As an avid player of Flash games (when I've got time), I found Dan Cook's post on the economics of the Flash game platform really interesting and applicable to anyone who is offering content online and wants to get paid for it.
Flash games are currently the ghetto of the game development industry. Compared to the number of players it serves, the Flash game ecosystem makes little money, launches few careers, and sustains few developer owned businesses. Despite the vast potential of the ecosystem, Flash games contribute surprisingly little to the advancement of game design as an art or a craft.
This is just the first installment...two or three more are yet to come. (via @anildash)
Pretty Loaded is an online museum of Flash preloaders. The site itself uses a Flash preloader and, oops, the universe just exploded. I could watch this all day.
Jonathan Harris recently gave a talk at a Flash conference, attended by a community of people that pride themselves on producing amazing work, and his constructive criticism didn't go over too well.
With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said. I believe that in the long run, ideas are the only things that survive.
That seems about right.
How uncanny is her valley? Very. Never has one of those Flash move-your-mouse-around applets been this creepy.
Can't. Stop. Playing. Desktop Tower Defense. (via damn you, schachter)
Because of the Eolas patent crap, Microsoft is updating Internet Explorer so that you need to click to "activate" any Flash or Quicktime applet. There's a workaround that involves replacing all your <object> <embed> and <applet> tags with JavaScript functions that write those tags. This is going to make a lot of web sites a pain in the ass to use with IE and developers are going to have to modify a lot of code. What a nightmare. (thx, dunstan)
Mesmerizing movie of Paris Hilton's unchanging facial expression. I can't stop watching this. I especially like that her hair looks like it's chasing itself around the top of her head.
Update: The Lindsey Lohan one is pretty good as well. (thx, patrick)
Adobe is planning on combining Flash Player and Acrobat Reader? As Todd says, "I don't know about you, but I just got an acrid taste in my mouth".
Update: John Dowdell notes that Adobe has clarified their position re: the above combination: "we will continue delivering the Flash Player as a small, efficient runtime for content and applications on the web". (thx, neil)
Cool letter boxy stacking thing. (Oh, just go and type something.)
With AJAX MAssive Storage System (AMASS) a web page can store large amounts of data on a computer using hidden Flash applets. Brilliant hack, but seems like a potential security concern (an AMASS-like app could just fill up a hard drive without prompting, no?). I just looked at this briefly...would this allow one to run something like GMail offline? (I'm thinking not.) (via waxy)
VGMap is a library developed at Eyebeam that lets you overlay arbitrary data and graphics onto Google Maps with Flash. Since you can dump anything you want into a Flash movie, you're free to annotate Google Maps with anything you want, from audio clips to banner ads of businesses. As an example, they've overlayed the NYC subway onto a map of Manhattan.
Awesome set of food photos with little people on them. They're buried in a Flash interface (grr, Flash), but it's worth the trouble to find them. Skip the intro, click on "minimiam", and then select one of the "galeries" (primeurs, gourmandise, etc.). (via dtb)
Fun little Flash game, kind of a chain reaction Missile Command. My high score so far is 133 (49 on an individual screen). You?
Macromedia may be a bit concerned about Ajax competing with Flash's XML socketing. "Kevin [Lynch] specifically wanted to explore the possibility of hooking into the Ajax system with Flash, via Flex."
