Adobe Media Player
Adobe Media Player 1.1 was released this week featuring a brand-new interface, RSS subscriptions, and a partnership with Sony Pictures allowing users to watch full-length movies. Adobe promise to eventually deliver around 600 shows and 25,000 episodes. The application is built and delivered via Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and features video content in FLV and H.264 formats. CNET have the lowdown, and Adobe have the download.

Flashforward Film Festival Finalists
One of the largest Adobe Flash conferences in the world, Flashforward, have announced the finalists for the Flashforward2008 Film Festival. The festival, which honors the best in Flash design across various categories, will take place in San Francisco this year in August. If you can’t make the conference this year, be sure to check out the stunning collection of Flash design and development each finalist offers, which are all ready and waiting for your votes.

The Charges Against ActionScript
Infamous Flash developer Colin Moock stirred the Flash community this week with an in-depth yet honest assessment of how ActionScript 3.0 is guilty of complicating Flash development as a whole. Read The Charges Against ActionScript and then take a peek at a response by an Adobe employee.

Pixel Bender
Adobe Labs, busy as ever, offered a new release of the developer kit Pixel Bender this past week. The toolkit, (previously known as Hydra) is an application allowing the user to create, compile and preview Pixel Bender filters and effects based on graphic technologies used with video processing.

ActionScripting Arrows
New York-based Flash developer Noel Billig has been spending his spare time developing a nifty little Flash tool and ActionScript class to dynamically draw arrows. For all the details, check out Noel’s blog.

Flash-based Virtual World
Finally for this week’s roundup, a new virtual world built entirely in Flash has been released by The Electric Sheep Company. Web Flock is a visually immersive environment aimed at developing online social interaction, media consumption and multi-player casual game-play. Watch out Second Life, Web Flock is coming to getchya!

As of a few minutes ago, FlashDen members subscribed to our FoxMail mailing list will have received the latest edition of our newsletter delivered to their inboxes. Remarkably we’re up to the 9th newsletter, despite my most erratic sending habits!

If you aren’t subscribed, you can still see both this edition and all our back-issues right here on Down the Foxhole, all the way back to March ‘07 when we sent our first mailout. There’s also a subscribe form in case you suddenly change your mind after being blown away with the quality of the editorial

I also have a few small things to mention that are about to happen here at Eden. The first is we’re changing our name! Thanks to some trademarking issues, we’re going to be changing from Eden to … something else. All will be revealed shortly.

Additionally we’re about to launch our third marketplace site in a matter of days. It’ll initially be in a beta phase available only by invite as we stock up on content, and then we’ll open to the world. It’s perhaps the most exciting launch of the year for us, and I for one, can’t wait!

A bit of light Flash entertainment via AlbinoBlackSheep

News Flash is Flashden’s roundup of recent Flash-related stories from around the globe. Here comes this week’s digest!

Best Flash sites ever
British Web magazine .net have assembled what they believe are the best 20 Flash Web sites of all time.

PaperKing3D Contest
Can’t resist creating three-dimensional Flash files using Papervision3D? Think you’re the king of 3D? Well here’s your chance to show off your skills with an online contest to find the best use of Papervision3D. You’ve got one month from today, as the contest closes on August 15. Get to work, there’s no time to lose!

Get Ready for Gumbo!
Adobe have released new information about ‘Gumbo’, the code name for the next version of Flex, which is now in active development. Infoworld have a nice article about the improvements Gumbo aims to bring to Flex, or you can read more about the project directly from Adobe.

Flash Player 10 New Features
In the first of a series of articles, StraightUpSearch.com explore the new features of Flash Player 10, including enhancements to the way 3D environments are created and manipulated.

Flash Player Worms
An interesting article by Ken Munro called A Flash in the Pan ponders the state of security on the Web after a recent Flash Player vulnerability got security experts hot under the collar.

If All the World Did Flash Rather than Sudoku
What if all the people that do Sudoku puzzles each day applied their brainpower to learning and executing ActionScript instead? This question is posed by Dan Zen of Sheridan Interactive Multimedia and leads nicely into a useful introduction into AS3 and object oriented programming.

Flash Video Gets the Gold Medal
News Blaze report on how China Central Television (CCTV) will be using On2 Technologies’ VP6-based Adobe Flash video to deliver video content of the Beijing 2008 Olympics to the largest population in the world. With a 40% improvement over legacy VP6 encode On2 performance, an incredible total of 1,000 servers will be serving-up Olympic goodness 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout the entire event.

Web site templates built entirely out of Flash have gotten incredibly popular here on FlashDen. At the time of writing there are over 250 templates available on Flashden. The availability, choice, and of couse, value for money of the templates on Flashden are just some of the reasons why our templates are hugely popular.

We’ve picked out 50 Flashden templates that we absolutely love from both a design and creative perspective. Not only is this a great way to see an overview of the quality and diversity of templates on our Web site, but it’s also an opportunity for us to thank all our authors and contributors who make Flashden the success it is. Well done to everyone who has uploaded Flash templates so far, irrespective of whether they’re featured in this article or not, and we’re excited to see what existing and new authors will be designing and uploading over the next few years!

Sit back and scroll through, in no particular order, 50 Killer Flash templates. Hopefully there’s something in here that you would like to use for your own Web site, or perhaps a project you are working on for a client. Here we go!

Corporate Template
By blackandwhite

Green Web Template
By barisintepe

XML_Creative_Portfolio
By dsym

Italian Desktop Template
By MaikoStudio Read More …

Back in August 2006 when we launched FlashDen, one of the jobs I had was to make a set of paw icons to show how much an author has sold. We made icons for sales all the way up to $100,000. Today I had to make a new icon.

The new icon , which we have dubbed “Blue Steel” after Zoolander, is for authors who have sold between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of items. And we have a few top authors who are about to cross over into this new category of author.

I’m so proud to know that FlashDen is providing these levels of income to independent Flash authors around the globe, particularly given some of the current global economic doom and gloom.

It also makes me wonder just how soon before I have to create another paw icon? More than a quarter of a million through FlashDen? All of a sudden that doesn’t sound so impossible after all!

News Flash is Flashden’s roundup of recent Flash stories from around the world. Read on for the first installment!

Flash Lite ported to the iPhone
Interactive designer Thomas Joos has ported Flash Lite code to the iPhone, opening up the possibility of iPhone applications that can use Flash.
View Full Story or Watch Video

Praise for latest Flash Player on Mac and Linux
Adobe released Flash Player 10 beta 2 last week and has already received praise from the Linux and Mac community. Practical-Tech.com give an in-depth look at the Linux release, whereas MacRumors.com wonder if the 3-fold increase in performance on the Mac is paving the way for Flash on the iPhone.

Google and Yahoo Now Index Flash
Adobe have announced that they are providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the .swf Flash file format and uncover information that is currently not indexed by search engines.

“Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.” -Google.

View Full Story

Adobe Flash CS4 Preview
A couple of weeks old now, but here is a sneak peek at Adobe Flash CS4 presented by Adobe themselves at the Sydney, Australia WebDu conference.
View Full Story

Have you ever wanted to create a pixel font or a TrueType font but did not know how to do it? Or perhaps you’ve tried but become frustrated with the process? Then meet your new friend, FontStruct!

FontStruct, from the creators of FontShop is a powerful yet super-easy to use online Flash application that allows you to quickly create fonts for free. And once you’ve finished creating your very own font, why not upload it to Flashden and sell it?!

The beauty of FontStruct is the intuitive, usable interface. Within minutes you can quickly create attractive characters and then save them as .ttf files which can be used on both Mac and PC platforms.

Almost 700 fonts at the time of writing have been created on FontStruct and are available to download for personal or commercial projects. Here are some useful links to get you started:

FontStruct guide to making pixel fonts
Font gallery
Screencast overview
FAQs

Good luck creating your masterpieces and don’t forget you have the opportunity to sell your complete font files on Flashden!