Video support in browsers has been even better with the new HTML5 standard. They added a video tag for playing one or a list of videos which will give flash as video container some competition. I’ve allways looked at flash to be the only good solution for presenting video on web but with the new tag the developers get the possibility to use the browsers video codec to render videos.

Read the great post from Mark Pilgrim at O’Reilly Media presenting the use of the video tag, explaining the browsers supported codecs and applications that can convert your videos.

Also have a look at Lee Brimelows post on this matter where he states and I quote: “..Flash video will continue to evolve”

I really hope that HTML5 does not make a negative impact on peoples intrest in flash or makes flash a non-desireble video container. As Lee Brimelow states, the flash library gives the opportunities like embedded cue points and alpha channels. Remember that there are a lot of good free open source flash video solutions out there

flash.lillegutt.com has been redesigned with a fresh new purple design which I cooked up late this weekend. I was looking for a more professional look to stay up to date with the current standard, but

I´m not sure I reached the goal. It would be super nice if you guys could give me some hints or pointers on design and/or changes you see.

Any positive remarks is much appreciated!

gskinner has reveiled a library that lets you create several textfields and make them “interact as one” when selecting and/or changing the aspect height. Even though he describes his code to be bugsy and not to the quality standard of what he wants, it seems to work great. Think about the areas where flash has been lacking when talking about text on the web. When Google and Adobe for many months ago started working out the little hicks on searching inside flash content, the TextFlowPro is a great supplement to the flash world. Hands in the air for gskinner. Head on over to gskinner’s blog and get your hands on the source code.

I just found a demo on Ryan Stewart’s blog from MAX in Japan about a Augmented Reality application library ported to actionscript 3. Really impressive stuff. FLARToolKit is a library in the SPARK Project and is basically a shape recognizer with the video camera as input. The toolkit is ported from the java based NyARToolKit which accordingly to the Spark Prokject website executes much faster then the original C version.

FLARToolKit Demo from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.

When you want to create an animation to view your products, the flash player can give you a dynamic and excellent approach to achieving this. This little tutorial will show you the basics of creating an XML-based product viewer which can be reused by changing the content of the XML(of course). I refer to my post Loading external resources in Actionscript 3 in order to load images and How to load XML in Actionscript 3 before reading further. Below you will see the final result of the product viewer and the code to complete this tutorial. Read more »