It's been over a month since the last news post. I guess my plan to update news weekly didn't turn out very good. There just hasn't been much news to report on. New content keep rolling in every few days which is really what the site is about, which is perfect.
Some people may be interested to know more about Flashindustries, and I thought it would be interesting to tell you more. Statistics have always been interesting to me so a few years I signed up to Google Analytics - An online tool that helps shows Web Masters visitor information. I've only really started using it a few months back before the launch of Flashindustries Version 8. Here's some interesting graphs based off the last 31 days:
Browsers:
Surprisingly, 74% of our users use Firefox. This, for me as a web designer, is a great sign. I hope this number continues to rise of the coming months.
Operating Systems
No surprise here. Windows with 93% of the visits. Macintosh was at 8% near launch but has began to go down as Flashindustries becomes more mainstream.
Screen Resolution
This is a disturbing result. 37% of our users still using technology from many years back. Furthermore, who's still using 800 x 600?
Search Engine
Not much of our traffic comes from search engines, but take a look at numbers 9 and 10. The next page is even worse, in fact, I'm not going to post it.
I look forward to comparing these results with statistics we get in the future.
It's finally out! Flash Player 10 BETA is here with loads of new features!
Features and Enhancements
Flash Player 10 includes new features, enhancements and bug fixes, including:
Creative Expression
- Custom Filters and Effects:
Expand your creative control by creating your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used to power filters and effects in After Effects CS3. Pixel Bender is a high performance image processing language that takes the pain out of writing custom, multithreaded effects and filters that can be added to web applications without any Flash Player update. Custom filters and effects can be combined with existing native Flash Player filters and applied to all display objects, including vectors, bitmaps, and video while retaining full interactivity. Custom effects can be parameterized to animate and change the effect at runtime. There is minimal impact on application size as complex filters are generally under 1KB.
- 3D Effects:
Add a new dimension to your applications and extend the creative possibilities by easily transforming and animating any 2D display object through 3D space, while retaining all of the interactivity that exists in 2D space. Fast, extremely lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users via ActionScript or Open Source libraries such as PaperVision3D, Sandy and Away3D available to everyone. Create complex effects with simple code by nesting 3D-transformed objects inside each other. Inheritance makes it easy to rapidly apply changes across objects.
- New Text Engine
A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text layout and interactivity APIs to create component-level text objects. The new text engine expands creative freedom by treating device fonts as first class citizens that can be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled and have filters applied as if they were embedded. The new text engine also offers right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
- Text Layout Components
An extensible library of ActionScript 3.0 text components, coming in future to Adobe Labs, provides advanced, easy-to-integrate layout functionality that enables typographic creative expression. Layout and style text with tables, inline images, and column flow through components that are compatible with both Flash and Flex, all while getting the benefits of the new text engine. Rich text components allow designers and developers to flow text and complex scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, across multiple columns like a newspaper, around tables and inline images, from right-to-left, left-to-right, bi-directionally, or vertically. Selection, editing, and wrapping of text are handled as would be expected for the different layouts.
- Drawing API Enhancements
Enhancements to the Drawing API make runtime drawing much easier with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line. Developers can tweak parts of curves, change styling, replace parts, and use custom filters and effects, delivering improved performance, creative control, and developer productivity. The enhancements extend the current drawing API to allow for read/write rendering and 3D effects, while adding memory and performance improvements that allow developers to create shapes using ActionScript that can be modified at runtime without re-drawing, edit dynamic drawings by modifying paths, and chain methods together to instantiate operations with a single method call.
- Color Management
Flash Player 10 employs color management to deliver web applications with the most accurate color possible, so your favorite web destinations look the way they were intended. Opt-in color management allows you to convert SWFs into sRGB (standard RGB), an international standard color space formulated by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Color management works with the monitor’s ICC color profile, turning the entire SWF into a color-managed object. Color management can be toggled on and off at runtime.
Visual Performance Improvements
- GPU Compositing - GPU Blitting - Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1) - Vector Data Type
Rich Media
- Dynamic Streaming - RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) - Speex Audio Codec
Other Community Requested Enhancements
- File Reference - Dynamic Sound Generation - Large Bitmap Support - Context Menu - GB18030 Compliance - Ubuntu OS Support
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That's it. Lots of features, etc. What are you waiting for? Download it now!
Install, restart browser, and be sure to check the demonstrations.
The Flashindustries Affiliate Contest is over and 23 banners were submitted. Voting took place in the forums where users have 5 votes each that they could give to any submission(s). Here are the top five banners:
Emit (17 Votes)
Blue_devil (10 Votes)
Emit (8 Votes)
Emit (7 Votes)
Miccool (6 Votes)
Congratulations to the winners! An affiliate link page will be put up shortly which will contain all the banner that were entered along with instructions on how to put them on your website.
I'm happy to say that the forums are back open this afternoon. My host uploaded a database file from April 13th and we'll work from there. There were a few errors at first but it should be good now but of course, if you encounter any problems be sure to contact us. Also, if you signed up AFTER April 13th, you will need to register again.
Affiliate Contest In other news, the affiliate contest is almost over. On May 1st voting will begin so be sure to get your submissions in. There are currently 14 submissions quality submissions. The competition may be tough, but remember, all submissions will be available on Flashindustries' Affiliate page for as long as we're open. Click here to see the submissions so far.
Updates We're trying to go back to the roots of V5 and what really got FI to where it is today by doing daily updates. So far we've had updates almost every single day since launch which is awesome and I'd like to continue to see that happen, but to add on to that, you should see more news (including technology updates) and more in house tutorials.
If you have any suggestions for Flashindustries on any of the topics above, leave a comment. Your input is always appreciated.
For the 4th time, Flashindustries Forums have been hacked. Today around 3:45 PST my administrator account was accessed and taken advantage of. Since I had administrative access on the Forums, the Admin Panel could be reached. The hacker deleted all post and categories then finished off by deleting my account itself (reminds me of a murder when the criminal commits suicide).
The hacked also decided to send out a mass-email which is an email that ALL users signed up to Flashindustries receive in their inbox. So disregard any recent emails from flashindustries.com.
The forums should be back up soon, it's just a matter of uploading the backup (which is pretty hefty). As for this happening again, I'll do my best to prevent it. If you have any suggestions and or want to help me, comment below, private message me or contact me by email flashindustries[at]gmail.com.
