DENG beta

In the words of Claus Wahlers, DENG's lead developer:

DENG is a modular class library, turning the Macromedia Flash Player into a webbased, zero-install, crossbrowser, crossplatform, modular and extensible standards compliant XML/XHTML/CSS2 browser.

The long-awaited XML/XHTML/CSS2 library for Flash has just gone into beta. The beta is limited, but you can apply by visiting here.

To check just how long-awaited DENG is, I did a quick search through my email archives. Found this (hope you don't mind, Claus):

From: Claus Wahlers
To: Peter Hall
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 5:39 PM
Subject: RE: html to swf translator - where / how?

hey peter,
i am working for a company that initiated and co-developed xforms at w3c (mozquito.org, actually good friends of mine). we already developed an engine that translates xforms into html/javascript, so it should be possible to write an actionscript engine to do the same for flash (with some restrictions/addons maybe). this will be completely modular of course.
cheers,
claus.

Well, it has certainly come a long way since then. You can read Claus' blog for details and keep up with their progress.

Generator gets canned

OK, so it went out ages ago. But I was clearing some shelves today and, in a symbolic gesture, my Generator manual went in the bin.

Secret games in Flash MX IDE

I thought these were just in one of the betas! But I checked after someone mentioned them in a forum, and they have been lurking in my Flash MX IDE all this time!. Here is a description in pictures, to show you how to access the games:

You have to get the last click spot-on and it may take a few goes to find the sweet spot.

They're written in Flash I think and some of them aren't that great. But its a good way of having some games to play in the office if your company has a no-games policy.

add odd?

Strangely, I just discovered that the addition operator "+" is slower than any of "/", "*" or "-". It sort of makes sense because the operator has two uses, according to the type of its operands, so Flash has to do some extra work.

Read more.

L'Estonie - dix points!

With Eurovision just around the corner I thought I'd mention pimpelsang, an Estonian Flash-related blog, which I saw mentioned at j3r.

I'm not sure what "pimpelsang" means, but I know what English word "pimpel" sounds like, and what "sang" means in a number of languages... hmmm... pleasant! ;-)