's Flash Remoting.

Creating games with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is a rewarding endeavor for aspiring and seasoned programmers alike, and the newly published Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Development (Glen Rhodes, Charles River Media) helps make the most of Flash's quick download time, cross-platform deployment, ease of use, and power.

Last December, Macromedia acquired eHelp Corporation, a San Diego-based software company offering an impressive set of tools that complements Macromedia products in very powerful ways. For MX developers, one of the most exciting additions is RoboDemo, an innovative tool with a surprising variety of uses.

Central is important to developers for a number of reasons. First, Central provides an application framework with which you can sell the applications you make. You just have to add a few purchasing details to an XML file and edit a Web form. Additionally, the user is presented with information about how to purchase.

In this article I show you some of the tricks I've learned over the years and give you some ideas for how to better combine Flash and AuthorWare in your work. I start with the basics and move to the more cpmplex, and I cover some optimization techniques for speeding up flash playback.

With any new version of a software product, a whole new host of features is introduced - Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is no different. It has been rebuilt for the ground up with a new JavaScript API (Flash JavaScript), which enables developers to extend the functionality of the authoring tool. This two part article explores features of this new architecture.

Macromedia products are ever more extensible in the 2004 releases. They make it easier for developers to create custom tools and extension scripts and then package those scripts and interfaces to distribute to their fellow designers and developers.

I love oxymorons - phrases whose words, when placed beside each other, don't make much sense because they contradict each other. One classic, 'military intelligence' got a lot of play in M*A*S*H and Catch 22. My all-time Web development favorite is 'Web Typography.' Typography simply does not exist on the Web. Type? Yes. Typography? No.

Flash developers who are still using ActionScript 1.0 are drastically limiting their capabilities, wasting valuable time and resources. Because most Flash developers come from a nonprogramming background, they don't fully understand the true power and benefits of ActionScript 2.0.

Could it be that we're about to see the disappearance of QuickTime, Windows Media Player, and RealOne as viable Web players for streaming video and audio? Now that I have your attention, this question is not as radical as it appears at first glance.

If you've upgraded to Flash MX 2004 Professional or you purchased the FireFly Data Connection Kit for Flash MX, then you've probably read a lot about how easy it is to have Flash pull data into a Flash Movie. The only problem is that this is not how applications work in the real world.

As you might have noticed, the current incarnation of Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Flash MX 2004, has evolved from a simple Web animation package to a full-fledged IDE that allows both developers and designers to work with graphics, animation, video, and sound and spice it up with external sources like databases and Web services.

This article will cover techniques in dealing with application state and complex animations. Additionally, I've included a few quick primers on how to implement some of the designs a Flash developer can be expected to put into Flash as well as a sample application file.

Building on the success of components in the last release of Flash MX, Macromedia has outdone itself in rebuilding this complete architecture for ActionScript version 2.0.

With the recent release of Flash MX 2004 Professional Edition and the SOAP support built into Flash Player some are questioning whether Flash Remoting has become obsolete. Indeed, it appears that Macromedia did not do anything to enhance the Flash Remoting feature, but instead made a significant stride to beef up support for SOAP Web services. The noticeable presence of the WebServiceConnector component, as well as the API for programmatically invoking Web services, makes a lot of developers wonder whether Flash Remoting is overshadowed by SOAP now. Anyone familiar with both approaches will admit that the core difference between them would be performance, though products such as FlashORB add a variety of features that significantly enhance the Flash Remoting approach. This article analyzes the results of a set of benchmark tests designed to demonstrate the performance differences between SOAP and Flash Remoting.

As the Internet evolves, the demand for a Web interface that rivals the functionality of desktop applications has become evident. The solution is the 'executable Internet,' a rich-client technology boasting a client-side browser plug-in capable of making the user's experience of a Web page much more interactive and powerful.