I've been spending a lot of time getting reacquainted with web development as of late. The reason you ask? It is because I have been building the Adobe onAIR Bus Tour website. The bus tour is an 18 city, cross-country adventure that will focused on spreading the word about Adobe's AIR (Apollo) technology. Adobe came to frog to help design and build the whole experience, including designing the bus wrap, website, and an AIR application for the tour.

I usually don’t post jobs here but this one sounds pretty cool. Marcus Geduld from Nabbr.com sent me note about this position. Send him your portfolio if you think it sounds like a good fit for you. Kickass AS Guru Wanted New York-based Actionscript developers, I have a great job for you. I’m the Senior Flash developer at Nabbr.com, and I need colleagues! They must live in or close to NYC, because we like to be in a room together, bouncing ideas off each other.

Photoshop CS3 now has a great new feature that allows you to automatically export an image into a Flash-based Zoomify viewer. This means that you can view hi-res photographs without having to worry about download times. You have probably seen this feature on a lot of shopping websites. It uses low-res versions of the image until you focus in on an area and then it downloads the hi-res version of just that chunk. Check out the example below by using the zoom controls at the bottom of the viewer.

I was asked to do a video interview while I was at Apollo Camp and they finally posted it online in Adobe’s Developer Center. Apart from the frightening freeze frame of me, I think it came off pretty well. Apollo Camp was very cool and it will be interesting to see what Adobe has planned for future events. Click on the image to check it out.

Today I got the new Samsung Blackjack and so far, I am very happy with it. The primary reason for getting it was for the email and web but I was psyched to find out that the Flash Lite player runs on it as well. This may lead me to get more into mobile development, or at least learn the basics of Flash Lite 2.

All I have to say is wow! I have been waiting for something like this for a long time. Have you ever seen a video you liked on YouTube or other video sharing site and wished that you had it on your hard drive? Better yet, have you ever wanted to include one of these videos in a presentation or share it with your friends? Yeah me too. I just found out about vixy.net which features a free, online conversion of FLV files to MPEG4. You can convert to a wide array of formats including AVI.

I just got this month’s issue of Layers magazine in the mail. I wrote an article on the new features in Flash CS3 in addition to my regular tutorial article. In the tutorial I talk about the methods for creating buttons from movie clips. This is a basic topic but is one that a lot of beginners struggle with. If you buy this month’s issue I promise that you will be as excited as I am in the photo below .

I first got wind of this demo from Ryan Stewart's blog. It is a 3D world that was put together using Flex. It isn't clear if it is using Papervision3D or not, but it is certainly impressive. The thing that sets it apart is the ability to interact with Flex controls that are set in 3D. This must be using the same approach as the interactive 3D features in WPF. Check it out by clicking on the image below. Nice work!

Andrew Fitzgerald from Desuade recently contacted me about trying out their new particle entension for Flash called Partigen. Of course I jumped at the chance and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s an amazing extension. The Partigen extension shows up as a custom panel inside of the Flash IDE and it allows you to create emitters and assign a wide variety of particle effects to them. The extension comes with a ton of great presets which you can of course modify to your own tastes.

I promise that this will be the last blog that I create. I currently have three technology blogs for WPF, Flash, and Flex/Apollo but I still am finding that I need a blog to talk about non-technical things. This can also be a space where I’m able to drop links to videos, photos, and sites that I find interesting. Check it out at http://www.leebrimelow.com.