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

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.

Flash player 10 has finally been released with new and funky stuff. Here is a summery of the new top features from on of their release pages:

• 3D effects
• Custum filters and effects
• Advanced text support
• Dynamic sound generation
• Vector data type
• Dynamic streaming
• Speex audio codec

Really looking forward to getting the new Flash CS4 in the mail soon…

When writing actionscript you allways forget to add some lines of code which are necessary on either syntax level or runtime level. Once you get the hand of it, you will understand what went wrong even before it happened. Sometimes you can struggle with the one-liner for many hours when the error only was an error so simple. Thats why this little post could come handy. If you should experience errors not described below, please post a comment and I´ll add it to the post. Hope this will help you a bit when pulling your hair.

1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
This is a runtime error stating that an object has not been initialized. You can find where the error occurred if you look at the output below the error line. Here is an example of what you might experience:

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
at ThumbHolder()
at ThumbsContainer() Read more »