Ivan describes the tool as "like the good old flpmaker, but inside your flash IDE."
It's nice to hear my little tool being referred to as "good old" 
and I hope I'll have a little time to play with the JSFL version soon.
Archive for July, 2004
Ivan Ivanoff just posted a note on Flashcoders about a new JSFL version of FLPMaker by Valeria Laura (I'm not completely sure about the author's real name -- I'm assuming it's this from her email address.)
I've been searching for something like this for a very long time: A tutorial on how to create pixel fonts for Flash by Dani Wahlers!
Dani's article shows you the tools to use (and how to use them) to create your own pixels fonts that work flawlessly in Flash.
Fonts For Flash move over, here I come!
I just got a confirmation that I'm going to be presenting at the Flash Europe conference in Barcelona later this year (November 3-5, 2004) with a stellar bunch of other presenters.
You can find a partial list of attendees on aSH's site.
I've just become a Macromedia Certified Instructor for the Flash MX 2004: Advanced ActionScript Development (FAAD) and Flash MX Professional 2004: Application Development courses and will be teaching select classes at the prestigious Highlander offices in the Docklands.
I will be teaching the first FAAD class this Monday.
We will, of course, be continuing to offer our own custom curriculum training courses for our corporate clients at Ariaware in topics ranging from advanced ActionScript 2 and Flash development to best-practices team-based RIA design and development, Agile Development process and usability design and testing.
We are also planning to continue to bring you training from the best designers and developers in the Flash and RIA worlds as part of the series of training sessions we debuted at the end of May with the wonderfully well-received Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development workshop presented by Flash guru Grant Skinner.
I had recently posted about enterprises that block ActiveX content (and thus Flash), asking for real-world experiences of developers who had encountered such a practice. Needless to say, I didn't receive too many responses. The reason, I believe -- as I had suspected all along -- is because this is a myth. This is not to say that paranoid system administrators with far too much caffeine in their veins and too little understanding of Flash may not be implementing such policies. After all, there are still those who believe that Flash is nothing but a bloated vector animation tool (these misinformed individuals can usually be found on Slashdot, regurgitating ancient history as if it were breaking news.)
The truth of the matter is this: Flash is secure.
I had a client ask me yesterday about this and I found myself writing back my usual response about how Macromedia is very serious about security when it comes to the Flash player and explaining how sandbox security is implemented. I still found myself yearning for some empirical data to present. Well, here it is:
According to Secunia, the Flash player has had a total of 8 security advisories filed for versions 5, 6 and 7 (and their subversions) combined. Let us, for the moment, take the version 5 family to be historic (I know it is not and many systems still utilize it) and the version 7 family as cutting edge and focus rather on a version family that has been in existence for some time now: Flash 6. Look at the advisory graph for Macromedia Flash Player 6 and all sub-versions, showing only 2 reports:
Let's compare this with another well-known application, Internet Explorer and focus on version 6 of that product. For the same period, Secunia collected 38 security advisories for Internet Explorer 6 and has a total of 54 on file for all periods:
Isn't it ironic that Internet Explorer remains a cornerstone of the enterprise while security concerns are raised about the Flash Player?
"But," you may interject, "I have to run the Flash Player inside Internet Explorer!"
Of course, the answer to that is that you don't have to do any such silly thing. The Flash Player will happily run within Firefox, other Netscape and Mozilla-based browsers, Opera and even on Linux. For the same 2003-2004 period, FireFox received 4 security advisories for all its 0.x versions. You will notice a similarly low number of advisories for the various Mozilla versions.
I can only conclude, based on these statistics and my personal experience over a period spanning over half a decade that the Flash Player is secure and if you're really concerned about security you should stop using Internet Explorer and enjoy the interactivity and user experience of well-architected Flash applications and web sites on your FireFox browser.
I was just over at Secunia's web site (reading security alerts is a good a thing as any to do when you can't sleep) and it appears that Internet Explorer is vulnerable to a frame injection attack. (The site says that other browsers are also affected.) You can test it for yourself here.
The latest FireFox does not appear to be affected.
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