Macromedia Podcast Highlights, Flash Podcast Player (and a Slight Case of the Chipmunks!)

I'm listening to the Macromedia podcast with Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers...

Topics: MXNA data services, Mark Anders (VP of Engineering) on Zorn. Mark brings his ten years of Microsoft experience to Macromedia. At Microsoft he headed the ASP.Net and .Net Framework teams. (I recently had the chance to meet and talk to Mark and besides his amazing wealth of knowledge, he's a really wonderful guy.)

Mark's got a new weblog... must bookmark it! He's talking about making Flash more accessible to developers with Zorn...

Hey, they're talking about FAME and the open source Flash projects. Mark's talking about how the components in FAME use Eclipse as a binding tool. He doesn't see FAME and Zorn competing -- although there will be some overlap -- he sees overlap (which is my view too and also describes my current setup with the Flash IDE and FAME complimenting each other.) Mike: "In the end it's all good for the Flash Platform" -- Couldn't have said it better myself! :)

Now they're talking about MXNA Data Services... these are really very cool, especially if you need a data source to play with in FlashLite. (They return MXNA data in variable-encoded strings). They just mentioned Richard's app. Mike's surprised that Richard put together his app so quickly (I'm not, Richard's a sharp tack!) :)

They're talking about deep linking now. This is something I've written off-and-on about. I usually use an application server to pass the state to the HTML page which proxies it to the Flash application. They're talking about Kevin Lynch's method which uses Javascript. (We definitely need a standard method that combines both methods for a variety of platforms.)

Hey cool, they're talking about the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit and OSFlash! :)

While listening, I thought I'd keep my fingers busy and make a little app to play the current/future Macromedia podcasts. I've added the little guy to the post but there's one small problem (or feature, if you will)... select the podcast from the menu and you'll see what I mean. Chipmunks, anyone? Mike does a mean Alvin, let me tell you! :) The up side is that you can listen to more podcast in less time! :D It's weird, I tried it with some other mp3s and didn't get any problems so there must be something with the podcast mp3. Any ideas? Update: I just emailed Mike about this and he uploaded a new mp3 which works perfectly about 5 minutes later! It was neary 3am his time! I don't think he sleeps ;)

[Update] Quick fix: I realized I was adding all RSS entries to the ComboBox, instead of just the ones with podcasts attached. Just fixed that.

PS. Totally unrelated: Check out Peter Elst's presentation on AS2 Best Practices. Was cool to see ARP mentioned.

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