The worst part about writing a book (which just arrived today – no, this is NOT an April Fools joke), is the fact that print is so damned permanent. And once the chapter leaves your word processor and heads off into editorial production land, there is no easy way to “fix” a mistake or update a topic. And just this very thing happened with the project in Chapter 6 of the book.

In that chapter, Stephanie and I wrote about using the Spry Framework for Ajax to create an art gallery. In approaching the project, we chose to use the “new” Sliding Panels widget which was added in the 1.6 release of Spry. Unfortunately, what I didn’t “notice” during the writing of the chapter was that the panel sort of stuttered when clicking upon the panel navigation the first time after the page load. Apparently this is something that others have seen as well, because I was recently asked about that very problem in an online seminar that Stephanie was presenting and in which I was frantically answering questions in the chat window. So, there’s the issue and, more importantly, here’s the fix. (more…)

The time has come yet again. This week is “Amsterdam week” – doing several training sessions for our Dutch partners and a seminar for their customers. Should be a lot of fun, as the subject is Flash Media Server, Adobe Media Player and Flash video. I have to admit that I’ve actually had a lot of fun preparing for the sessions. I always enjoy getting the opportunity to delve into a new version of our software – and the newly released FMS 3 is truly a revolution. Not only did we drop the price (significantly), but we also piled on the features, including not only the ability to stream H264 content (in addition to FLV), but also to “automagically” encrypt video on the fly. This is done by simply adding an “e” to “rtmp” when creating the link to the stream. That’s it. And to make it even more amazing, it works with live video as well as recorded content. There’s tons of other cool stuff, but you can read about that yourself. In fact, I’d recommend the article that Kevin Towes recently posted to the Developer Center.

Finally, for those that missed it… there was a recent flurry of Twitter activity around a marriage proposal that I made to my co-author (and love) Stephanie Sullivan. Little did we realize just how much the “rest of the world” cared – LOL – it got picked up by Wired News! Prost!

The German/English web site, Create or Die, conducted a video interview with Rufus Deuchler, Jason Levine and myself during our recent tour through Germany and Austria. I unfortunately forgot to put up a link to the interview in one of my previous posts. So, as I wait to go to the airport to head for SXSW, I thought I’d add this little bit of hilarity for your amusement.

The concept behind Create or Die’s interviews is actually quite funny itself. Instead of an interviewer asking the questions, they chose to print the questions on cue cards. We each had to read the question and then respond. It made for a lot of fun. Additionally, I have to say that I was impressed by the level of research that Felix (our interviewer) had done. Specifically, he had scoured the web for interesting tidbits about each of us, and had questions relating to them. And, pay close attention, we even reveal the release date for CS4… ;-)  Cheers!