Yep, you heard right: Beta 1. No more Alphas! I'm skipping Alpha 0.3 and going directly to Beta 1.

SWX has been progressing faster than I imagined and I feel it's now ready for Beta.

What does that mean? Well, it means that it's pretty much feature complete and the API, which will be introduced in Beta 1, shouldn't change dramatically. This doesn't mean that it won't change at all during the beta process and that new features won't be added, it just means that I will make a greater effort to make sure that existing applications do not break.

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OFLA 2, the second Open Source Flash Conference is scheduled for June 15th, 2007.

I'm going to present on OSFlash in general, and my latest baby, SWX, in particular. And there's a great lineup of other speakers: John Grden (Red5), Ralph Hauwert (Papervision3D), Cortlandt Winters (OpenLaszlo/Flex/Flash/Haxe/ActionStep), Firdosh Tangri (ASWing), Nicolas Cannasse (Haxe), and Igor Costa (Flex/Granite Data Services).

The conference is going to be held online and attendance will be free of charge.

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Wow, that's a sweeping statement! Care to prove me wrong?

Here's a quick quiz:

1. Do you know what a mashup is?
2. Have you ever created a mashup?
3. Do you know CSS?
4. Do you use webmail?
5. How many social networking sites are you on?
6. How many web applications do you use on a daily basis?
7. Do you subscribe to RSS feeds?
8. Do you use SWF Object or UFO?
9. If you answered yes to the question above, do you know why you use SWF Object or UFO?
10. Do you blog?

OK, to get your score, add +1 point for every "yes". For the "how many" questions, just add the number you came up with. And then leave your score in the comments, along with whether you're a Flash developer or an HTML/JavaScript/Ajax developer. I look forward to seeing the results!

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Be careful with the Save As feature in Flash CS3: it's horribly broken.

On any other Mac application, if you choose to Save As, your file dialogue will default to the folder that the file is currently saved in. Not so in Flash CS3, where it defaults to the folder that you last saved any file into. So, if you save FLA A into Folder A and then do a Save As on FLA B (which is in Folder B), it will default to saving it in Folder A. This can result in having different versions of files saved in weird and wonderful locations on your drive which, in turn, can lead to lots of head scratching and the wasting of otherwise valuable and potentially productive time.

To make things worse, it will also forget the version of Flash that the FLA was saved for. So, if you saved an FLA for Flash 8 (because you need to share it with people who are still using Flash 8 Professional), it will randomly forget this.

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I'm going to be doing a short 5-10 minute presentation at the Flash Brighton relaunch tonight at 7pm so if you're in Brighton, come on down!

Flash Brighton is the new Flashcoders Brighton group. Why the name change? Here's what the official invite says about it: (more...)