As devoted readers will know, I first warned the community about Flash Europe in September of last year, when one of my good friends got a phone call from the credit card processing company they were using at the time to alert her to some suspicions they had about whether the event would be going ahead. At that time, the credit card company assured her that her money was safe and would be refunded by them. After blogging about this, I was contacted by Harold who told me that they were going to postpone the conference and make a public announcement in a few days time and asked me to remove the blog post as it was hurting their efforts. He sounded sincere and, not wanting to obstruct what I thought at the time was a genuine community event, I removed a blog post for the first time. The last-minute postponement meant that some people (including myself) got burned because we had already bought plane tickets.

Unfortunately, things did not improve and the FlashEurope "organizational committee" went into silent mode. After many unanswered emails and on the heels of Peter Elst's post on the same subject, I had to blog to ask Can someone from FlashEurope please contact me? in which I stated "I don't know what the deal is with Flash Europe but there appears at best to be some serious lack of organization going on."

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If you're using FLPMaker to make creating Projects in Flash MX 2004 Professional easier, you may want to update your copy with the bugfix Markus Cecot sent to me a little while back (unfortunately it got lost in the sea of spam I receive on my FlashAnt email account so I couldn't post it earlier -- if anyone wants to send me email directly, sent it to my first name at ariaware (com) instead.)

Here's Markus' email with more information on the issue:

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Tim Bray's post dissected:

"Seems straightforward to me. Adobe is in at the center of print production (PhotoShop & friends, InDesign, PDF), while Macromedia's DreamWeaver is the single most important Web-design product."

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Everyone (including yours truly) appears to be speculating as to what will happen to those applications in the Macromedia and Adobe product lines that have traditionally been competing neck-to-neck and which offer a similar array of features. So have your say. Would you rather see Dreamweaver or GoLive live on? Which do you work with and prefer? Why? What are the coolest features in each that you like to see live on even if the product doesn't?

I've recently been using a neat, free application called RunFast that lets me create aliases for launching frequently used programs by typing in the first few letters of their names. Tonight, I was at an interesting meeting on OS X and was impressed with a free application called QuickSilver which goes far beyond this by indexing the hard drive and allowing quick access to files and applications (similar to what Spotlight promises in Tiger, I assume.) In any case, I thought I'd search for an alternative for Windows and came up with QuickStart. It's not as snazzy but it does appear to work really well. I also found a commercial application called AppRocket but couldn't be bothered to install it as it required the latest .Net runtime to be installed first.