I was just reading through the Flex EULA (reading EULAs has become a hobby of mine, it seems) when I came across an interesting snippet under the section titled "Ownership":

"The foregoing grants of rights give you limited license to use the Software. Except as expressly provided in this Agreement, Macromedia and its suppliers retain all right, title and interest, including all copyright and intellectual property rights, in and to, the Software (as an independent work and as an underlying work serving as a basis for any improvements, modifications, derivative works, and applications you may develop), and all copies thereof. All rights not specifically granted in this EULA, including Federal and International Copyrights, are reserved by Macromedia and its suppliers." [Emphasis mine]

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Emilie and I just returned from drinks with Grant (and his lovely girlfriend, Bobi) and the participants of the three day workshop Bits And Pixels Training organized here in London. Judging by the happy faces and the wonderful comments, the workshop was a great success! A big thank-you to Grant for his tireless 9-hour days and to all our participants for making it possible.

Macromedia FlashPaper is a very exciting tool for "printing" SWFs from any application (it ships as part of Contribute 2 and is not available by itself.)

FlashPaper is initially aimed at the consumer market for creating standalone FlashPaper SWFs -- which will, Macromedia must hope (and I believe), eventually replace PDFs. That's not, however, the use case that concerns me currently. What is infinately more exciting to a Flash developer is the ability to include external FlashPaper SWFs in your own applications, thereby transforming FlashPaper from a standalone PDF alternative to a truly embeddable PDF alternative -- a document display component for Flash, if you will.

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Grant Skinner and Mike Chambers will be presenting at the London MMUG tonight. We have about 70 people registered -- looks like it's going to be a really good meeting and we've got a busy day planned!

You can find directions and full details on the MMUG web site.

We're going to be hosting the Macromedia World-wide User Group Meeting in London tomorrow. Don't forget to sign up if you haven't done so.

I just spoke with Grant about an hour ago and his plane should have just taken off from Canada en route to London. He's going to be presenting alongside Mike Chambers (who will be arriving on Thursday) at Thursday's MMUG meeting. We've already got lots of people signed up for both events and I have it on good authority that Peter Hall, Guy Watson and Owen van Dijk will be among those in attendance. I have a feeling it's going to be a great event followed by interesting conversations at the pub.