FlashBrighton is organizing a Big Day Out -- a free day-long event at the ballroom of the Royal Albion Hotel on the 24th of this month. I'm going to be there, giving a talk on APIs and Mashups with Flash and Flash Lite. Places are limited and, from what I heard from Seb, 2/3rds of the available seats are already gone, so register today!

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Nearly all Mac users at one point or other will have had to install StuffIt to unzip a legacy SIT file. Unfortunately, StuffIt also associates itself with unzipping Zip files even though OS X comes with its own built-in (and much faster) Archive Utility.

To set my associations back so that Zip files are handled by the Archive Utility I right-clicked (option clicked) a Zip file and selected Open With... -> Other followed by /System -> Library -> CoreServices -> BOMArchiveHelper.

I was looking for a distraction from the PayPal integration stuff I'm working on today for my Super Secret New Project (tm) when I ran across Ted Patrick's Cards API post from yesterday and decided to quickly implement a SWX API for it.

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Writing about secure passwords in Buzzword got me thinking about the state of security and user trust in Flash (and Flex)-based Rich Internet Applications in general. After giving it some thought, I concluded that we have a little more work to do if users are to be expected to have the same sort of trust in Flash-based RIAs as they do for JavaScript and HTML-based applications and web sites.

The key security issue I see with Flash applications, especially those that deal with sensitive information, is that the user has no way of knowing whether or not the application is communicating their sensitive data over a secure connection.

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My friend Dan played around with SWXml yesterday and hacked together a simple RSS reader in three minutes:

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