Comcast has a new beta site, FANCAST, where you can watch streaming episodes of many of your favorite shows. You can watch something as recent as a latest 30 Rock or something as old as the first Lost in Space from the 1960's (in black-and-white no less). Oh, an it's FREE! At least for now. I suppose Comcast could have choosen to use any number of web technologies to do this, but to me, chosing Flash Video was the right choice. OK, I am a bit biased, but come on, this is really cool technology.

I've not been happy about the performance of my Atmospheres Music Player. I installed it on my home computer where I have a network disk that holds all my CDs - about 240 of them. When I pointed Atmospheres at the network drive, it took a long time for it to read all of the music information from the disk. I had taken steps to make the program responsive while the files were being read, but still, it took a long time.

Here's another example of a Flex component. This one scrolls a message within a fixed area. The message can be scrolled vertically or horizontally. You can give it a try right here: This component shows how to use custom properties, meta data to work with Flex Builder, and overriding functions. Click here to download the source code.

I've been asked a number of times if there are more chart types, as well as other controls, available for Flex. Perhaps I'm late to the party, but I just came across this announcement (from October 2007) that Adobe and ILOG are teaming up to enhance Flex 3. Here's a quick list of what's available in the ILOG ELIXR package. You can find out more on Adobe Labs: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.

The last article in this series showed how to write the CycleSelectButton from scratch. In this article I'll look at styling and skinning the component. Skins versus Styles One frequently asked question is "what's the difference between styles and skins?" This is a good question and it is confusing a bit because you specify a component's skins using specific styles on the component. For example, the upSkin style on the Button component.

I have (finally) ported the Atmospheres AIR Music Player to Flex 3 Beta 3. You can get the complete code as a Flex Builder 3 Beta 3 project at the following link: Download Atmospheres Beta 3 Project Here You will need the Flex 3 Beta 3 software from Adobe Labs. This will also install the newest version of AIR. You may find however, that older AIR applications will no longer run.

The third and final public beta releases of Flex 3 and Adobe AIR are now available for download on Adobe labs. These releases are focused on quality and performance, resolving numerous bugs from beta 2. This is your final chance to provide feedback on the release before launch, so please take this opportunity to take a final, thorough look. You can download the final beta releases of Flex 3, Flex Builder 3, and Adobe AIR on Adobe Labs at: http://labs.adobe.com/.

Adobe in the News On Monday, December 3, 2007, Adobe announced new versions of the Flash Media Server and the Flash Player. Here are some highlights: - Flash Media Server 3:  includes two offerings; Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3 for live and video on-demand streaming and Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3 for customized scalable video streaming services plus multi-way social media applications -  Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, previously code named Moviestar now includes H.

Communicating with a PopUp is a common task. This article explores how to do that. The first example shows how to use Alert to pose a question and get answer. private function showQuestion() : void { Alert.show("Do you like Flex?", "Question", Alert.YES|Alert.NO,this,processAnswer); } private function processAnswer( event:CloseEvent ) : void { if( event.detail == Alert.YES ) { response.text = "Of course you do!"; } else { response.text = "Hmm. Really? Keep reading then.

A couple of typos and a mistake have been brought to my attention regarding the ZIP files for these Component examples. I have made the fixes and replaced the files. If you have downloaded the code, please go back to the articles and download the files again. .