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.

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.
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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.

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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.
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As you know the team behind FlashDen also puts together blogs and sites for creatives of all fields. Some of our sites include FreelanceSwitch - the blog for freelancers and PSDTUTS - the best photoshop tutorial site around (in my totally biased opinion).

This week we’re thrilled to launch another tutorial site for web designers and developers - NETTUTS! So far the site has mostly HTML/CSS tutorials, but I’ll be getting some awesome Flash tutorials in there too. Hopefully we’ll even get a dedicated Flash tutorial site out in the future. In the meantime take a moment and head over to NETTUTS and say hello!